Transcript: Mark Oppenheimer

An interview with the American journalist and author

Many of us grew up reading classics from the great Judy Blume, from Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret to Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Blume, now in her eighties, is famous for writing about childhood and adolescence with humour and heart. This week, my guest on the program has published a remarkable book documenting her life story.

Mark Oppenheimer is an American journalist and author. He’s the editor of the online religion and politics magazine ARC. His latest book is Judy Blume: A Life.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.

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TH: It’s great to have you on. We are taping this on your actual pub date.

MO: It’s true. Books publish on Tuesdays. A little-known fact, even to people in the industry, is that books publish on Tuesdays. Back when movies opened, they opened on Fridays. Do you remember that? And I think records, back when people bought vinyl, dropped on Wednesdays. But books still publish on Tuesdays, so here we are.

TH: Here we are, talking on a Tuesday. I love Judy Blume. This is a fantastic biography of her.

MO: Thank you.

TH: It’s so thorough and meticulous. I learned a lot. I want to start by talking about your background. You’ve written extensively about religion. You’re a former Beliefs columnist for The New York Times. You are the editor of the online magazine ARC. And you are also a founding director of the Yale Journalism Initiative. I think our listeners might be curious about your trajectory and what drew you to this subject. I want to go back to 1997. At the age of 23, you wrote a piece for The New York Times Book Review about the enduring appeal of Judy Blume. Tell us what inspired you to write that piece back then — and the events that it set in motion.

MO: Sure. Gosh, I was 23. A lot has changed. I’m 51 now. I was out of college and about to enter graduate school — or maybe I’d just entered graduate school — in religious studies. But I knew that I was not going to end up a typical professor. My goal was not to be a tenured scholar. I wanted to do more school, I wanted to be on that track, but I really wanted to write for a popular audience. I think somebody advised me, “You have to start writing stuff and sending it out, or sending pitches out.” Somebody gave me career advice. I had not been a student journalist as an undergraduate. I had not been on the school newspaper or the literary magazine or anything. So, I really was a babe in the woods and pretty clueless.

But I wrote this piece and thought this could be a good essay for The New York Times Book Review. This was back when they used to run a back-page essay of about one thousand words. It felt like it would fit. I printed it out, probably on a dot-matrix printer, and put it in an envelope and mailed it to the old address on West 43rd Street and just sent it out into the ether with a stamp that was probably 22 cents — which is like 78 cents Canadian. Then I waited. I think a month later I got a letter back from an editor at the Times Book Review saying, “We love it. We’re going to publish it.” I think at that point maybe there was some faxing. Maybe there were edits that were sent to me by fax machine. I think I had to go to my academic department, to the secretary, and say, “Do you have a fax machine?” Then it ran.

I’m not really answering your question: Why Judy Blume? I think I was looking — as a 23-year-old without a lot to say for himself, because I was 23 — I was looking for some sort of personal essay to write. I had found myself haranguing people about the greatness of Judy Blume. Some people would say, “Oh, that’s so interesting because I think of her as a girl’s author, but you are a boy, or were a boy. You were reading it in your boyhood.” So, I thought there was some sort of news hook there. It was probably just purely opportunistic. What do I have to say at age 23? What I had something to say about was a writer who had inspired me a lot.

TH: And she liked it.

MO: She liked it. She sent me a very nice note. Again, I think it was probably on stationery and went to my academic department and found its way to me eventually. And we met and that was lovely. Then we stayed in what I call very loose touch afterwards. The world was slowly moving on to email. I think at some point we exchanged emails. Then every five years or so one of us would drop the other one a line. About 10 years ago I started suggesting, “Hey, maybe I could write your biography.” She wasn’t into it at first. I think because, being in her seventies, she felt she had a lot of life left to live and wasn’t ready. I think she also had in mind that maybe she would write an autobiography or a memoir. Then in 2022, when it became clear she didn’t want to do a memoir and I think was a bit older, she reached out and said, “I’d be willing to talk with you now if you are interested.”

