Ep #60: What Judy Blume Taught Us About Puberty, Friendship, and Life with Rachelle Bergstein

Did you love reading Judy Blume books growing up? Do you still remember reading about the maxipad belt and Are You There Margaret and wondering what the heck she was talking about? Today, we have an amazing interview for you with a great author, Rachelle Bergstein, who’s going to talk to us all about Judy Blume and how she shaped our childhoods. Stay tuned.

Welcome to Parenthood Prep, the only show that helps sleep-deprived parents and overwhelmed parents-to-be successfully navigate those all-important early years with their baby, toddler, and child. If you are ready to provide the best care for your newborn, manage those toddler tantrums, and grow with your child, you’re in the right place. Now here’s your host, baby and parenting expert, Devon Clement. 

Devon Clement: Hello and welcome back to the Parenthood Prep podcast. Today we have another exciting interview. It’s an author, Rachelle Bergstein, who wrote a book called The Genius of Judy, all about New Jersey native Judy Blume.

And I think this is going to be really interesting and exciting because we’re just going to get to talk about some stuff that’s interesting. We’re not trying to teach anybody anything or give anybody, I mean, obviously, teach them information about Judy Blume and her work, but just a little bit more of an entertainment and an interesting topic than like a, here’s how to get your baby potty trained or something like that. And I love this and I’ve been really excited to talk to you because your book just sounds so interesting. So tell me about what inspired it. What made you decide to write a book about Judy Blume?

Rachelle Bergstein: Well, I’ve been a Judy Blume fan my whole life. I have really visceral, vivid memories of reading her books as a kid. And in, I want to say 2021, 2022, I started to notice that Judy Blume’s star was rising again for some reason. Her name was really coming up a lot more in culture. People in their 40s and 50s who had a voice in media were talking about the impact that she had on their lives. And it just started percolating from there. Me and my editor both thought the time was right for a book about Judy Blume. And it seemed like something that would be really fun for me. I have a young child. I thought that it would be great to be able to revisit some of her books with him. So things just sort of fell into place with it.

Devon Clement: That’s awesome. Give me a little bio background about Judy because I know she wrote books in like the 70s and 80s, and I know she’s from New Jersey, but beyond that, I don’t know a ton about her life specifically.

Rachelle Bergstein: Yeah, so Judy Blume is an interesting character. She was raised in the 1950s in Elizabeth, New Jersey. She wasn’t from a particularly literary family. Her dad was a dentist, her mom was a stay-at-home mom. They loved to read, but she didn’t grow up thinking she was going to be a writer. She did love books, but she didn’t think that she was going to write them. 

She was raised with kind of like a very specific mid-century middle-class mentality of like, as a woman, your goal in life is to get married to a good man who can provide and to have children and raise the children. And that’s what she did. She went to NYU for college, but she really didn’t expect to use her degree. Her mom sort of told her it would be like a backup plan if she didn’t get married.

Devon Clement: Sure.

Rachelle Bergstein: So, she was engaged and actually pregnant before she had her degree.

Devon Clement: I was going to say, plus in those days you went to college to meet a husband, right?

Rachelle Bergstein: Right, to get your what they called your MRS degree.

Devon Clement: Your MRS degree. Yeah.

Rachelle Bergstein: So she did that. She found a husband and she got married young and by her mid-20s, she had two kids and she started to feel really disappointed and desperate with her life. Not only emotionally, but she was having a lot of physical symptoms. She was getting weird headaches, rashes, stomach aches that the doctors couldn’t explain. And when her kids started going to school, she started to think back to her childhood and how joyful it had been to have creative outlets. 

So she had been, you know, she had danced, she had taken dance classes, she had done acting in high school, she had edited the school newspaper. And she realized she needed an outlet like that in her adult life. So she started trying to write songs. You know, she was doing, she was trying all sorts of things. She bought a bunch of felt from a craft store and started making felt pendants to hang in the walls of children’s rooms. 

And you know, she tried all of these things, but she landed on writing. And in fact, like once she started writing children’s books, she actually got something in the mail that was a continuing education brochure for NYU, her alma mater. And she saw that they were offering a class called writing for children and young adults. So she signed up, she went every Wednesday, and she just started writing and, you know, the rest is kind of history.

Devon Clement: Wow. So she wasn’t like always wanted to be a writer, that kind of thing. It kind of, oh, so it’s kind of amazing that her books have had such a major cultural impact when she came to it like later in life. But I love that. I love that she got away from that norm of you just raise your kids and then they go to school and then you clean up after your husband until you die.

Rachelle Bergstein: Yeah. I mean, you know, she was a young mother in the late 1960s. So she was finding her voice around the same time that the feminist movement was really becoming more powerful in this country and having more of an influence.

Devon Clement: Sure.

Rachelle Bergstein:  So in my book, I talk a lot about how second-wave feminism ultimately impacted Judy and what she wrote about. And, you know, what she was experiencing, being kind of like unfulfilled in her regular suburban life was something that was becoming a topic of conversation among feminists, you know. Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique about this very issue. It was women who were bored, they felt guilty about being bored. They loved their kids, but they also felt like they needed something else in their life and they couldn’t put their fingers on it. That’s what Judy was going through too.

Devon Clement: Yeah, and to be just right there in that moment, I’m sure influenced a lot of what she was doing and her topics. And in what ways do you think does that really stand out?

