Although this charming documentary undoubtedly was timed to debut in tandem with next week’s big-screen release of Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, it ironically coincides with an alarming — and shameful — tsunami of ultra-conservative book banning and library de-funding.
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| Judy Blume donated her entire archives — including some unpublished early works — to the Yale Library in October 2017. One of this film's most charming sequences finds her in the library, reading excerpts from some of the many thousands of letters she received from devoted young fans. |
(Needless to say, she’s in very good company, alongside Maya Angelou, John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, John Green, Toni Morrison, Harper Lee and — you’ll love this — The Holy Bible, among many others.)
Blume, a spry and feisty 83 years young, narrates much of her own story in Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok’s thoroughly engaging film. In addition to Blume’s astonishing ability to vividly recall events going back to her childhood, such memories are supplemented by excerpts from the thousands upon thousands of personal letters she has received.
Some of those fans became lifetime correspondents; two of them — Lorrie Kim and Karen Chilstrom — are interviewed here, with portions of their letters read aloud and displayed on-camera.
It quickly becomes clear that few authors have so deeply touched young readers, many of whom came to regard Blume as a surrogate parent: the only person in their lives who not only “gets it,” but gets them.
Additional on-camera high praise comes from celebrities and influencers such as Lena Dunham, Samantha Bee and Molly Ringwald, also among many others. Further details are revealed during archival media interviews with Gene Shalit, Joan Rivers and David Letterman.
Blume, born in 1938 as Judith Sussman, was a self-described “anxious Jewish child,” who — after seeing movie theater newsreel footage of liberated Nazi death camps — didn’t entirely believe it when her mother insisted “That won’t happen here.” Growing up in New Jersey, young Judy spent much of her time in the library; as a teenager, she was profoundly affected by three (!) airplane crashes in her hometown of Elizabeth, in 1951 and ’52, which claimed the lives of 118 people (an emotionally shattering period she ultimately dealt with in her 2015 novel, In the Unlikely Event).
Perhaps more telling, Blume admits that she never was able to ask her mother personal questions, particularly anything having to do with one’s body.