TH: There’s so much to learn from this book. I think a lot of us who have read her books and loved her books maybe didn’t know as much about her life. Let’s touch briefly on her childhood and her early adolescence. By outside appearances she was very happy, cheerful. She lived in a nice house, in a nice neighbourhood. But she was haunted by World War II and its aftermath. Talk to us about how that shaped her.

MO: Judith Marsha Sussman was born in February 1938, and so then is a child not of the 70s, when she began publishing a lot, not of the 60s, not even of the 50s, but really of the 40s. She has memories of the day that World War II ended and the celebrations at the beach where she was, at the Jersey Shore. She is Jewish, and there was a consciousness about what Hitler had done in Europe. Especially as the stories came back, the unvarnished truth of the destruction of European Jewry. After 1945, when the stories filtered back, she had — I don’t know that they were nightmares — but sort of dark visions of what had occurred.

She was sensitive to current events. She was a literary and creative soul. And she put a lot of that anxiety into what I think is her best novel, Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, which is about a girl Judy’s age, set after World War II, who has visions in Miami Beach of Hitler. She thinks that Hitler has escaped and moved to Miami Beach.

Judy was not from a highly observant Jewish family. They were not regular synagogue-goers, but she was from a family that was deeply culturally Jewish. She did have religious relatives. Her world was not exclusively Jewish but was heavily Jewish. And so, she was very attuned to what had happened, and it did end up working its way into her fiction.

TH: Another big emotional influence on her was that her father came from a family of people who died young, and she was terrified of losing her father. She did lose him young, right before her first wedding.

MO: Her father was one of many siblings, and several of them had died at the same age or almost the same age, and it was young. I mean, these were people who did not make it into their sixties or seventies. He’d had a couple brothers who had died of very premature heart attacks.

[Her father] was a dentist. He was also very handy. He could do crafts, he could build things, he could decorate. He was a delight, and she adored him. She was haunted throughout her childhood by the idea that he wouldn’t be with her as an adult. She used to make pacts with God: “If I’m really, really good, will Daddy survive another day or month or year?” For a long time it worked. Then, as she was coming up on her wedding — which was right before her senior year at New York University — she was 21 and a rising senior when she got married to John Blume. They were on the way back, I think, from picking up her older brother who was in the military, who had flown in for the wedding. Her father began to feel chest pains in the car and ended up dying of a massive heart attack, just as she had always feared.

TH: What a way to start a marriage.

MO: Yeah. It ended up being, as I write about in my book, something that haunted the first couple of years of her marriage. She was married to a somewhat older man. John Blume, I think, was six years older, and he was a practising attorney. As she was finishing school at NYU and then having their first child, their daughter Randy, he was working very hard at his law firm in Newark and wasn’t around so much.

[John] was not a great nurturer. I think he was a good person, but he was not necessarily ideally suited to helping his young bride through this incredibly tumultuous year when she lost her father, got married, and then fairly soon thereafter was pregnant. He was emotionally absent, I think it’s safe to say.

She had long had psychologically induced skin reactions. She would get psoriasis — no, sorry, it was eczema — in times of great stress. Clearly this was a time of great stress, so she also ended up in a lot of pain with her skin condition. It was a really tough time.

TH: As she settled into the marriage, again on the outside it looks like things are quite happy. She’s this cheerful woman. But she’s quite bored as a housewife. I know she subscribed to Ms. magazine. The feminist movement was in the ether at that time. She is not someone who’s written for feminist publications. How much of [the feminist movement] do you think influenced her desires for expression, for autonomy, for freedom?

MO: I write that the women’s movement came late to Scotch Plains, New Jersey, but it came and it was very influential. I want to make a minor correction, which is interesting and important. She didn’t subscribe to Ms. at first because nobody did. Ms. magazine began as an insert. The first issue was an insert in New York magazine. I say that not to correct you because nobody knows this. People have forgotten it. But it’s so interesting. New York magazine, edited by the great Clay Felker, was the definitive bible of New Journalism. If people wanted exciting, racy, up-to-the-minute, edgy stories about what was going on on the island of Manhattan, you subscribed to New York magazine — not The New Yorker, which was stodgier and more literary. And so, if you were an intellectually, culturally oriented family across the bridges and tunnels in suburban New Jersey, you might get New York magazine. It was saying, “Look, we still care about [culture]. Even though we’re parents and we never make it to the theatre anymore, we still wish that we did.”