Rachelle Bergstein: Well, she wrote about a lot of things that nobody had ever really thought to put in children’s books before. So if you’re familiar with Judy Blume’s work, um, she wrote about regular kids who had kind of like regular thoughts and problems, but some of those thoughts and problems had to do with their bodies. So she wrote about puberty. She wrote about menstruation and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Devon Clement: Oh, I remember that and I read it when I was like a preteen teenager in the 90s and my one standout memory about it was talking about the belt with the Maxipad belt, which at that point we were not using anymore, but I was just like, that’s so interesting. Like, what is that? You know, what is that like? And I do remember when you’d go to the school nurse if you needed pads, which I got my period for the first time at school, and it said on the package like beltless. And I was like, what does that even, how old are these things that they’re from the days where you had to specify if it was for the belt or not.

Rachelle Bergstein: No, what’s so funny is that they actually did update Margaret so that she no longer uses the belt in like contemporary printings of that book.

Devon Clement: Oh, really? Oh, funny.

Rachelle Bergstein: But like you, I had like a hand-me-down copy that was like one of, you know, the originals from the 70s. So she also used the belt in my copy and it was also totally outdated. And I thought it was weird, but it wasn’t weird enough to distract me from the rest of the book. You know, it’s just like, I feel like I had a health teacher at some point who talked about how there used to be belts and I thought, wow, that sounds crazy. You know, but…

Devon Clement: Yeah. I guess my mom had like mentioned it or something, but I just remember it being like I had not read about this or heard about this or seen this anywhere before. And of course not, you know, really anything about periods or anything like that. So it was really just the way that it went so in depth, I think was great. And especially for people in that generation of the 70s and early 80s that just really had no exposure to it.

Rachelle Bergstein: I mean, when Judy Blume was writing about things like puberty, not only did she kind of demystify the process, but she also made it sound really exciting. You know, one of the key ideas in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, is that Margaret and her friends are so excited to go through puberty. They actually feel competitive about it. You know, it’s like a little bit of a horse race, like who’s going to get boobs? Who’s going to get their period first? And, you know, I think kids were really excited to see that kind of stuff reflected in a book. You know, it instantly made them trust her.

Devon Clement: Yeah, for sure. For sure. I actually remember Freckle Juice, right? That’s what it’s called. That was like the first, I think the first like chapter book that I fully just like read cover to cover by myself. Like I’d had it for a while, but I wasn’t like quite at the reading level to read it. And then I just, I don’t know, I just picked it up one day and I like read the whole thing and I was so proud of myself for my reading prowess. 

But yeah, he like draws freckles on his face because he wants them and other kids get to have them and you know, at the time I wasn’t absorbing it as like a major life lesson, but it sticks with you like those things, you know, comparing yourself to others. Who’s going to get boobs, who’s going to get their period first and things like that. So, also, I think her – the like age range of her work is huge because Summer Sisters, of course, is for adults. That was one of my favorite books when that came out. I read it multiple times. 

And then she’s written Freckle Juice, which is for like little kids. Are You There Margaret, which is for in between. Did you feel like that there was a particular phase for each or has she been kind of all over the place? I’m not even sure when they were published. Did she have like a children’s book phase and then kind of grow up with it or was she back and forth?

Rachelle Bergstein: When she started writing, she really started writing for children and like a specific set of children, age eight and up. So she wasn’t really, I mean, she dabbled with picture books, but she didn’t publish picture books, you know. What she was really doing was writing for what we would now call the middle grade reader, but that category didn’t really exist yet.

Devon Clement: Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Rachelle Bergstein: Yeah. So she was writing for kids who like, you know, like we’re describing, were like just starting to really read on their own and, you know, were looking for stories of kids that kind of reflected their experience. So she did a bunch of that in the 1970s and then she wrote Forever in 1975, which is for a slightly older teenage reader. And then she published Wifey, I think in 1978, which was her first book for adults. And Wifey, if you’re familiar, is like a really sexually explicit book.

Devon Clement: You know, when you said that, I was like, I feel like I know that’s a dirty book, but I don’t think I’ve ever read it.

Rachelle Bergstein: I mean, it’s great. It’s super fun. It’s about like a bored housewife who’s unfulfilled in her marriage, like emotionally and sexually, and she starts having affairs and it’s all about like the kind of mess she makes of her life. But when she turned in that manuscript, people at her publisher were really worried about publishing it under her name Judy Blume because Judy had developed such a fan base with young kids and they were like, aren’t you concerned that kids are going to see this book and want to read it or that parents are going to be disappointed in you because you’re not being the role model that you are supposed to be? 

And she was really brave. You know, I actually admire this about her a lot. She said, no, I want to publish under my own name. This is my work and I don’t think kids, if they pick up Wifey, I think very quickly they’ll realize it’s not for them. So yeah, she has a lot of range and she published for little kids, big kids, adults all throughout her career.

Devon Clement: The Fudge series, right? Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. I remember that. That was so meaningful to me when I was in that age range and reading those characters and the like first-person perspective, right? Just really getting inside kids’ heads and not just talking about what they’re doing, but also about what they’re thinking and feeling, which I guess, yeah, up to that point, there wasn’t a ton of that for that age range, right?

Rachelle Bergstein: When she started in the 1960s, one of the biggest writers for children was Beverly Cleary. And Beverly Cleary, she was kind of groundbreaking in…

Devon Clement: The Ramona books, right?

