Did Philip Roth Read Judy Blume?

When Judy Blume reintroduced her novel Wifey, first published in 1978, in a 2004 preface, she related an anecdote about the reception of her often salacious fiction. “My mother, who went to high school with Philip Roth’s mother, met Mrs. Roth on the street,” she wrote. “Mrs. Roth had some advice for her. ‘When they ask how she knows all those things, you say, I don’t know, but not from me!’” This anecdote, a recollection illustrating these celebrated authors’ enmeshment in their bemused families, echoes themes in the work of both and raises questions about the extent of their proximity. Blume and Roth were born and raised just a few years and a couple of towns apart in Jewish households in northern New Jersey. As Blume’s anecdote makes clear, both have achieved a certain notoriety by pushing the bounds of appropriate subject matter, and both have been met with the sort of vehement criticism often levied at work deemed too risqué for popular consumption.