Then a group of women put together this special issue called Ms., which ran as an insert in New York magazine. All of a sudden, this explosive feminist magazine arrived on the doorsteps of — I want to say tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of subscribers of New York magazine. They hadn’t signed up to get this collection of feminist essays, but it arrived. Then it became a standalone magazine and people subscribed. Judy was an early subscriber. So, it’s not even that she went and sought out a feminist magazine or journal to subscribe to. It’s that her regular weekly New York magazine came and she read it, and it tapped into something that was already there because she was bored.

I mean, she loved being a mom. She’s very clear that she was not someone who was oppressed by motherhood. She loved being a mother. But, as her kids moved into their school years of being in school every day from eight to three, or nine to three — and she had some help, she had a part-time housekeeper to help with the cleaning — she had some free time. She had a creative instinct and a creative drive and nothing to do with it. So that, in a roundabout way, led to her trying writing for the first time.

TH: I want to talk about her divorce. She’s something like 37 when she leaves John Blume. It seems very out of character for the Judy that we’ve gotten to know in the book so far. This is someone who was a so-called good girl, who followed the rules a lot. But she was unfaithful in her marriage. And she did decide to leave her husband. What was that about? What do you think that turn was, for her?

MO: Well, first I should say it seems to be she was unfaithful once or twice. She did not carry on long torrid affairs. I think that’s a meaningful distinction. I think that she stepped out on her marriage and she also confessed it to her husband and he forgave her. But the problem with their marriage was not unfaithfulness or adultery or infidelity. To the extent there was any of that, it was symptomatic and it was at the very, very end when things were already coming apart. So, I want to be fair to her about that.

Yeah, she was a good girl. She had snagged a tall, dark and handsome Jewish lawyer as her husband. Her parents approved, his parents approved. Then they had two beautiful children, a boy and a girl, and had a nice house in suburban Jersey and then an even nicer house in suburban Jersey. Things really did seem quite perfect from the outside. But as she started publishing — she had several books out when she began talking to John Blume about divorce. Probably it helped that she all of a sudden had some income of her own, though not yet as much as he had. And of course, she was getting all this recognition. She was becoming a professional woman in her own right. She was getting attention for it. She was getting money for it. And she was increasingly dissatisfied with John Blume. Certainly the culture and feminism was causing her to raise her expectations about what it meant to be a supportive husband and a supportive father.

He wasn’t great on those counts. He wasn’t somebody who was 100% behind her career. He wasn’t somebody who did a lot with the kids. I think she started taking a more cold-eyed look at that — a more honest look at it — and realized she didn’t need this marriage. But it was hard. I mean, she was not someone who easily threw over the marriage or was excited to escape. It was very painful and she suffered a lot as a newly single woman: “Have I done the right thing?” It was not an easy decision for her.

TH: In reading those passages, it did seem like part of the impetus was freedom, and in part sexual exploration. However, there’s a tension here that you allude to in the book, in that she doesn’t go for that ultimately. She remarries right away. Then, her third marriage with George Cooper has lasted almost 40 years.

MO: More now. Well, they married in ‘87, but they got together in 1980. They were one hundred percent monogamously coupled starting around 1980, ‘79 or ‘80. So, it’s been closer to 50 years. It’s been a terrifically successful marriage and they adore each other and are completely supportive of each other. It’s truly a great love story.

