Blume also talked about the letters she received from victims of incest and sexual abuse. These children reached out to Judy not because she was an authority on the subject, but because they trusted her and didn’t know where else to turn. “While the censors are looking for obscene passages in my books and others, I’m hearing from kids like this,” Blume wrote, before quoting a letter from a girl who talked about being raped by her father. “Dear Judy, I just graduated from eighth grade, and I need an adult’s advice,” the missive started. “I have a problem, which concerns my father and myself. It started when I was in fourth or fifth grade and it still continues. It is incest. I feel tremendously guilty, like I led him on.”
How could Blume stop fighting when she was being let in on such horrors? Some children were lost—it was heartbreaking but also not inevitable. And Judy, with the help of NCAC, was found again.
Chapter Twenty-Three Daughters
“I gave you a lot of shit this year, didn’t I, Mother?”
What a whirlwind the past twenty years had been for Judy. She had gone from a Betty Draper type letting off steam with a metaphorical shotgun in her backyard, to the frantically flapping avian target, to something else, like a tree—grown-up and grounded, even approaching peaceful. Yes, she had taken her kids on the journey and she felt bad about that. But she never, ever stopped trying to make their lives better.
In 1981, she bought an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which meant she could go back and forth between New York, her all-time favorite city, and Santa Fe. And even New Mexico had started to feel more like home, thanks to a man she’d met. A friend, actually his ex-wife, had set them up in the winter of ’79. As tough as the early Reagan years had been, Judy knew things would have been a thousand times worse without him.
George Cooper was a Columbia Law professor with a graying beard, shaggy hair, and glasses. He had a twelve-year-old daughter named Amanda—when Judy and George met, Amanda had heard of Judy Blume but he hadn’t. For their first date, on a Sunday, they went to dinner. The next night they got tickets to see Apocalypse Now. On Tuesday, Judy had a date with another guy. George came over afterward and as Judy likes to put it in interviews, he never left.
In her 2004 introduction to her adult novel Smart Women, Blume writes of getting to know George: “Falling in love at forty (or any age) is s’wonderful, just like the song says. But this time around you bring all that baggage with you, not to mention your kids, who might not think it’s as romantic as you do.”
Smart Women, first published in 1983, covers exactly this territory. Margo is a divorced mother of two teenagers, raising them as a single mom in Boulder, Colorado. Over the past few years, her children, Michelle and Stuart, have transformed from her sweet little buddies into rough, prickly strangers, banging around the house. After spending the summer in New York with their conservative father, Stuart comes back west as Dad’s preppy clone with a tidy haircut, piles of Polo shirts, and a newfound passion for tennis. Meanwhile Michelle is consistently hard on Margo. “She did not understand how or why Michelle had turned into this impossible creature,” Margo says early on in the novel. “Margo would never voluntarily live with such an angry, critical person. Never. But when it was your own child you had no choice.”
In the introduction, Blume explains that because some details from her personal life overlapped with Margo’s, everyone assumed Smart Women was about her and her family. Even Randy, she says, “believes that Michelle is based on her (when she was that age) and maybe she’s right.” Judy goes on to say that “all the characters in the book (okay, except for some parts of Michelle) are fictional,” admitting that Michelle is closest to her heart. “Michelle is my favorite character in the book… I love her for giving her mother a hard time because she cares about her and can’t bear to see the family painfully disrupted again.”
The novel is told from four different perspectives: Margo’s, Michelle’s, Margo’s friend B.B.’s, and that of B.B.’s twelve-year-old daughter Sara. B.B. (whose real name is Francine) is also a divorced forty-year-old who is newish to Boulder. She and Margo meet at work and hit it off. But their burgeoning friendship gets complicated when B.B.’s ex-husband, Andrew, sublets the house next door to Margo’s for three months. One balmy August night, he calls over the fence and invites himself over for a drink and a hot tub. The flirtation revs up.
Andrew, a journalist, is rakish and charming. He earnestly tells Margo that she “look[s] like the girl on the Sun-Maid raisin box.” For their first official date, Margo calls him and tells him she’s leaving for Apocalypse Now in a few minutes, and would he like to join her? He would. He brings two boxes of raisins to the theater and they eat them before holding hands. When Margo nods off because she doesn’t like the movie, she snuggles up to Andrew’s shoulder.
Margo has casually dated around since her divorce. Her ex wanted “a Stepford Wife… a plastic princess,” she explains, and she isn’t eager to get married again. But after turning forty, she resolved to find herself a “steady man.”
