The woman responsible for easing our pre-teen years with stories that made girls feel like others were having the same experiences as them is our QUEEN SHEVA of this Wednesday. She is the magnificent Judy Blume.
Growing up making up loads of stories, Judy Blume went to write as a professional writer after her 2 children were in preschool. She would spend her days writing the countless stories that would form in her head and by 3pm, when the kids would walk in after school, her writing stopped. She was a working mother in a time where no other working mothers lived on her street.
Judy faced rejection early in her career but that didn’t stop her. In 1969, she published her first children’s illustrated book called The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo. The following year, she published her first novel called Iggie’s House and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret followed that same year. Her “Margaret” Novel established her as “the” Young Adult novelist we know her to be. Margaret was a 12 year old girl who deals with religion, her first period, buying her first bra, liking boys, and many other subjects we girls dealt at that age. It became the quintessential coming-of-age story for girls.
And her other 25 books that followed touched on subjects like body image, sexuality, angst, family problems, birth control, death, divorce, bullying, and even masturbation. She wanted to be honest because, she says, adults were not honest with her and she would’ve liked to know about all those subjects when she was growing up. So it’s no surprise that Judy gets countless messages from girls all over the world thanking her for her stories.
Because of the arrange of subjects that cover Judy’s books, in the 1980’s she was faced with a group of people wanting to censor her book (along with many other books). It was then and there that she joined the National Coalition Against Censorship to support intellectual freedom. One of her efforts was to edit a book called Places I Never Meant to Be, where she put together a collection of short stories by authors who also faced the censorship debacle.
Her latest novel, In the Unlikely Event, broke her 17 years of not publishing anything. So, counting the latest novel, Judy has sold more than 85 million copies that have been translated in more than 32 languages and have gotten her countless awards around the world. Today she is still creating stories in her head and an avid activist of intellectual freedom.
Judy Blume’s books is, and should be, a right of passage for girls. It is her empowering stories and her honest that make her our QUEEN SHEVA of today.