Rachelle Bergstein: Yeah, exactly. She was kind of groundbreaking in her own right in that she wrote realistic fiction. She wrote books about just regular kids. You know, they didn’t have any special powers or anything. Ramona was pretty zany. But Beverly Cleary stuck with this idea that the parents were always right. You know, the kids could get into trouble, they could, you know, do all sorts of wacky things, but the parents were there to sort of guide them and shape them and help them grow up. 

Whereas in Judy Blume’s books, the parents aren’t always right. And sometimes we’re seeing the parents through the kids’ eyes and we’re realizing that the parents like have some growing to do and you know, they make mistakes. And that was really one of Judy’s biggest innovations in the like children’s book world was that, you know, she didn’t believe that parents always knew what they were doing and she was able to reflect that in her work.

Devon Clement: I love that perspective. And as you’re saying it, I’m remembering like snippets from the Ramona books where like, yes, her parents were definitely the authority figures. And in like, yeah, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Super Fudge and stuff like that. They the kids are kind of, yeah, not seeing them be perfect. And I think that’s such an important lesson for parents too. And I’m sure parents are reading these books with their kids, either out loud or just sort of previewing them before the kids are reading them and stuff and realizing like, wow, I see, you know, yeah, I see myself. 

It’s like that show the kids watch now Bluey. Like I think that it’s so interesting that it’s so much about the parents like learning experiences and how they’re making mistakes and learning from them and having that growth. That’s so important. So Wifey was a sexy book. Are you there God? It’s Me, Margaret, talked about periods. She talked about these things. What was the reaction when that was first published to these topics that hadn’t really been in mainstream publishing before?

Rachelle Bergstein: It’s wild. So this was something that I learned like when I started researching this book, which is that at first, when these books came out, like when Margaret published in 1970, when Deenie, which talks about masturbation, published in 1973. The reaction was pretty quiet. You know, some of the reviewers would comment and make a snide remark maybe that it was a little bit too like, I remember one of the words that is used in a review of Deenie is bibliotherapeutic. Like there was comment that she was a little too fixated on bodies maybe, that Judy was bringing too much body stuff into her books. 

But there wasn’t like this uproar and that really came later. It came, it started in the late 1970s with Forever, which showed two high school students falling in love and losing their virginity. And it grew and grew and grew until the early 80s when, you know, a conservative movement really found a lot of purchase in this country and she became a target.

Devon Clement: Yeah, she her books were like super banned for a long time, right? And maybe still are, which I’m sure is also why it’s becoming relevant now with all the conversation about increased censorship and conservatism and things like that. And she’s still alive, right?

Rachelle Bergstein: She’s still alive. She’s in her late 80s. She published her last book in 2015 and she was pretty clear that was her last one.

 Devon Clement: Yeah.

Rachelle Bergstein: But she owns a bookstore in Key West. She still is very vocal when it comes to speaking out against censorship. And yeah, she’s really, you know, a pioneer in her field and she’s someone that rightfully is kind of like earned her spot as a living legend.

Devon Clement: Absolutely. Absolutely. Did you meet with her to when you were researching the book?

Rachelle Bergstein: I didn’t. I didn’t. She was not able to, but her archives are at the Yale library. So I spent a lot of time reading through her archives, you know, reading every interview she’s ever done, watching her TV interviews. And she did fact check the book.

Devon Clement: Oh, okay. So you feel like you know her and she was involved in the process. I love that. That’s so cool. And she’s she’s in Key West, which why not? Live your twilight years there. That sounds amazing.

Rachelle Bergstein: 100%.

Devon Clement: I love that. She owns a bookstore. That’s so cool. What was her reaction at the time to the sort of backlash that came later with her books that had been released earlier? What you were just saying how there was like a growing conservative movement in the 80s and her books ended up getting banned. Did she write more sensational stuff or did she kind of pull back or?

Rachelle Bergstein: She was really stunned at first. She was really taken off guard. You know, she was quite famous as a children’s book writer by the time that her book started getting banned and she really did not expect it. And I think it had a really devastating impact for a little while. You know, she was she’d gone from someone who children were celebrating, they were writing to her, telling her how much her books meant to them. 

And then all of a sudden people in the media were saying that she was, you know, a pornographer, that she was writing sexually inappropriate books for children. You know, I mean, these are pretty serious words and I think she felt them very deeply. But she did ultimately get involved with an organization that’s an offshoot of the NCLU. It’s still exists. It’s called the National Coalition Against Censorship and she started fighting back and you know, they gave her a toolkit to do so and I think ultimately she didn’t set out to be an activist, but she became one.

Devon Clement: Yeah, absolutely. And so funny because at first she’s like this pioneer of feminism and now she’s a pioneer of like anti-censorship all just because of kind of the timing of when she was alive and when she was doing things like probably not even not even intentionally, but that’s so great. So, the women’s movement and stuff is so interesting. And I remember reading about that Betty Friedan was talking about the married woman. And that was actually kind of a, I mean, it was it was very pioneering, but it also kind of kept out like single women or women who didn’t want to get married. And then you had like Gloria Steinem coming in later with that. But, you know, every role in society is important and women in all kinds of positions are important. So what was that about for Judy, like being a part of that movement?

Rachelle Bergstein: She wasn’t an activist in the sense that she wasn’t marching down Fifth Avenue.

Devon Clement: Sure.