But yes, when she got out of the first marriage, she probably had notions that she wanted some sexual exploration. She dated a bit. Well, she quickly moved into a relationship with this fellow she’d met on an airplane, a physicist named Tom Kitchens, and quite stupidly married him. And she would say, “This was a big mistake. It was wrong from the beginning.” She lived by herself for a very short while, then moved to England to be with Tom, where he had a job for a little less than a year. Then he wanted to go back to New Mexico to be near the Los Alamos laboratories as a physicist. So, then she went with him to Los Alamos and then Santa Fe. She married him while in London, came back, did a couple more years of the marriage. But was crying a lot, was unhappy, knew that this wasn’t good for her kids to be moved all over the place. They were teenagers. She kind of wanted out. Then she was single for a little bit, again probably a few months of adventure, some dating, and then met George. It turns out that she was by nature a marrying kind — wanted stability, wanted monogamy.

But look, yes, in her marriage to John Blume, she’d been reading Fear of Flying by Erica Jong. She’d been probably reading Up the Sandbox by Anne Roiphe. There was a moment when probably that kind of freedom, and some amount of promiscuity, looked really appealing. Of course, as we know, in practice it’s not what it’s cracked up to be for most people.

TH: As a Gen Xer — I know you’re Gen X too — divorce is a thing that I’ve returned to over and over again, that I find fascinating for our generation. But also personally, because I lived through one as a child. You spoke to both of her kids. What were those two divorces like for them?

MO: I spoke to each of her kids. They were in some ways very open and candid and in some ways understandably guarded and circumspect. They love their mom and wanted to speak well of her. I would say Larry in particular — her son, the second of her two children — he had some interesting stories about the first stepfather, about Tom Kitchens, who he was really looking to be more of a dad figure and who showed some promise. You know, would build stuff with him and at one point got motorbikes for them to use together, but then would kind of bail and just disappear. He’d raise expectations and then dash them. This is when Larry was out in New Mexico. His dad was still back in New York, New Jersey, as a lawyer. So, his biological dad wasn’t in the picture very much. I mean, he loved them, but was living 3,000 miles from them.

[Larry] had pretty high hopes for a father figure in his stepdad, and it didn’t work. And Larry, when they’d been in London for half a year, was left to his own devices a lot. He talked about having wandered the city and skipped a lot of school — something that it seems like Judy didn’t know about. So, I think for Larry it was a much more difficult, transitional time. It’s also an age, though, where Randy went through a few months where she drank a lot and then very quickly got sober and has not drank much or anything in decades. But both kids — look, they were teenagers at a tumultuous time in the 70s. There was a lot of adult behaviour — not just divorce but parents dating a lot, sleeping around a lot, smoking weed. The 70s were a time when a lot of parents were trying to live through the 60s that they’d missed.

One of the interesting things about Judy is that she is kind of a countercultural soul — somebody you would place spiritually in the late 60s, early 70s — but she was born in 1938. The reality is she started college in 1956.

I had an uncle like this, who sort of missed it. He came too soon and was married with two kids and [was] then looking at the people 10 years younger and saying, “Holy cow, those 20-year-olds are having a blast. But when I was in college it was the Eisenhower era. We were still wearing jacket and tie to the dining hall in college, and the girls had curfews at their women’s colleges.”

So, I think Judy was of that generation that missed the fun in college. And of course she got married before her senior year, which was the goal. The goal was get a ring on your finger. So, I think that the kids bore some of the brunt of that. But they love their mom and spoke very warmly of her.

TH: It’s so interesting how history plays out throughout her life. I want to talk about the reception to her books. We know that there have been many censorship attempts over the years, in part because of her frankness about sex. But also, she’s so famous, she’s a huge figure. She’s a longtime advocate of freedom of expression. An interesting point you make in the book is that she came out in this time of gritty realism in children’s literature. Many parents, in fact, saw her as milder than what was on offer at the time.

MO: Right. It’s an interesting moment for children’s literature. First of all, there had always been children’s literature. The idea that she somehow invented it, or that her generation did, is not true. There had been not only generations of classic books for young people — the Newbery Medal winners going back to the early 1900s — the historical fiction of G. A. Henty, the work of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, the Noel Streatfeild books. I mean, there were children’s classics. There were also, of course, genre books for children. There was The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and Bobbsey Twins. There were all those series. And then, of course, bright precocious children would always pull books off their parents’ shelves. Judy was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dos Passos and Dreiser and Faulkner as a teenager, because she loved to read, as my kids read adult books.

