Judy Blume wrote my adolescence. Everything I knew about menstruation, masturbation, and dealing with your parents’ divorce, I learned from her. It was her fictional scenarios that persuaded me from ever stuffing my bra, despite a lot of provocation. As a young adult writer, she was an icon in my era. She wrote some great younger books too, full of humor and a similar understanding of how hard it can be to be young (Blubber, for instance).<\/p>\n
Her grown-up books aren’t as good. They don’t resonate. Of course, I read them much too young. I couldn’t be expected to relate to women contemplating divorces or second marriages when I was a teen. I still can’t contemplate either a divorce or a second marriage, having never found the resolve to contemplate even a first marraige. And yet, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t speak to me no matter how targeted my demographic. I got more out of that book with the teenage boy protagonist than I did on a recent re-reading of Wifey<\/a> and Smart Women<\/a>. <\/p>\n I don’t know what Blume is up to these days, but I hope she’s writing back down to her level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Judy Blume wrote my adolescence. Everything I knew about menstruation, masturbation, and dealing with your parents’ divorce, I learned from her. It was her fictional scenarios that persuaded me from ever stuffing my bra, despite a lot of provocation. As a young adult writer, she was an icon in my era. She wrote some great […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}