Rachelle Bergstein: You know, she was absorbing what she was seeing in the culture, which was news footage of women marching down Fifth Avenue, which was, you know, Time magazine covers, which was feminists like Susan Brownmiller on the Dick Cavett show talking about whether or not Playboy is good for women. You know, so it was really a big part of the culture. And everyone was having these debates. 

So my thesis is that Judy was sort of absorbing all of this in real time and she was training the next generation of feminists by showing them what options were available to them in their books. You know, the idea of bodily autonomy was a really big deal in second-wave feminism and then you have Judy Blume writing about puberty in an empowering way and writing about sex in an empowering way for girls and really showing girls that there were other choices than what she had when she was a kid growing up in the 1950s. Yeah, I think that she was incredibly meaningful to the feminist movement in this country and kind of unheralded.

Devon Clement: That’s really interesting. So what was your favorite thing in like researching and writing the book? What was something like unexpected that surprised you in a good way?

Rachelle Bergstein: It was very exciting to me to learn that she wasn’t like a natural straight away. Like, you know, she worked for it. And growing up, I grew up in the 80s. Judy Blume was always a thing and I never really thought to ask like who was she before she started writing and was it a struggle? And it was. And in fact, like she got a lot of really bad reviews. A lot of critics didn’t like her work. They thought that she was overly simple. They thought, like I said, she was obsessed with bodies in a way that wasn’t like, it wasn’t important work. She was accused of writing junk food for kids. Like they’d be better off reading Wuthering Heights or Little House on the Prairie or something.

Devon Clement: Yeah.

Rachelle Bergstein: So even though kids loved her, adults didn’t really warm to her. And it was actually not until she started getting banned more and more frequently and her name was put in conversation with people like Solzhenitsyn and Shakespeare and Mark Twain that I think people started kind of like looking again at her work and saying like, wow, she must be doing something really important for to be making people so angry, you know?

Devon Clement: Yeah. Oh, that’s such an interesting perspective. So when it first came out, it wasn’t necessarily celebrated or praised by anyone but the children who were enjoying it and that the critics and stuff maybe thought it was less positive and educational. That’s so interesting. I’m just remembering back to like reading books when I was a kid and yeah, just loving those and knowing it as a household name, like you said in the 80s and early 90s, it was just like, oh yes, Judy Blume, great author, famous author, like whatever, but she was ahead of her time. What about her children? What did they think of her like becoming a writer and do you think it influenced their lives and how they made choices and like did things?

Rachelle Bergstein: I’m sure it did. I mean, her older child is a daughter named Randy and Randy was like her go-to editor, which I really love too. So Randy was like the age of the children who Judy was writing for and Randy would read her manuscripts and would weigh in ways that are really cool. Like she would say like, you know, no one in school would say this. Like this is not a word a child would use. And so she would kind of like give her mom feedback.

Devon Clement: Oh, I love that. That’s so fun.

Rachelle Bergstein: Yeah. One of the reasons that Judy Blume wrote Forever in the first place is because Randy as a 12, 13-year-old girl was reading all of these books that were popular with kids her age. And they all had a really specific message, which is that if you were a girl who had sex before marriage and you were a teenager, is like something horrible was going to happen to you. You were going to get an STD, you were going to die, you were going to have an abortion and your life was going to be ruined. And like book after book after book dramatized this experience and made it seem so awful. And Randy actually said to her mom, like, could you please write a book where teenagers have sex and nobody dies?

Devon Clement: Wow.

Rachelle Bergstein: Yeah. So, you know, her children definitely had impact on her writing. Her son Larry inspired Fudge. I guess Larry was a very crazy toddler.

Devon Clement: I believe it.

Rachelle Bergstein: You know, that gave her the idea to write this like maniac character who’s so funny to children. But you know, I did read some articles and it’s so interesting because I thought about this a lot. I did read some articles where you can feel that like maybe for teenagers having Judy Blume as a mom was like kind of a mixed blessing. You know, like she was everybody’s mom. All these kids in the country were like lionizing her and wishing that she was their mom and meanwhile, you know, those who were actually being parented by her knew she was human and she made mistakes. So again, it’s this question of like, inevitably we make mistakes as parents and they knew that better than anyone.

Devon Clement: Sure. I could also see like your mom writing some pretty graphic sex scenes into adult books, feeling a little awkward for you.

Rachelle Bergstein: I wonder. I wonder if like that was something that they were teased about. I actually don’t know.

Devon Clement: Yeah. Oh, that’s funny. But I mean, yeah, it makes sense. What about Summer Sisters? I just love that one so much. How does that sort of play in with her? And I remember thinking like, oh, Judy Blume was somebody who wrote books like a long time ago and now this is like a new book that she’s written. And I’m sure she was like writing throughout, but it felt, I guess because I read it contemporararily when it first came out and not when it, you know, had been out for years or whatever. Did that signal any kind of like a change in her style or her tone or?

Rachelle Bergstein: It’s such a great book. You know, I don’t know that it signals a change in her style, but I think like something that she was always very good at and interested in her books for younger people were the dynamics of female friendships, right? And that was one of the things that drew me to her books as a kid. It was like she really understood how complex friendships between girls could be. 

And so when she takes on Summer Sisters, which is a book for adults, she kind of follows that girlhood friendship where you’re kind of like mutually obsessed with each other, but also competitive. And she follows it into adulthood, right? So like, where does that kind of relationship go when you become very intense friends at 11, 12 years old, you know, what happens when you become adult and you make really different choices. So I think that book is like such a beautiful continuation of some of the things that occupied her as a writer when she was younger. Yeah, it is a really great book.