“No more affairs going nowhere,” she reminds herself early in her and Andrew’s courtship. “From now on she was only interested in men who wanted to settle down… He would have plenty of experience with women, her steady man, and with life, so that settling down with her would be a pleasant relief.”
When Andrew’s sublet is up just a few months after they’ve been dating, Margo invites him to move in. She knows it’s quick but as soon as the words are out of her mouth, she’s excited. “She tried to think reasonably, but she couldn’t,” she says. “She wanted to jump up and shout, Yes, move in with me but a mature adult did not react solely on an emotional level. A mature adult thought things through, considered both sides of the issue.” So Margo checks herself. “There would be a million complications,” she admits.
Good-naturedly, Andrew agrees, but they resolve to go on the adventure anyway. The complications are real, and they include B.B., Sara—who openly wants to Parent Trap her mom and dad—Stuart, and, topping the list, Michelle. Michelle is horrified that her mother is letting Andrew move in with them, and she isn’t shy about telling her so. Ten days after Andrew has officially become the new roommate, Margo throws a dinner party with a few friends. Everything is rolling along smoothly until a conversational lull, when Michelle seizes on the chance to chat up Andrew in front of the group. “Did you know when we first moved to town my mother joined Man-of-the-Month club?” she asks sarcastically, before rattling off the names of Margo’s former lovers.
Margo is mortified but Andrew takes it in stride. “Oh, those were just alternative selections, Michelle,” he jokes. “They don’t count.” Soon, we find out that Michelle is hazing Andrew as a way of protecting her family. “Michelle had set out to test Andrew as soon as he’d moved in, because it was better to find out now if he could take it, and if he couldn’t, to get rid of him quickly, before she got to know him and like him.” As she confesses to Stuart, Michelle is tired of riding her mother’s emotional roller coaster, sick of being ignored when Margo is happy and getting dragged down with her when she’s miserable. “I’m the one who has to suffer through it every time one of her love affairs fizzles,” Michelle tells her brother defensively, after he scolds her for being obnoxious at dinner. “Me… not you!”
We learn that Michelle is harboring quieter resentments, too, ones she doesn’t admit to Stuart. Michelle writes poems that she’d like to show to Margo but she talks herself out of it. “One day, Margo would be sorry,” Michelle says. “Sorry that she’d had a daughter and hadn’t bothered to get to know her.”
This sequence complements a handful of passages from another book, published sixteen years later by a different author: Randy Blume. After graduating from Wesleyan in 1983, Randy’s professional life took an unexpected turn. She fell in love with flying planes and set out to become a pilot. She worked in commercial aviation for years and in 1999, she wrote Crazy in the Cockpit, a comic novel about a young female pilot trying to break into the male-dominated world of air travel. The book was edited by Dick Jackson, who by then had sold Bradbury and had set up his own imprint elsewhere.
Kendra is Crazy in the Cockpit’s protagonist, the only child of a respected academic who chairs the sociology department at Princeton. Early on in the book, Kendra tells us that her mother, Rachel, was distressed when she learned Kendra had no intention of attending Princeton herself: “You’ve become so self-absorbed that you probably never even considered what my life would be like without you!” Rachel said at the time. Kendra’s college roommate, a psych major, has diagnosed their mother-daughter bond as “ ‘acutely neurotic’ and wanted to use it as a case study for one of her research papers.”
Rachel hates that Kendra wants to walk away from her journalism training and pursue flying. When Kendra arrives home for Thanksgiving break, she anticipates a thorough guilting from her mom. But that’s not what happens. “It turned out my mother wouldn’t have noticed if I’d flown an airplane through the living room,” Kendra says. “She was too busy with Norman, her new boyfriend, who I found comfortably ensconced in our town house.” (Is the name “Norman” an Easter egg reference to Wifey?)
Christmas break, at a rental house in Key West, brings more of the same. “My mother and Norman got up early every morning to bike, snorkel, or sail, and I sat by the pool with my books and Jennifer, Norman’s sullen twelve-year-old daughter, who was angry because she’d been dragged away from her friends in Phoenix to a place that didn’t even have a decent mall,” Kendra explains. Throughout the novel, Rachel functions as a mixture of annoying adversary, conscience, and comic relief. When Kendra gets a flying job in Guam, Rachel visits and brings her anxiety with her. “How could she have let me come to this intellectual and cultural wasteland,” Kendra says, aping her mother’s point of view, “this paved rock in the middle of the Pacific? What if, God forbid, I ever needed emergency surgery?” (Randy was clearly grateful for her real mother’s well-earned appreciation of the differences between fact and fiction, and dedicated her one and only book to Judy, “who always believed I would write—even when I was too busy flying.”)