So, it’s not that Judy and her generation of the 70s invented books for children. But what they did was quite powerfully and capably start writing about contemporary realism for kids. In other words, not set in the past, not historical, and not magical — not fantasy or science fiction. She and people like Paul Zindel and Norma Klein and E. L. Konigsburg and a bunch of others were writing realism. Now, there were some books that were even more — I don’t know if you want to say realistic, sort of beyond realistic.

There was a bestseller called Go Ask Alice, which was purported to be the diary of an adolescent heroin addict. Like 13 or 14 years old, I forget how old. It turned out to be a forgery. There was no Alice. But it was published as the real diary. There was a scandal around it. It was reported as a true book about what happens if the hippies get to your kids — they’ll end up literally with a needle in their arm and prostituting themselves on the streets at the age of 12. And 12- and 13-year-olds were passing these books around.

TH: I remember reading it.

MO: I actually didn’t read it until I wrote a piece on it for a newspaper in my 20s, partly about the realization that it was not true — that it was still being sold as true, but it was a forgery.

So, it was a moment when there was a lot of scare literature for kids. A lot of these books — you know, the kid falls into rock and roll and then they start smoking weed and before you know it they’re getting raped all the time or they’re part of a biker gang or they’re doing drugs. It seemed like it was trying to scare kids straight.

By those standards, the stuff that Judy Blume was doing — which was a suburban girl like Margaret who talks frankly about getting her period and wishing that her bust was bigger — is pretty mild. The other thing I always point out about Judy Blume’s books is the stuff she’s talking about is not controversial or scandalous. It’s just true. I don’t even mean true in the sense that, well, all of us will try drugs at some point. I mean literally girls will get their period. I mean literally children touch themselves. Literally, adolescent girls think about their breast size and about their changing bodies. Deenie gets scoliosis. There are children who have spinal deformities. This isn’t even stuff where you have to say, “Oh, in this dangerous age we have to face reality.” This is literally facts of growing up, of being human.

So, the idea that she was confronting controversial topics really says more about us and how squeamish we can be about normal adolescent bodily changes than it does about her and her choice of topics.

TH: I was really struck throughout the book by her correspondence with children and with adolescents and how much she cared about them. And throughout the book, the way she treated the people in her life was overwhelmingly decent. That really stood out. One place where maybe she wasn’t as decent has a Canadian connection to it. We’re talking now about the Canadian writer Michele Landsberg.

MO: The Canadian connection. I was so glad to get your fair country into the book, even though, as you’re about to point out, it’s a difficult little moment in the book.

TH: We’re talking about Michele Landsberg. She’s the wife of Stephen Lewis, the mother of NDP politician Avi Lewis, the mother-in-law of Canadian journalist Naomi Klein. She wrote a book called Reading for the Love of It.

MO: I had no idea she was Naomi Klein’s mother-in-law and the mother of [Lewis]. I know her from her writing. I did not know the deep Canadian connections.

TH: Very famous family here. She takes quite a shot at Judy Blume, attacking her for her “bland and unquestioning acceptance of majority values” and her “unbounded narcissism.” Tell us how Judy Blume responded.

MO: Yeah. So, Michele Landsberg at several points — or a couple points anyway, over the decades — has attacked Judy Blume. Michele Landsberg wrote a fairly large volume about the contemporary children’s literary scene and what to read, what not to read. She’s a major critic in that space. And she just thinks Judy is quite mediocre and has been saying so since the 70s, or 80s anyway. She thinks that Judy Blume is overrated, not very good, bland, boring, writes little childhood versions of herself — perky white girls with not much to say or not much that’s interesting about them.

