It's Not the End of the World by Judy Blume

Finally, I realized that what Judy Blume had taught me is that writing about family, writing about psychological dramas, writing about people in a household-that’s vital stuff. But, of course, other books came along that shifted my ideas and made me more interested in writing for adults. Judy Blume is mainly suburban, but you get a little hit, from things like that girl reading the Times, of something bigger and more metropolitan.įor a while, I did want to write for the young adult audience I felt that I would grow up authoring for children. I grew up in Manchester, Massachusetts, and a lot of the books I found in the library were set in the country, on farms.

This new friend is much more sophisticated and cultured she reads the New York Times. There are great characters, like the friend the protagonist makes in her father’s new “bachelor” apartment building. It’s such an interesting and powerful combination: I needed that book, but I also got so much pleasure out of it.

She was at my level, but at the same time guiding me, helping me be aware, not to think just about the pain of my parents breaking up, but through to the larger picture. I really, really credit Judy Blume for that.īlume was willing to speak to young people. I want to write these kinds of things.” And I’d never had that before. So when I stumbled on Judy Blume, I not only felt “I love this kind of writing, I love this kind of book,” but I understood for the first time “I want to do this. There was nobody just telling family tales. When I was growing up, there were a lot of talking animals in children’s literature, and a lot of science fiction for slightly older kids. I read that novel many times-and I’m sure my mother was aware of what she was trying to do in giving it to me.īut aside from the narrator and her voice, from the moment I read Blume, she spoke to me in a way no writer had before. I know that I read It’s Not the End of the World in hardcover, as I read all of Blume’s books, because my mother would buy them for me.Įven though the circumstances were very different between my parents and Karen’s in the novel, reading her story made me feel that I had a friend going through this, experiencing her family coming to an end. It was 1973, and my parents split for good in the summer of 1974. No one else I knew had parents who were getting divorced. It helped me process my parents’ divorce. But there was a much bigger reason that this one changed me. I had already loved Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and it was natural that I would want to read Blume’s next novel. The book that changed my life was It’s Not the End of the World by Judy Blume.

It's Not the End of the World by Judy Blume