A Contemporary Story That Changed Young Lives

It took decades for her work to be given recognition when it was added to the Library of Congress. It provided the words kids of all ages needed. I think it could have helped me in my “pre-tween” years, but I had my own points of reference and a lot to discover ahead of me on my own. It’s a reason I also promote school counselors. Kids need “neutral” people who listen to them. 

Judy Blume didn’t know how hard her words landed and how far they reached. She’s a reason I blog, to keep information from getting lost, which isn’t being passed along. This could be required reading. Young readers are discovering her thanks to librarians. A 2023 popular movie gave kids a new kind of hero to follow. Read On….a story worth knowing.

• In the 1980s, a woman in New Jersey was receiving 2,000 letters a month.
  Not from fans. From children.
  Kids who were scared. Kids who were confused. Kids who were being hurt. Kids who had nobody in their lives they could talk to — so they wrote to a stranger named Judy Blume instead.
  “You’re the only one who understands me.”
  “I’ve never told anyone this before, but…”
  “I thought I was the only one who felt this way.”
  Judy read every letter. She answered as many as she could — personally, honestly, without judgment. She would later say that reading those letters was “three emotionally draining, gut-wrenching years” of her life.
  Because the letters weren’t just about puberty or friendships or parents who didn’t listen.
  Some were about abuse. Some were about feeling completely alone in the world. Some were from children who had no one else to turn to.
  And they wrote to her because of a book.
  
  Judy Blume was born in 1938 in New Jersey, the daughter of a shy librarian mother who passed her love of reading on to her daughter. She grew up devouring books. She felt things deeply and kept most of them inside — because in the 1950s, girls weren’t supposed to talk about what they really felt.
  She never forgot that silence.
  When she started writing in the 1960s — a homemaker with two kids and a husband who thought the whole idea was a waste of time — she made a decision that would define her life: she would write for children the way no one had ever written for children before.
  She would tell the truth.
  Not sanitized truth. Not comfortable truth. Real truth — about bodies changing, about parents fighting, about feeling invisible, about being bullied, about wanting things you weren’t supposed to want.
  In 1970, she published Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret — a book about an 11-year-old girl navigating puberty, faith, and the desperate desire to fit in.
  The male principal of her own children’s elementary school pulled it off the shelves immediately.
  That was just the beginning.
  Over the next decade, book after book was challenged, banned, removed from library shelves, and burned — sometimes literally. School boards called her work dangerous. Parent groups held meetings to have her removed from classrooms. Five of her books landed on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books.
  The irony was suffocating.
  The very children these adults claimed to be protecting were the ones writing Judy 2,000 letters a month — telling her that her “dangerous” books were the only reason they didn’t feel completely alone.
  “How do you know all our little secrets?” one nine-year-old girl wrote to her.
  That was exactly the point.
  Judy Blume wasn’t writing secrets. She was saying out loud what every child already knew and felt — but had no words for, no permission to express, no adult willing to acknowledge.
  She gave them the words.
  She gave them permission.
  She gave them proof that what they were going through was real, was survivable, was not shameful.
  And when the censors came — and they kept coming, decade after decade — Judy didn’t go quiet.
  She fought back.
  She joined the board of the National Coalition Against Censorship. She edited entire anthologies of stories by banned authors. She showed up at hearings, gave interviews, wrote essays, and refused to soften a single word.
  “It’s not just my books,” she said. “It’s the books that will never be written — because authors are too afraid. That’s what censorship really costs us.”
  She never stopped writing. She never stopped fighting. She never stopped answering letters from children who had nowhere else to turn.
  
  Her books have now sold over 82 million copies in 32 languages.
  In 2000, the U.S. Library of Congress named her a Living Legend.In 2024, at 86 years old, she received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle — honored as someone who “inspired generations of young readers by tackling the emotional turbulence of childhood with authenticity, candor, and courage.
• “Have a little faith. Kids just need a book and someone who listens.
  
• 
  She is still alive. Still writing. Still fighting.Somewhere tonight, a child who feels completely alone will find one of her books.
  They will read the first page.
  And for the first time in their life, they will feel like someone, somewhere, finally understands them.
  That’s not just writing.
  That’s a lifeline.
  That’s what Judy Blume has been handing to children for over fifty years — one banned, beloved, impossible-to-silence book at a time.
  “Librarians save lives: by handing the right book, at the right time, to a kid in need.”
  She would know. She’s been that book.
• #BannedBooks #NationalLibraryWeek