Judy Blume Forever
Directed by Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok
Unrated
Runtime: 97 minutes
Streaming on Amazon Prime Video April 21

by Daniel Pecoraro, Contributor

I love Judy Blume. Everybody we meet in Judy Blume Forever loves Judy Blume: childhood friends; legions of authors inspired by her; fans who swing by her bookstore; a shirtless dude on the beach in Key West. This throughline of Blume as an author who has touched millions of young American lives is an indelible part of the DNA of Judy Blume Forever. This project apparently took directors Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok two years and the backing of Ron Howard’s documentary company to convince Blume that a documentary should be made about her.

The film is a largely straightforward chronological look at Blume’s life and career. Born in Elizabeth, NJ, Blume was raised after World War II ended but was still anxious about the horrors of the Holocaust. She met her first husband as a teenager at NYU (while he was a lawyer a few years her senior) and settled into the Jewish New Jersey suburbs. She started writing “bad imitation Dr. Seuss” after her two kids were born, but they were never published. It wasn’t until she pivoted to longer stories for middle-grades kids (fortuitously, just as Bradbury Books was founded to publish such novels) that she had success.

Of course, that success was massive. Tapping into her experience as a young person, she wrote about what she knew young people struggled with: their changing bodies, their sense of identity, the anxieties of the world around them. It’s not easy being a kid, and Blume brought that to the page, blazing a new trail for what children’s literature could be. In the words of author Jason Reynolds, who serves as a talking-head in the film, “her books were so timely that they became timeless.” All this occurred before she turned 37. Then came even more groundbreaking work–over twenty novels in total.

The combination of contemporary interviews with Blume, verite shots at her bookstore, family home movies, and mountains of archival interviews from the ‘70s through the 2000s would have made for a decent enough documentary. (Honestly, a Blume doc solely made up of all the archival footage would be a fascinating document.) The reverence for Blume and her work is a solid keynote, and it’s all well and good. But what makes the film shine are the letters from children to Blume that children wrote to her, which currently fill what seem to be dozens if not hundreds of boxes at the Beinecke Library at Yale (my favorite non-pizza related spot in New Haven). The letters alone would pack a punch; forty years of kids writing to Blume and her responses about their curiosities and fears. Getting to hear from these kids today as adults creates an even greater emotional impact. Lorrie Kim’s story about being a nine-year-old regular correspondent with Blume (and how Blume was essentially her godmother) brought both laughter and tears.

We see that even beneath Blume’s charming smile, there’s been sadness–the sudden death of her father, two divorces, being dismissed with questions like “when are you going to write a real book?”–and anger, particularly directed at the banning of her books, in the Reagan era and today. Pardo and Wolchok do a superb job humanizing Blume while lauding her, and I’m glad that they’ve given Blume the opportunity to hear from fans and friends just how much her life and work has meant to them. Judy Blume Forever, indeed.