And yeah, there is a moment when Judy Blume is corresponding — well, there’s a good bit of correspondence in her archives about Michele Landsberg and the shots that she took at Judy. By the way, one of those shots was actually repeated by me in my original New York Times piece in 1997, where I was looking for naysayers — people who didn’t like Judy Blume — and I quoted Michele Landsberg as one of the people who’d written negatively about her. And so, I entered into the story a bit, unwittingly, because Judy mentioned that in one of her letters at the time.

One of her takes in one of her letters, which is in the archives, was that “Landsberg just hates me because…” — I forget if it’s because she’s fat and her daughter is fat. It had to do with the Landsbergs being fat and therefore they didn’t like the book Blubber. Even though that’s an interesting read on it, because Blubber is not an anti-fat book. It’s a book about fat shaming and fatism, among other things. But her take was that the Landsberg family didn’t like the way overweight people came off in that book and that was because they are fat. I think at one point she says, “I think she’s a fat, bitchy type.”

Then, there’s a correspondence with Roald Dahl, the British writer, whom Landsberg also had attacked. And the two of them talked about the fact that Landsberg’s book was being published by various houses that published their books and maybe they could — Roald Dahl more than Judy seemed to want to get the book cancelled or removed. Which is not Judy’s style, as somebody who supports free expression. She doesn’t tend to want other people’s books pulled or yanked. But Roald Dahl clearly did, and they had some conversation about that.

I reached out to Michele Landsberg for the book, just in the last year or two, and she wrote back a lovely note saying, basically, “Judy can say what she will. I’m not losing any sleep over it.” But it’s one of the very rare occasions in the archives where Judy is pretty harsh. [She] generally writes about other people pretty favourably, even when no one is looking.

TH: I want to spend a moment on your relationship with Judy. You did interviews. You talked to one hundred people around her. You sent her an initial draft of the book and she sent back 40 pages of suggestions. You told The New York Times you haven’t heard from her since and she doesn’t seem to be commenting publicly on the project. What do you make of this?

MO: I have always known that this is my book, not hers. It was very clear from the beginning that while she was going to grant interviews — and I always said, “I will show you a draft and I will want your feedback. You will catch errors.” As she did. “You will see some things that are literally wrong, where I say 1973 and you say, ‘Actually, it was 1974,’ and you save me from an error. And you will have thematic and constructive suggestions around how I frame things, and I will want that feedback, and it will become a better book.” And it did.

I was also always very clear that at the end these would be my decisions and I would not just write the truth as I saw but also focus on the things that I wanted to focus on. This book could have been 2,000 pages long. I mean, it’s a whole life. There’s 130 boxes of her papers in the archives. I spoke to dozens and dozens — ultimately over one hundred people, quite a lot of them on the record.

The focus that I write in my 400 pages might leave out huge things that she would find important. Ultimately I have to think about what I find most telling about her life and what readers will find most interesting. So, it’s not her book to publicize. It’s mine to publicize. It’s my version of her life. And so, I’m not surprised or chagrined that I’m the one talking about it and that she’s not.

She has a very full life. She lives in Key West most of the year, where she and her husband help run a nonprofit bookstore. That’s her work right now. And my work is writing the book. So, all is well.

TH: This book is also interesting in terms of the other people that it pulls into its sphere. Molly Ringwald narrated the audiobook. You’re going to be doing an event with her at the Toronto Reference Library on May 19. We’re all really excited for that. But also, the celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley was pulled into this. She was assigned a book review. It looks like she did it with AI. Tell us about that debacle.

MO: Well, first I have to say — and you as a fellow Gen Xer will appreciate this — how excited I am that Molly Ringwald is playing the part of me in narrating this audiobook. She’s narrating the whole audiobook. I come in at the end to narrate the epilogue, but 95 percent of it is her reading the book. That was my idea. I said to the audiobook division at Random House, “Wouldn’t it be great to get Molly Ringwald,” who has spoken about Judy Blume before and has also narrated several audiobooks before. So, she’s professionally awesome for it. And also so important to my own childhood. I mean, so many of her movies are just seared into my memory. I’ve listened to big chunks of the audiobook and she does a splendid job. So, that’s very exciting for me.

