Mark Oppenheimer, who first wrote about Ms. Blume in a 1997 essay for The Occasions, had been attempting fruitlessly for the previous decade to get her to comply with a biography, earlier than she signed on final yr. “I’ve been interested by her work, and why it succeeds and its literary deserves in some methods, since I used to be 10 years previous,” he stated. “She’s a tremendously vital lady of letters. She is one among a really small quantity of people that have written exceedingly effectively, and with nice success, for a number of age teams.”
The world is a really completely different place from when Ms. Blume started writing over 50 years in the past. Youngsters trying to find solutions don’t want Judy Blume to assist them; they’ve Google. But ebook gross sales are nonetheless sturdy. In accordance with Justin Chanda, a senior vice chairman at Simon & Schuster, the portion of Ms. Blume’s catalog that the publishing home oversees, which incorporates the vast majority of her younger grownup titles besides the “Fudge” collection and some others, sells 200,000 to 250,000 copies a yr, with “Freckle Juice” being the most effective vendor. Mr. Chanda provides that since publicity has begun on the “Margaret” movie, gross sales of the 50-year-old novel have shot up 762 p.c from a yr in the past.
Ms. Blume chalked all of it as much as kids’s insatiable curiosity that she believed was nonetheless not being happy by the web. “They nonetheless say, ‘No person is answering my questions, and no one is telling me what it’s I actually wish to know,’” she stated.
Letters from kids nonetheless arrived, although not as many as earlier than and never as pressing as they as soon as had been. She’s hardly ever known as on to avoid wasting anybody’s life. The latest letters are extra about her books’ characters and tales. All of the correspondence right this moment occurs on a pc, a technological advance that she believes creates extra distance between individuals and their feelings.
But Ms. Fremon Craig stated take a look at screenings of “Margaret” had evoked a wistfulness amongst center faculty readers for a time they by no means even lived by way of, a craving, if doable, for a world the place expertise and social media didn’t rule their lives.
“There’s this sense of wishing that they lived by way of it and likewise this bizarre, unusual nostalgia that type of seems like their very own reminiscence, however it’s a step eliminated,” she stated.
