Making Waves Author Judy Blume Sails Along In Her Crusade Against Censorship Of Children’s Books

Judy Blume lowers herself gingerly into the kayak. A stiff northeast wind is blowing across Lake Tashmoo, churning the surface into foamy corrugation. The small vessel bobs and bucks like a 25-cent arcade ride.

All in all, not a Blume-in-boat kind of day.

“I’m a fair-weather sailor,” admits the bestselling author, whose coming-of-age novels about blended families, sibling rivalries, adolescent sexuality and other knotty childhood issues have been known to stir up a little turbulence themselves. Particularly among those who champion “traditional” family values, which is to say families that look or act just the way theirs do.

Or the way theirs ought to, anyway.

Blume, 57, floats delicately over the backwash, hard-wired to her own 11-year-old inner child and fiercely proud of it. She giggles girlishly as she adjusts her sunglasses and prepares to shove off.

After three or four hours at the word processor, Blume likes to climb into the kayak and drift away, alone with her thoughts.

She finishes with a long walk along the lake’s outermost jetty. Mostly she slips into that magical Judy Blume realm, where God and boyfriends and the mysteries of the training bra all seem insoluble problems, and a girl does her best thinking with some open space to breathe in. And no bratty kid brother to take care of.

Not, however, when 20-knot winds are whipping in off the Atlantic and even the ospreys have the sense to take cover. Fortunately, she finds some calm water on the lake’s leeward side. In no time, Blume is making a beeline across the lake, back toward the family compound. The literary hero of kids everywhere suddenly looks positively Pocahontan. She beaches the kayak with a war whoop.

Summers on Martha’s Vineyard, she says, settling into an armchair on her front patio, “remind me of those long, lazy summer days when you just lay on your back and looked at the clouds, making things up. Being by yourself. I still think that’s the most important thing a writer can have.”

And Blume has made the most of her opportunities.

In the publishing world Blume is a phenomenon. A unique combination of, say, Dr. Seuss and Danielle Steel.

To date, Blume’s two dozen titles have sold more than 60 million copies, in 16 different languages. “Superfudge” (1980) and “Fudge-a-mania” (1990), a pair of quirky sagas of modern family life (starring an impish “5-year-old human hurricane” named Fudge), were optioned last year by Steven Spielberg and turned into a Saturday morning ABC-TV series by Spielberg’s production team. She is also the founder of the Kids Fund, an educational foundation that underwrites a spectrum of services and organizations geared toward children.

Blume, a former suburban New Jersey housewife, receives so much correspondence from her young fans - hundreds of letters a week, at minimum - that she has had to hire a full-time assistant to help keep up with it. “Letters to Judy: What Kids Wish They Could Tell You” ranks among her most popular works, a self-help guide for parents who blush at the mere idea of their preteens actually possessing hormones.

For her service to children’s literature and to the cause of sexual awareness in general, Blume has been honored by the Authors Guild Council, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, among others. In 1984, she received the Carl Sandburg Freedom to Read Award from the Chicago Public Library, one of many library groups to single out Blume’s contribution to developing literacy skills. For millions of 8- to 12-year-old readers, especially girls, the first books they sit down and read coverto-cover - for pleasure, and without an ounce of adult prompting - are Blume’s.

With fame and fortune has come controversy, to be sure. In writing about such matters as adolescent sexuality, the author has drawn significant fire from conservative groups who find her language offensive - and her subject matter highly inappropriate for younger readers.

Blume, says Leanne Katz of the National Coalition Against Censorship, is “one of their main targets, right up there with ‘Catcher in the Rye”’ on the hit list.

“The attacks on Judy come in large part because she’s writing about things kids care about,” says Katz. Including girls who take responsibility for their own sexuality “outside of the context of their being victims,” Katz emphasizes.

Blume says the attacks intensified in the 1980s, when the Reagan revolution ushered in a backlash against the prevailing liberal trends of the 1960s and 1970s. With the Gingrich revolt of 1994, she notes, the battles have intensified once more.

“If you had asked me years ago whether I’d become a First Amendment activist, I’d have said, ‘Well, that’s a nice idea. But why?”’ Blume says. “Now I am one, because there is a real effort by the extreme right to dictate what can be read or should be available to kids. The focus used to be on sex and languages. Now it seems to be on Satan, witches, anything to do with Halloween. It sounds crazy, but there it is.”

She sips a glass of cold fruit juice. “Myself,” she says, “I decided some time ago that I could either go around the country defending my books, or I could write. And I would rather write. But yeah, I’ll help anyone who is out there defending kids’ rights.”

Blume grew up in Elizabeth, N.J., where she attended an all-girl public high school. Her father died when she was young, Blume says, and her own writing career did not take wing until she became the mother of two young children and found herself “going crazy.” She started to write when the kids were in preschool or day care, stealing whatever time she could.

“All my first stories rhymed, just like Dr. Seuss,” Blume says. “And all of them were rejected.” Only when she began to write “from inside myself,” Blume admits, did she find her own voice. And a receptive publisher as well.

Blume’s first marriage ended in divorce in the mid-‘70s. She moved to England shortly thereafter, and then to Santa Fe, N.M., where she lived for several years. She and Cooper met in the Southwest, where his daughter and ex-wife were living. Their union marked another turning point in Blume’s life.

“I used to be real prolific,” she cracks, “until George came along and ruined my career by making me happy. You need a lot of angst to write.”