Devon Clement: Yeah. Oh, that’s such a good word, continuation, because it really, I mean, there are even adolescents in the book. So it sort of takes that time and then says, okay, now all my readers are older and have gone through this period and what are you going through now and what is that like for you? And it is, it’s just a good book. I want to read it again now that we’re talking about it.

Rachelle Bergstein: Right? I know, me too. I mean, like think about, you know, I have had girlfriends since I was high school, in high school and that I’m still friends with and like so much changes. Your life changes and you really have to like work to stay friends and to understand each other’s choices. And you know, I think Judy really got that in that book.

Devon Clement: Yeah, for sure. Did she ever talk about any of her like meaningful friendships?

Rachelle Bergstein: She does have lifelong friends. Like I know that she does have friends from like high school that she’s still really close to. So she is a person that has held on to her friendships. And I’ve met people over the years promoting this book who have like, “Oh, I’ve known Judy Bloom, you know, since the 70s,” right? So she seems like someone who’s really good at keeping in touch with people.

Devon Clement: That is important.

Rachelle Bergstein: Yeah.

Devon Clement: That is great. So you kind of talked about what interested you in this topic. What has it gotten you thinking about like researching this and writing this book? Like where are you going from here?

Rachelle Bergstein: You know, this book was a lot about the feminist movement. I mean, it was about Judy Blume, but it was about her cultural impact, which to me had a lot to do with the feminist movement. So I revisited a lot of second-wave feminist texts for this book.

Devon Clement: And just, sorry, just for a second, can you just like, because I always get the waves mixed up. Can you just give the listeners a quick overview of what second-wave feminism is and what was like happening at the time?

Rachelle Bergstein: Yes. So okay, so when we say first-wave feminism, we’re talking about the suffragists. So these are the women in the early 1900s who are campaigning for the vote. You know, when we think of like an Elizabeth Cady Stanton, right? They want women to get the vote and they accomplish that. And then the feminist movement kind of quieted. And it comes back with a vengeance in the 1960s in the US. 

And these are women who are saying, you know, women are bored at home. They need more from their lives than just raising children and making good dinners. They also need legal entitlements that they’re not getting. You know, the divorce rate is skyrocketing and women are leaving their marriages and becoming destitute because their husbands were the ones who had the jobs and the pensions and things.

Devon Clement: Well, and women weren’t even allowed to have a bank account by themselves or a credit card by themselves, right? Until like the 60s and 70s.

Rachelle Bergstein: You couldn’t take out your own credit card until the early 1970s, which is crazy to think about now.

Devon Clement: Crazy.

Rachelle Bergstein: And of course, you know, they were campaigning for things that we’re still talking about. Like the Equal Rights Amendment didn’t pass. You know, they were very pro-choice, they were pro-universal childcare. These are still conversations that we’re having now.

Devon Clement: Yeah. Oh, and this is where I guess around Roe v. Wade initially.

Rachelle Bergstein: Mm-hmm.

Devon Clement: Okay. So yeah, so that and, you know, in that interim time where you said it kind of quieted down. I mean, of course there were wars, there was the rise of the suburbs and this baby boom of families. So of course then it makes sense that these women who were now like living these suburban lives would have these issues and these concerns and start wanting more. So second-wave feminism, we’re talking like 60s-ish. We talked about like Betty Friedan and like married women coming into a little bit more of like single women, pro-choice, that kind of stuff. So it sort of reinvigorated your interest in this in this area.

Rachelle Bergstein: Yes. So where I’m going from here or where I’m like reading from here right now is I’m very interested in what happened in the feminist movement in the 80s and 90s because it started cannibalizing itself a little bit. There were really strong opinions and really divided strains of thought that I’m just I’m interested in all of that. So I don’t know exactly where I’m going with it yet, but that’s like the world I’ve been hanging out in.

Devon Clement: Yeah. Oh, I love that. And I think it’s, you know, obviously history is still relevant today. It repeats itself. So the more we educate and learn about the past, the easier it is to like move forward into the future. I remember, I feel like I remember in Summer Sisters, there was maybe some like queer themes. One of the characters was having some like lesbian relationships and was that something that Judy instilled in a lot of her work? I mean, obviously the children’s stuff, it’s not going to be as relevant, but do you think that was something that just came out later?

Rachelle Bergstein: She does write about a couple of things that were sort of cutting edge at the time. So she writes about disability in this really like…

Devon Clement: Oh yeah.

Rachelle Bergstein: Kind and like curious way. She writes about same-sex relationships like in Forever, one of the friends is exploring his sexuality and realizing he’s gay and sort of like grappling with that.

Devon Clement: I haven’t read Forever. I should.

Rachelle Bergstein: Yeah, you should. I mean, there’s actually a TV show coming out this week and…

Devon Clement: Oh, perfect time.

Rachelle Bergstein: Yeah, it’s updated, but it’s good. I’ve gotten to preview some of it. But in Summer Sisters, the two girls, they kind of like experiment sexually with each other as, you know, adolescents. And then they don’t grow up to be lesbians. It’s just something that they try. And Judy Bloom has said in interviews that she did that with her friends. So I think that was coming from her personal experience, just like another thing that she felt was kind of normal, but no one had ever written about.

