“People need stories, they want stories. They always will.”
Judy Blume
Evan Agostini / Getty Images
Jami Attenberg
Michael Sharkey
Words I never thought I'd type as a teenager: Judy Blume and I both have novels coming out the same day. Judy Blume, whose seminal young adult novels I grew up on, who everyone grew up on, all the girls and lots of the boys too, across America, around the world. Even today my 10-year-old niece is impressed that I know Judy Blume, even if it's only on Twitter. Because Blume has captured a way to write that transcends time.
And now I have an excuse to talk to her, email with her, because we share something in common, even if it is just one day in our lives. Her new adult novel, In the Unlikely Event, is irresistible, inspired by real life events in the early 1950s when a succession of airplanes crashed over a year period in Judy's hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey. It's a witty, wise, hooky book, about life and death and love, spilling from a multitude of voices. But what Judy and I talked about over email was business. (And, oddly enough, vaginas.)
Posts
Judy Blume On Writing, Twitter, And Vaginas