“Judy Blume: A Life” and the Problem of Biography

“Why her?” the journalist Mark Oppenheimer writes toward the end of his first biography, “Judy Blume: A Life.” “What is it about Judy and her work that won her so many millions of fans?” Partly talent, he offers, and timing: the iconic children’s author, whose twenty-nine books have sold more than ninety million copies, took off during the seventies, an era “when young readers had more autonomy, when cheap paperbacks, in mall stores, made more books available to them, and when progressive librarians were keen to stock books for them.” She was also meeting a need that had not otherwise been acknowledged, or not in the right way. In Oppenheimer’s view, Blume pioneered and popularized a new genre: “realism for young people.”