Devon Clement: Yeah. And I guess that’s kind of the running theme, like normalizing stuff that’s going on from questioning your sexuality in the 70s and 80s to getting your first period to having a little brother that’s kind of a nightmare and ruining your life.

Rachelle Bergstein: Totally.

Devon Clement: Just all these things that are going on behind the scenes that we’re now talking about and I mean, I think one of the beauties of the internet, there’s a lot of a lot of downsides, but one of the beautiful things is just seeing other people going through these same experiences, even something so simple as a tweet that’s like, oh, I don’t want to go to bed at night, but I have such a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. And you’re just like, yes, me too. Okay, I’m normal. I’m normal. This is fine. Like just these normal human experiences that she’s talking about and just bringing them into the public consciousness for people and saying this is what we’re doing. I love that.

Rachelle Bergstein: Completely. And when you think about when she was writing, you know, the peak of her publishing was the 70s and 80s, you know, there wasn’t the internet, right? So like you didn’t have TikTok to Google something and say like, is this normal, you know, and are people talking about this, right? You had a Judy Bloom book. So I think, yeah, like her value can’t really be understated.

Devon Clement: 100%. And I mean, I was fortunate to have parents that were very open with me and talked about things with me and we had, you know, pads in the house for – but my mom, you know, tells the story of when she got her first period, she like thought she was dying. She had no idea what was happening. She’d never heard anything about it. Nobody had talked to her about it. She didn’t have classes in school. And obviously that was like older. That was like the 50s and stuff, but or 60s, I guess. But yeah, like just shortly after that, books are coming out talking about it so that girls are aware of what’s going to happen to them.

Rachelle Bergstein: Yeah. And if you did have classes in school, sometimes depending on where you were, they were actually kind of intentionally confusing. So I did write a lot about the history of sex ed in this country in this book. And I spoke to someone who said, you know, this idea of the birds and the bees, that came from the idea that sex ed was taught through nature. So no one wanted to really talk about the actual mechanics of sex in schools. 

So they would talk about how babies were made if you were a cow or you know, and it doesn’t necessarily a certain kind of child can’t really translate that in their mind, you know, like it’s not it’s like intentionally confusing like I said. So, you know, even if you did get sex ed, it wasn’t necessarily really like helpful.

Devon Clement: Sure. I mean, I know that a lot of people prior to that because I, you know, I see this with people becoming parents. They often have not ever like seen a little baby before. They’ve never held a newborn. Even if you’ve seen like a three-month old or a six-month old, you don’t know what it’s like having a newborn. And I’m going to just digress for a minute, but I’m coming back. So just not living these experiences. 

And I think obviously more people prior to that time lived on farms or just lived more closer to nature and said like, oh, I’m learning about sex because I watch cows and horses and dogs and sheep doing it. So that must be like kind of similar. But if you’re a kid in the suburbs or in the city and they’re telling you about how cows have sex and you’ve never like it’s just so disconnected for you.

Rachelle Bergstein: Totally.

Devon Clement: Just like people not being around, you know, back in the olden days, you your mom had like 10 kids after you, or you’re the youngest and your sister’s having kids and she’s living next door in the next apartment over and you’re seeing her kids all the time. And now we’re just like not living like that anymore. So we’re not getting those experiences. Maybe Judy Blume will come out of retirement and write a book about having a newborn and what that’s like.

Rachelle Bergstein: I think you’re totally right. I really do. I mean, I’m trying to think like, I do have much younger sisters, so I had been around a newborn, but even then, like, you know, when you have one for yourself, it’s just a totally different experience.

Devon Clement: It’s so different.

Rachelle Bergstein: I remember my husband and I brought my son home and we, you know, he was in the little carrier from the hospital. We were like, who sent us home with this baby? Like, what are we supposed to do now?

Devon Clement: I hear that a lot. I hear that a lot. And of course, I’m, you know, in the newborn care field, so I have a lot of experience, but my partner and I bought a house last year and we joke all the time. We’re like, who let us have this house? Like, who gave us permission to like, oh, we don’t know how to deal with a house. We don’t know how to fix things. We don’t know like just dumb stuff that I’m like, I don’t know this. I have rented apartments my whole adult life.

Rachelle Bergstein: Exactly. Yes.

Devon Clement: I don’t know what to do. Oh, like we bought the house in March and I guess it kind of had it in the back of my mind that we had to think about like mowing the lawn. And then like April, May, all of a sudden the grass got really tall. And I was like, oh, I guess I have to get someone to mow the lawn because I don’t know how to do that.

Rachelle Bergstein: Right. I know.

Devon Clement: And that happens with kids and it happens with your body too.

Rachelle Bergstein: 100%.

Devon Clement: You’re just like, oh, crap, I have to I have to deal with that. How has it informed like your work with Judy Bloom or things you’ve learned from Judy Bloom? How has that informed your life as an author or even as a as a parent or?

Rachelle Bergstein: I really admire her bravery and it makes me want to continue to take risks in my work. You know, even just speaking about Judy’s work in public, which I’ve done, you know, you have to find comfort with talking about the things that she wrote about. And I gave, you know, I give a talk where I read from Deenie and talk from the perspective of the health teacher who’s saying the word masturbation. And I gave this talk to 200 people in Georgia and I was laughing. I was like, don’t arrest me. You know.

Devon Clement: Yeah, right.

Rachelle Bergstein: I’m just reading what she wrote. But yeah, I mean, I’m very inspired by her bravery and I’m very inspired by the people who take risks in their work and, you know, consequences be damned. Like that’s your art. So it makes me want to experiment and use my voice.

