15/08/2026
There are books that find you at exactly the right moment.
Not the books that adults think children should be reading. Not the carefully approved versions of childhood that leave out the parts that are awkward and confusing and real. The other kind — the ones that seem to know what you are actually going through, that say out loud the things you thought you were the only person thinking, that make you feel, in the particular loneliness of growing up, that someone on the other side of the page understands you precisely.
Judy Blume wrote those books. And for fifty years, certain adults have been trying to make sure children cannot reach them.
In 1970, she was a restless woman in suburban New Jersey, nearly thirty years old, with two children and a conventional life that did not quite fit. She had been writing for years — submitting, getting rejected, persisting. Then Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret came out.
The book follows an eleven-year-old girl named Margaret Simon, newly moved to New Jersey, worried about the things sixth-grade girls actually worry about when no adults are listening. Getting her period. Developing. Whether she will fit in. She talks to God directly — not through a priest or a rabbi or any institutional mediator, just in the casual, honest way a child actually might. She joins a secret club. She and her friends make pacts to tell each other the moment they get their periods.
It was real. It was honest. It was exactly how girls thought and talked.
Judy Blume did not know she had written anything controversial. She said later that she was so naïve she did not even think to be anxious about the reviews. She gave three copies to the elementary school her own children attended, expecting them to reach the shelves.
The male principal decided on his own they were inappropriate. They never reached the shelves.
Then the phone calls started.
One night a woman called, asked if Judy had written the book, and when Judy said yes, called her a Communist and hung up. Judy wrote later that she never did figure out whether the woman was equating Communism with menstruation or with religion — the two central concerns of twelve-year-old Margaret's life.
Through the nineteen-seventies the challenges were relatively scattered. Then 1980 arrived and something organized and coordinated appeared. Judy described it as censors crawling out of the woodwork seemingly overnight, determined not just to decide what their own children could read but what all children could read. Challenges to books quadrupled within months. Her work became a prime target.
Are You There God? was challenged for discussing puberty, menstruation, and religious faith outside institutional guidance. Forever, her 1975 novel about teenage romantic experience, landed on the American Library Association's list of the hundred most frequently challenged books and has never left. Deenie was challenged. Blubber was challenged. Tiger Eyes was challenged.
She was shocked.
She had believed, she said, that America did not do this — that freedom to read and freedom to write were things the country actually meant. And then they did it anyway.
She never stopped writing.
Instead she became something more than a novelist. She became one of the most consistent voices in the country for the freedom to read — speaking for authors, for librarians, for teachers, for the children who needed books that told them the truth about their own lives. She wrote and spoke publicly about what she believed censorship actually was: fear, organized and given institutional power. Parents who wanted to feel in control of something in a world that felt out of control, and who had found in book banning a way to act on that feeling while calling it protection.
The readers kept writing to her.
Letters from thirteen-year-olds saying they did not know where they stood in the world and read to find themselves. Letters from girls who had found in Margaret's worries a mirror of their own. Letters from women decades later saying that her books had been the first time they felt seen by something on a page.
Over ninety million copies sold. Translated into thirty-two languages.
Still banned.
In March of 2023, a Florida school district removed Forever from its middle and high schools. Judy Blume, eighty-five years old and living in Key West, called it government censorship and did not soften the language. She has been fiercely critical of policies she believes have systematically removed books from shelves in ways that harm the children they claim to protect. When one proposed bill would have restricted discussion of menstruation before sixth grade — despite evidence that many girls get their first periods before that — she posted two words on social media:
Sorry, Margaret.
When asked to describe the current wave of book banning, she offered several words: cuckoo, impossible, disgusting, fascist, all of those and more.
She also said she sees hope.
She has received letters from young people studying censorship in their own classrooms. Students from elementary school through high school becoming active in the fight for the right to read, alongside adults who understand what is at stake. She believes the censors can only be answered when readers of all ages are willing to stand up and make clear that fear will not decide what stories get to exist.
In 2023, at eighty-five, Judy Blume owns a nonprofit bookstore in Key West. A new film adaptation of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret came out that year and introduced Margaret Simon to a generation of girls who had not yet found her. She says she is happy now — genuinely, in a way she was not during the restless suburban years when she first sat down to write honestly about what girls actually experienced.
She never sanitized. Never compromised. Never decided that the things that made certain adults uncomfortable were therefore things children did not need to see on the page.
And the readers who found her books at the right moment — who felt, maybe for the first time, that what they were going through was real and normal and worth a story — carried that with them. Many of them have never stopped.
For anyone who has ever felt that their experience was too messy or too specific or too real to be worth telling — who has wondered whether honesty has a place in a world that often seems to prefer the comfortable version — Judy Blume's fifty-year argument with the censors offers a particular answer.
The things that make people most uncomfortable are often the things most urgently needed. The books that got banned the hardest were the books that mattered the most.
She wrote honestly. They banned the books. She kept writing anyway.
Ninety million readers found her.
What was the book, or the story, or the person that made you feel — maybe for the first time — that your own experience was worth taking seriously?