In Crazy in the Cockpit, the mother-daughter plot is a high-strung counterpoint to the much bigger story of Kendra’s coming-of-age drama, played out against the clouds. But in Smart Women, the relationship between Margo and Michelle—not Margo and Andrew—provides the book’s emotional center. The novel takes some wacky turns, like when teenage Michelle starts dating an older guy who secretly used to sleep with Margo. Thorny, for sure, but the pair work things out. Smart Women’s last chapter sees Michelle heading off for a summertime trip to Israel with Stuart and their father. The family has found a cautious balance, and Michelle has surprised herself by developing a big-sisterly fondness for Sara.
In a clever bit of symbolism, Michelle, who has smoothed out a bit, asks Margo to take care of a cactus in her absence. “I gave you a lot of shit this year, didn’t I, Mother?” she asks. Margo doesn’t argue, and is touched when Michelle asks her for a goodbye kiss. Margo tells Michelle that she loves her. “I love you too,” Michelle says as they embrace. “You know something, Mother… for a while I had my doubts, but you’ve turned out okay.”
Her words please Margo immensely and after Michelle is gone, she cries heavy tears of relief, in recognition of all they’ve been through. The deep emotional release is akin to surrendering to something sublime in nature, like a perfect sunset, Margo tells us. “She felt a pouring out of motherly love, followed by an enormous sense of pride in herself and her children. She had made a lot of mistakes, but they had come through it together,” Margo thinks with satisfaction.
“Is there any relationship more complicated than mothers and daughters?” Blume asks rhetorically in the introduction to Smart Women. Any close-knit, strong-willed mother-daughter duo would recognize the truth, the heat, and the humor in this question. The feminist movement didn’t ease generational tension among these pairs—if anything, it made it worse at times. Divorce, dating, and consciousness-raising meant that mothers grew up clumsily in front of their daughters. Girls, born native to the language of freedom, watched their mothers stumble and didn’t understand why they couldn’t just soar. Moms wanted the world for their female children, but then resented the bigness of their dreams, their easy entitlement. Hopefully we’ll do it better, whispers every generation of parents. Hopefully next time we’ll get it right for our kids.
Chapter Twenty-Four Libraries
“It’s really scary being a librarian right now.”
There’s still work to do. The Equal Rights Amendment—which, along with Roe v. Wade, was supposed to be the crowning achievement of Second Wave feminism—still hasn’t passed. It went through Congress and the Senate, but then died at the state level in 1979 thanks to a swell of conservative activism led by Phyllis Schlafly. As any parent of an elementary school–aged child can attest, the breadwinner/homemaker model of marriage is still “super baked in” to our legal and school systems, Suzanne Kahn said, which means that, arguably, traditional gender roles are, too. Regardless of any political lip service, universal child care still sounds like a progressive pipe dream. The tide of right-wing support that got Reagan elected is once again overtaking local and state governments.
While book challenges certainly slowed down by the end of the 1980s, they continued through the 1990s, and in some extreme cases ruined peoples’ careers in the process. That’s what happened when Wisconsin guidance counselor Michael Dishnow took on his school principal, who wanted to ban Forever in the early nineties. As Dishnow tells it, the principal at Rib Lake High School, where he worked, saw a girl reading Forever in the hallway and snatched it out of her hand. “Of course, [he] opened it initially to the perfect page with the sexual intercourse, and confiscated the book,” Dishnow remembered.
Dishnow was married to the school librarian at the time, who had described Judy Blume to him as “the best of the best.” Dishnow, a mustached former Marine and a onetime school principal himself, thought it “just wasn’t right” that the principal “didn’t go through any process” when he decided to take the student’s book away from her and subsequently ban it from the school library. They argued over it, and Dishnow recalled that “at one point I made a statement to the effect, I used a curse word, I said something about the ‘damn principal’ and this ‘damn school’ or whatever.” (The judge’s ruling on the case quoted him as having referred to the “God damned administration” at a faculty meeting.)