Kitty Kelley — celebrity biographer, in the 80s and 90s wrote biographies of Frank Sinatra, Jackie Onassis and so forth — is in her eighties, living in greater D.C. She wrote a piece about my book for something called The Washington Independent Review of Books, which is a nonprofit book review and more power to them. But the review had all these quotations allegedly from the book that aren’t in the book. In a couple cases, it seems like they were scraped from somewhere on the web.

One of the things that she says Judy said — that I apparently quoted her as saying, but I didn’t — was that “life is not a pile of cupcakes.” I read that and I thought, “I’ve never heard Judy say that. That’s not in my book.” Then you go looking for it, among the places it is on the web is some British astrology website where they say Judy — a famous Cancer or Capricorn, or whatever she is — has said, “Life is not a pile of cupcakes.” So, it seems like somebody or something scraped the web, found some stuff and attributed it to my book and then published it as this book review. I don’t know.

I alerted the editor of The Washington Independent Review of Books, which Kitty Kelley is on the nonprofit board of, so that must be a delicate situation for them. She may help fund the thing for all I know. She is very generous; she has some fellowships to support biographers that she’s funded.

They did change it a lot, but they basically took five or ten incorrect things out of it and stitched it back together, but still left her name at the top. I think if I were them I would have just taken it down because it was so flawed. I don’t hold any hard feelings or grudges. I don’t know if Kitty Kelley used AI, if she had an intern who used AI, if she just got confused and was doing her own web research about Judy on the side. I don’t know. But in some ways it’s a little bit flattering to have been maligned, misappropriated, wrong-footed by the legendary Kitty Kelley.

TH: It’s a good warning for all of us, too, as we dive into this AI world.

MO: Oh my God.

TH: Let’s close on this. I want to ask you this question that you come to at the end of the book: Why Judy? You feel like you hadn’t answered it completely. I feel like you did. I also think you’re going to get even closer to it in your book tour, as you talk through it. So, let’s just spend a minute or two on that. She has sold 80 million books — or more actually. Why has she been [so successful]?

MO: Wait, so you think I answered it?

TH: I do.

MO: Tell me, why do you think that? And then I’ll tell you why I think I failed.

TH: I think it’s a combination of her ability to be so prolific and so steadfast and so hardworking, her empathy and care for the children, her writing talent — but also the way that we’ve talked about, throughout this interview, how she pulled in all the currents historically of the time and absorbed that. I think it’s all of those things combined.

MO: I think those are all perfectly respectable answers that have some truth in them. I would also add that she’s very funny. Even though some of her plotting can seem dated, great literature of course outlasts its own era. We’re still reading Jane Austen. We’re still reading Shakespeare and performing Shakespeare. And so, the books hold up — but in part because they’re very funny, in part because her use of the first-person voice makes you feel like you know her characters really well. From page one, you feel like you know Margaret Simon in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. So, there are certain things I think she does very well.

I think that when I said in the epilogue that I still don’t really know, part of that was my own nod to the mystery of artistic success. Look, there are great actors who never book major parts and give up acting. And then there are some very mediocre actors who become extraordinarily famous. There are great writers who make it, but there are great writers who don’t make it.

I think that for Judy to have succeeded so much has causes that we can put our fingers on, like the ones you mentioned. Her willingness to tour, engage with readers, her own charisma. People know her as a charming public figure. They don’t know what S. E. Hinton or E. L. Konigsburg looks like. I’ve talked to a lot of people who don’t know that S. E. Hinton is female — the woman who wrote The Outsiders and That Was Then, This Is Now, truly great books.

But Judy was public and present and a good saleswoman for her own stuff, and her books were very good. And yet, there are still people who are also really awesome and great salespeople for their own work who don’t sell 100,000 copies or 1,000. And here she is selling tens of millions. So I always, as an artist myself, want to leave room to respect the kind of mystery — the unknowability — of why certain art connects and some art disappears.