Are You There, Readers? It's a New Judy Blume Biography. Read an Exclusive Excerpt Here (Exclusive)

Judy Blume's frank, honest books about young people facing very real problems made teens and tweens feel seen. But that often landed her in hot water.

Now, The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us by Rachelle Bergstein (out July 16) explores not only how Blume, 86, went from a mother of two looking for a way to express herself to a writer on the front lines of the culture wars.

Blume's novels — Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Blubber and others — seemed simple on the surface, but they dealt with the at-the-time revolutionary idea that girls deserved bodily autonomy, careers of their own and and even sexual enjoyment. By the mid-1980s, she was the country's most-banned author.

Now, book bans are surging across the country, with the American Library Association finding the number of titles targeted for censorship surged 65% in 2023 compared to 2022. That's the highest level ever documented in more than 20 years of tracking those statistics.

Below, read an exclusive excerpt on where some of Blume's inspiration came from.

There’s nothing remarkable about Margaret Simon. She is 11  years old, an only child who has just moved from New York City to the (fictional) suburb of Farbrook, N.J. She likes boys, wants  to impress her friends, and is impatient to grow her hair longer. She  finds adults and their preoccupations a bit funny, like when it’s humid  outside, she catches her mother sneakily trying to sniff her own armpits.  She is neither shy nor especially outgoing. She’s being raised in a dual=faith household, which in practice means a no-faith household, because  the topic of religion is so fraught. As a result, it’s up to her to figure out  her own private understanding of God. 

All of these details add up to a portrait of a regular adolescent girl.  

And that’s what makes Margaret Simon special. She isn’t remarkable — but she is real. 

Letters to Jackson from 1969 reveal that while Judy was excited about publishing Iggie’s House, the project that had captured her imagination was her as-yet-untitled novel-in-progress. Unlike Iggie, which took a  child’s view of a contemporary social issue, Margaret Simon — as Blume  referred to the draft manuscript — was born from Judy’s own memories. “In Margaret, I decided I’m going to write about what sixth grade was really like for me,” she told the Daily News in 1976. “The personal parts  about Margaret were true.” 

Judy turned eleven in the winter of 1949, four years after the war ended with a cataclysmic blast on the other side of the world and well  into the Truman presidency, when everyone in America was just trying  to go back to normal. Well, not exactly normal — the post-war economy was booming. The middle class had gotten a buff and a polish. Families of four or even five could thrive on one income, which meant kids were liberated from hovering psychic burdens like work and the draft and could concentrate on being children for a little bit longer than previous  generations. That’s how the adolescent, focused on school and socializing, was born. 

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As a child, Judy was daddy’s little girl. Her parents, Rudolph and Essie, both grew up in Elizabeth and met when they were finishing high school. They married young, him dark-haired and dapper, her slender, serious and blond. They stayed in town, where they had lots of family living nearby. Essie, an introvert who loved books, was a guarded person, keeping her feelings under wraps. Rudolph, on the other hand, was  dynamic — he was funny and charming. He owned his own dental practice and was widely admired within the community. Judy thought of him  as a natural philosopher who just happened to fix teeth for a living. 

Her father was her go-to parent for comfort and affection, the one who indulged her in round after round of hide-and-seek, took her temperature when she was sick, and soothed her during thunderstorms (one boom was enough to send her leaping across the room). She rewarded  him with a special nickname: Doey-Bird. Every night before bed, she gave him his “treatment,” which was a series of kisses and hugs, always doled out in the same pattern.

Blume described it in her 1977 autobiographical novel, Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, as “a sliding kiss, three quick hugs ... finished with a butterfly kiss on his nose.” 

The Sussmans were Jewish, so Margaret’s struggle with religion — in which she seeks out both Jewish and Christian experiences as part of a  yearlong project to clarify her faith — wasn’t Judy’s. But when it came to  Margaret’s secret, intimate relationship with God, that was all her. From the first page of the book, Margaret whispers a prayer, as if conjuring an imaginary friend. 

“Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret,” she begins, as she does with every quiet appeal to God throughout the novel. “We’re moving today.  I’m so scared God ... Don’t let New Jersey be too horrible. Thank you.” 

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Judy spoke to God, too, mostly as a way of coping with her anxiety about her father’s mortality. He was ostensibly healthy, but much of her childhood was shaped by illness and death. Not just the Holocaust, though whispers about the camps made her shudder. With many generations of family around, there were inevitably a lot of funerals, followed by  intense, seven-day shivahs. She was terrified Rudolph was going to die  young — at the age of 42, to be exact. He was the youngest of seven children and two of his older brothers, also dentists, had unexpectedly  passed away at that age.

Please, she prayed to whoever might be listening, not Doey, too. Sally has the same fear in Sally J. Freedman: “Let Doey-Bird  get through this bad year ... this year of being 42 ... we need him God ... we love him,” Sally begs in her bed at night. “You wouldn’t let three  brothers die at the same age, would you? But somewhere in the back of her mind she remembered hearing that bad things always happen in threes.” 

Her fear of something happening to Doey was so overwhelming that Judy became compulsive. “I made bargains with God,” Blume wrote in  her 1986 collection of children’s letters, Letters to Judy: What Kids Wish They Could Tell You. "I became ritualistic, inventing prayers that had to be  repeated seven times a day, in order to keep my father safe and healthy.” 

She also felt like she needed to keep her worries to herself. Her brother, David, was the problem child, so she felt pressure to be perfect, fulfilling Rudolph and Essie’s expectations for both of them. From a young age, David was brilliant but inscrutable. He was rebellious — once, he got sent  home from kindergarten after kicking his teacher in the stomach.

When Judy was going into third grade, David developed a kidney infection so  persistent that Essie moved the three of them south to Miami for the year, hoping the sea air would cure him. It worked, but it also meant that Judy only saw her beloved father on holidays, when he could get away from the office and fly down. 

More and more she learned to hide things from her family. Essie needed her to be easy, talented, popular, happy — and so Judy learned to give her just that. 

Copyright © 2023 by Rachelle Bergstein. From the forthcoming book THE GENIUS OF JUDY by Rachelle Bergstein to be published by One Signal Publishers, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Printed by permission.  

 The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us is out July 16, and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.