Devon Clement: I love that. I love that. It also kind of bums me out that we’re like still, not even still, like again dealing with this regressiveness in sex ed and body autonomy and all these things that are like, we made so much progress with them and now they’re being pulled back and kids are going to be turning to Judy Blume again to find out about periods because they’re not going to learn about it in school anymore and things like that. I think that it’s nice that we’re sort of educating, at least trying to educate everyone a little bit more though. Like I remember the day, you know, the day that they separate the boys and the girls and they talk to the girls about periods. Like boys should be learning about that too. You know, they should know about it.

Rachelle Bergstein: Totally.

Devon Clement: I joke because all of my guy friends can juggle. They just can. You like, I started trying to learn and like any guy that was around would just be like, oh yeah, juggling. I was like, is this what they taught you when they taught us about periods.

Rachelle Bergstein: You know, my husband can also juggle.

Devon Clement: I think that’s what they do and they’re just not telling us.

Rachelle Bergstein: That would be amazing. There’s like a secret juggling class. I’m going to – I have a son. I’m going to ask him, like, when is the secret class?

Devon Clement: Well, maybe he’s learning about periods now, hopefully, because I think everybody should learn about it. But when they separated us to teach us about periods, I think they taught the boys how to juggle.

Rachelle Bergstein: That’s so funny. I think you’re on to something.

Devon Clement: Okay. Let’s leave everybody with like a main takeaway about Judy Blume and what we can learn from her life or her writing or whatever.

Rachelle Bergstein: It’s two things. So I think I feel like she’s very inspiring if you want to take a chance on something. You know, I think like Judy’s career, she took a lot of leaps of faith and it really paid off for her. And I think we could all learn a thing or two from that.

Devon Clement: I love that. Especially, I feel like nowadays there’s so much push to like figure out your career when you’re in high school so you can major in the right thing in college and then like, whatever, become a writer in your 30s. Who cares?

Rachelle Bergstein: Who cares? Try it. You know, dip a toe in it. And then also, you know, she, and this is another way that she has inspired me. You know, like I said, she became a real fighter against censorship and I really feel that very deeply. I really feel like we need to let the kids read what they want to read and that books are not harmful. So I like to say, let the kids read. They will ask the right questions. Be prepared to talk to them about what they’re reading. It’s so much better for them to learn from a book than it is for them to Google something because who the hell knows what they’re going to find.

Devon Clement: Yes. Oh my God, 100% or watch videos on YouTube and go down that rabbit hole of absolute chaos. Yeah, I love that. I was a very unsupervised reader when I was young and I read, I read everything. Like, maybe I read a few things that were not entirely appropriate for my age, but 95% of it improved my life and taught me and, you know, I learned things from and, you know, sometimes the takeaway is, ooh, I don’t want to do that.

Rachelle Bergstein: Totally.

Devon Clement: That’s also good.

Rachelle Bergstein: Totally. This is like a deep cut, but I used to read these Christopher Pike books that were kind of like sexy horror books.

Devon Clement: Oh yeah. Yes.

Rachelle Bergstein: And I loved them, you know, and I wasn’t thinking I’m going to go do this stuff. Right? They were just pure entertainment and they had me reading and kids reading is a good thing.

Devon Clement: Absolutely. Absolutely. Oh God, I remember those and some of them were like very good and some of them were so scary that I was like, oh my God, I can’t.

Rachelle Bergstein: They were so scary. They were so trashy, but they were so entertaining.

Devon Clement: Yes. I remember, so I was very big into the Sweet Valley Twins when I was like eight, nine. They were like middle school age. That was good for me. I got a little bit into Sweet Valley High, but that was like sort of older than my age and also like before my time, so I didn’t really find it super relatable. But anyway, I had I had a bunch of them. And my mother happened to pick one up one day and read like the one like sex scene or kissing scene or whatever.

Rachelle Bergstein: Because they always do. That’s what the page falls open to.

Devon Clement: Yeah, that’s what the page falls open to. And so then she was like, I don’t think you should be reading these. These, just these. That was the only supervision I had. She was like, it’s going to you’re going to need to wait a few years before you can read Sweet Valley High. And I was like, okay, that’s fine. I don’t not that into them anyway.

Rachelle Bergstein: I was a Babysitter’s Club girl. I read every Babysitter’s Club book.

Devon Clement: Oh, same. I actually, I don’t know how many details you know about my business, but literally I have a babysitter’s club.

Rachelle Bergstein: Oh, so great.

Devon Clement: We do. I have a team. We specialize in newborn care, but we have a team. Parents call us, they want support. I put it out to the team, see who can do it. They go. I mean, I was very inspired by that. That was very – and it’s not like I went into it saying I want to have my own babysitter’s club, but eventually I was like, wait a minute. What have I done here? I’ve started a babysitter’s club.

Rachelle Bergstein: So you are Christie. You are Christie Thomas. You’re living the dream.

Devon Clement: I am, which is weird because I feel like I’m much more of a Dawn, but you know, a Dawn who’s aspiring to be a Stacy, but…

Rachelle Bergstein: See, I was a Mary Ann who was aspiring to be a Stacy.

Devon Clement: Yeah, see, she just was the pinnacle. I mean, moved moving to New York City, having like the cool fashion.

Rachelle Bergstein: Totally. Yeah.

