Mark Oppenheimer, who first wrote about Ms. Blume in a 1997 essay for The Times, has been trying fruitlessly for the past decade to get her to agree to a biography. “I’ve been thinking about her work, and why it succeeds and its literary merits in some ways, since I was 10 years old,” he said. “She’s a tremendously important woman of letters. She is one of a very small number of people who have written exceedingly well, and with great success, for multiple age groups.”
The world is a very different place from when Ms. Blume began writing over 50 years ago. Children searching for answers don’t need Judy Blume to help them; they have Google. Yet book sales are still robust. According to Justin Chanda, a senior vice president at Simon & Schuster, the portion of Ms. Blume’s catalog that the publishing house oversees, which includes everything but the “Fudge” series, sells 200,000 to 250,000 copies a year, with “Freckle Juice” being the best seller. Mr. Chanda adds that since publicity has begun on the “Margaret” film, sales of the 50-year-old novel have shot up 762 percent from a year ago.
Ms. Blume chalked it all up to children’s insatiable curiosity that she believed was still not being satisfied by the internet. “They still say, ‘Nobody is answering my questions, and nobody is telling me what it is I really want to know,’” she said.
Letters from children still arrived, though not as many as before and not as urgent as they once were. She’s rarely called on to save anyone’s life. The recent letters are more about her books’ characters and stories. All the correspondence today happens on a computer, a technological advance that she believes creates more distance between people and their emotions.
Yet Ms. Fremon Craig said test screenings of “Margaret” had evoked a wistfulness among middle school readers for a time they never even lived through, a yearning, if possible, for a world where technology and social media didn’t rule their lives.
“There is this feeling of wishing that they lived through it and also this weird, strange nostalgia that sort of feels like their own memory, but it is a step removed,” she said.
Judy Blume’s finale
Nicole Sperling
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