The well-liked guidance counselor said he was a rare liberal in a conservative town, where the school’s less-is-more approach to sex ed struck him as naive, given “the realities I knew having been in the Marine Corps overseas, various places, especially when it came to sexual issues.” Dishnow wrote a column in the local newspaper, Medford’s Star News, where he mused about things that came across his desk as a guidance counselor—mostly uncontroversial topics, like college applications and job hunts. But after the principal “unilaterally” banned Forever, he used his “Counselor’s Corner” platform to sound off on the situation.
Dishnow said that was probably the last straw. “They fired me… for being insubordinate,” he alleged. He’d had a successful twenty-five-year career working as a school administrator in Alaska before moving to Wisconsin, and felt the blow to his reputation was unjustified. He sued the Rib Lake school district, arguing that he had been let go in retaliation for exercising his First Amendment rights. “I was a gadfly, no doubt about it,” Dishnow said, “[but] they’re not going to take my rights away from me, so I fought it.”
The case went on for three long years, during which Dishnow looked for another position but claims he was kneecapped by the very public details of his dismissal, and the fact that he couldn’t get a letter of recommendation from his former employer. A jury agreed, awarding him $400,000 in damages (that number was reduced to approximately $180,000 in subsequent appeals, according to Dishnow). Dishnow eventually took the one and only employment offer he received, in another small town in Wisconsin, where he still resides, at a significantly lower salary from the already modest one he was making at Rib Lake. “But I wasn’t in it for the money to begin with,” Dishnow said. “Nobody else would touch me at that point. It was a long time ago but it was a pretty trying experience.”
He is still in contact with some former colleagues at Rib Lake High School and they told him that to this day, Forever remains on a restricted shelf in the library. Dishnow’s campaign seems to have done nothing to change the principal’s mind about the book, but he did get one high-profile shoutout for his efforts. In Places I Never Meant to Be, Blume mentions Dishnow among a number of examples of people who stood up to book bans and experienced dire personal and professional consequences. “Guidance counselor Mike Dishnow was fired for writing critically of the board of education’s decision to ban my book Forever,” she notes. “Ultimately, he won a court settlement, but by then his life had been turned upside down.”
For a while, it looked like the culture wars over children’s books had been diffused. Two blockbuster series took over bookstores in the mid-1980s: The Baby-sitters Club and Sweet Valley High. Ann M. Martin, who created the Connecticut band of business-minded babysitters, had them talk about serious issues—diabetes, divorce and remarriage, cultural differences, death—but left the puberty stuff to Blume. Sweet Valley High, about a pair of pretty blond twins, was straight fluff. Fleissner said her mother hated those books, which crowded out complex novels like hers: “From my mom’s point of view and the other seventies-era writers, it was such a step backwards, to this much more 1950s sanitized version of like, ‘Oh, who’s dating who?’ Little high school dramas.”
Parents and politicians argued over Satanism, rap lyrics, Beavis and Butt-Head, and whether or not it was cool that Britney Spears dressed like a sexy schoolgirl. But now, book challenges are back—and they’re more cutthroat than ever.
In April 2023, Blume told the BBC that the current movement to ban books is “so much worse than it was in the ’80s,” because instead of being stoked by grassroots movements, it’s driven by the politicians themselves. She cited her adopted home state of Florida as a place where “bad politicians who [are] drunk with power, who want to get out there” are using extreme talking points and legislation to do so. “It is so frightening,” Blume told British journalist Laura Kuenssberg. “I think the only answer is for us to speak out and really keep speaking out, or we’re going to lose our way.”
Arlene LaVerde, who has spent three decades working for the New York City Department of Education, said that Blume’s novels aren’t challenged nearly as often now, in part because they aren’t as ubiquitous as they were in the 1980s, and also because the bull’s-eye of conservative grievance has moved. Now the young adult books that are most often under attack are ones with LGBTQ+ themes. Of the top thirteen most banned books in 2022 according to the American Library Association’s list, seven contain LGBTQ+ subjects and/or characters, including Gender Queer, All Boys Aren’t Blue, the award-winning graphic novel Flamer by Mike Curato, and transgender writer Juno Dawson’s This Book Is Gay.
LaVerde said that thanks to the brouhaha over Critical Race Theory, books that speak openly about race—even straightforward history books—are under fire, too. “Critical Race Theory is not taught in K–12 education,” insisted LaVerde. “But it’s a term that people grab on to and use because they feel like it’s indoctrination. Indoctrinating what? Indoctrinating that in the United States, more than half of the country had slaves? And that it was legal?” She went on: “It’s a shameful part of our history, yeah. But it’s a part of our history and we should learn about it.”