Devon Clement: No, Dawn was like the chill laid back, like California, like, yeah, whatever. Christie, you know, wore a lot of turtlenecks and like sweats. So yeah, that’s not really my vibe. And I wonder if this is something we haven’t talked about, but there was such an explosion of like books for that middle grade age when we were kids. And I wonder if Judy Blume was part of like the kickoff for that.

Rachelle Bergstein: 100%. I think that she helped the publishing world realize what an incredible economic opportunity there was in kids that age. You know, like Babysitter’s Club books didn’t come out in hard cover, right? They were meant for kids to buy for themselves or for parents to buy for their kids as a treat, like candy, you know. 

I remember my dad would take me to the bookstore on Saturdays and we would buy a new Babysitter’s Club book and I would read it through the weekend and it wasn’t literature. Nobody thought it was literature, but it was entertaining. It kept me busy and I loved these characters. And they were actually, I mean, when you talk about the Babysitter’s Club, they were pretty good role models to be honest.

Devon Clement: Oh, absolutely. Did you watch the show on Netflix?

Rachelle Bergstein: I did.

Devon Clement: I can’t believe it got canceled. It was so good and I just feel like so contemporary, even though the – like so emotionally healthy and I was just so sad that it didn’t last very long because it was it was wonderful.

Rachelle Bergstein: I totally agree. I still kind of want to watch it with my son. I think he would like it. And the fact that Alicia Silverstone was the mom, I mean, how cool is that as our like Clueless girl, you know, she grew up and now she’s the mom.

Devon Clement: Yes. Oh my God, amazing. When I saw that, I was like, yep, that makes sense. That’s right. That timing works. Yeah. And I love that because that’s such an age to read. Like I said, Freckle Juice, like, I don’t know, I was six or something. I was like, I’m going to read this whole thing. And then I just never stopped. That was it.

Rachelle Bergstein: Totally. Yeah.

Devon Clement: I was in the parking lot of a restaurant a couple years ago and I saw this girl, little girl, like eight or nine, holding a book with her parents like on either side of her, kind of like keeping her from getting hit by cars because she just would not take her nose out of the book. And I was like, oh, that’s me. And it was so nice to see that, I mean, whatever, we can rant about technology and phones and this and that, but I was like, it’s not a phone, it’s not an iPad, it’s a book. It’s like a good old fashioned. Maybe it was a Judy Bloom, you know, who knows?

Rachelle Bergstein: Who knows? Yeah, we got my son a Kindle, so it’s like a little bit of the best of both worlds.

Devon Clement: Oh, I love that. No, I love my Kindle too.

Rachelle Bergstein: You know, he’s like, it’s a screen, so it’s cool.

Devon Clement: Yeah. Well, I just love that you can pack a thousand books into one little thing and you don’t have to lug around these like big heavy, you know, I was a big library book person, so I had all these like big heavy hard covers. I was like driving around with my car, carrying like a huge bag to fit it in. Now it’s like little thing slides in my purse. It’s great.

Rachelle Bergstein: I know. It’s pretty awesome.

Devon Clement: What have you read recently that you loved?

Rachelle Bergstein: I read All Fours. I loved All Fours.

Devon Clement: Oh, somebody recommended that to me. It’s on my list. I will uh I will bump it up.

Rachelle Bergstein: It’s bizarre. It’s totally, I mean, it’s really weird and the character’s very offbeat, but she really – she strikes at something I think really true about being like a 40-something mom.

Devon Clement: Okay. I love that. Yeah. I love that. Finding it relatable. I read Bright Young Women.

Rachelle Bergstein: Mm, was that good?

Devon Clement: That was amazing. I read it like a year, maybe over a year ago, and it’s like my favorite thing I’ve read. And I’ve read some good stuff in between, but that has just really stuck out for me. So when people ask for recommendations, I’m like, Bright Young Women.

Rachelle Bergstein: I have picked up that book in bookstores and almost bought it like three or four times. So now hearing that, it makes me want to actually just do it.

Devon Clement: It’s stunning. And you know, a lot of it takes place in the same time period that we’ve been talking about and yeah, it’s really, it’s really great. So. Rachelle, thank you so much. This is so interesting. You know, of course, I haven’t thought about Judy Bloom in years. And now I want to go back and read Forever and Deenie and Wifey and all those good ones. Maybe she pioneered all the fairy smut and things that people are loving nowadays.

Rachelle Bergstein: I don’t know who pioneered the fairy smut, but good on them.

Devon Clement: Getting that those graphic scenes in the books. I mean, Judy Bloom started it, right?

Rachelle Bergstein: Totally. Well, enjoy your deep dive down into Judy Bloom world. And thank you so much for this conversation. It was really great.

Devon Clement: Thank you. And just remind us again, it’s The Genius of Judy.

Rachelle Bergstein: How Judy Bloom Rewrote Childhood for All of Us.

Devon Clement: Oh, I love that. I love that. And I think our listeners are going to love digging into it. Thank you so much.

—

To be sure you never miss an episode, be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast app. We’d also love to connect with you on social media. You can find us on Instagram @happyfamilyafter or at our website HappyFamilyAfter.com. On our website you can also leave us a voicemail with any questions or thoughts you might have, and you can roast your baby. Talk to you soon.

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Parenthood Prep. If you want to learn more about the services Devon offers, as well as access her free monthly newborn care webinars, head on over to www.HappyFamilyAfter.com.