Judy Blume
Judy Blume
Judy Blumeis an American writer known for children's and young adultfiction. Some of her best known works are Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Deenie, and Blubber. The New Yorker has called her books "talismans that, for a significant segment of the American female population, marked the passage from childhood to adolescence."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth12 February 1938
CityElizabeth, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
Are you there God? It's me, Margaret. I just told my mother I want a bra. Please help me grow God. You know where. I want to be like everyone else.
I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.
When I was growing up, I dreamed about becoming a cowgirl, a detective, a spy, a great actress, or a ballerina. Not a dentist, like my father, or a homemaker, like my mother - and certainly not a writer, although I always loved to read.
Something awful happens to a person who grows up as a creative kid and suddenly finds no creative outlet as an adult.
I have to go with what comes naturally to me. Fantasy isn't my thing. I did enjoy the Oz books when I was growing up and certainly my grandson and I read Harry Potter together. You write what you can as well as you can.
My only advice is to stay aware, listen carefully and yell for help if you need it.
Those who would challenge or ban a book have to find out about it first,
You'd think he was the first person to ever lose a tooth!
It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written.
The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.
It's all about your determination, I think, as much as anything. There are a lot of people with talent, but it's that determination.
I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.
I was sick all the time, one exotic illness after another, which lasted throughout my twenties. My worst decade. But from the day the first book was accepted, I never got sick again. Writing changed my life.
If no one speaks out for [young readers], if they don’t speak out for themselves, all they’ll get for required reading will be the most bland books available. Instead of finding the information they need at the library, instead of finding novels that illuminate life, they will find only those materials to which nobody could possibly object... In this age of censorship I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced — writers’ voices, teachers’ voices, students’ voices — and all because of fear.