Hands Off Those Books!!!
This article first appeared in the Minden Times on May 10, 2023.
Judy Blume at age 85 is having a much-deserved moment in the sun. The new documentary Judy Blume Forever is available on Prime TV, and a movie Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret was released in April. There are interviews all over the place!
Judy Blume has written more than 25 novels which have sold 82 million copies in 32 languages. Prodigious, by any comparison! At age 80, having hung up her pen, she opened a bookstore. Courageous, at any age!
She has two claims to fame: one is that she communicated across the generational gap, the second is that her books have attracted censorship. They are connected. In this ‘woke’ era, there is an escalating battle for the minds of the young.
Blume’s YA books (her work created the genre of Young Adult fiction) tackled forbidden topics like menstruation, masturbation, losing virginity, bullying, death, divorce, sibling rivalry – in short, everything that parents are likely to be squeamish talking about. And everything young people need to figure out as they survive childhood and make the transition to adulthood. Her books allowed children to have private, in-depth conversations with a trusted adult about things that mattered.
Judy Blume says she wrote a) to escape the small world of at-home housewife and mother – she started writing as soon as her two kids got into nursery school -- and b) to talk about the things her mother did not talk about with her, although she was a good mother who encouraged Judy to read whatever she wanted. (Instruction by the written word seemed to have all-family support; in an interview with NYTimes, Judy Blume says ‘My brother gave me a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover just before I left for my honeymoon in 1959. The marriage didn’t last but the honeymoon was memorable.’)
You can see how Judy Blume came to see books as the way around the constrictions of inter-generational discussion of difficult topics. The current challenge in communication may not be prudishness (although maybe), but rather a rising tendency to censorship, imposing the will of the powerful, or those who would wish to be in control of others, over the vulnerable. And certainly in the internet age our youth are vulnerable to misinformation that arguably is crippling. At the same time as we seem paralyzed about disciplining the behemoth corporations that are gobbling up public discourse, books are coming under fire.
I understand this: there is a permanence about books that render them visible and therefore a potential target for those who would control what feeds our minds. Books are accountable for themselves in a way that an ephemeral presence on the internet can never be. The internet may never forget, but it can certainly hide.
There is a push in the USA to take over boards of schools and libraries in order to control what books become available – they say to protect vulnerable children, but I think that is the thin edge of the wedge. Censorship is a sword that beheads broadly, respectful of no one but the person/s who wields it. The Canadian manifestation seems to be push back about Drag Queen Story time.
We should not be complacent, however. I understand there was an unusually robust competition for the citizen roles in our local library board. I don’t know if eager applicants wanted to protect what we have and/or grow it, or to impose their literary opinions. But even if we’re safe locally (which I think and hope we are), there is the power of the provincial purse at play. Doug Ford, as a Toronto City councillor during his brother’s chaotic reign as mayor, tried (unsuccessfully) to close a significant number of libraries. He was proud to say he would close libraries in his ward ‘absolutely…in a heartbeat’. He was also happy to not know who Margaret Atwood was and not deign to talk to her unless she ran in the next election and got elected. A dangerously ignorant man when he has power.
And true to form, he slashed the Ontario Library Services budget by 50% as soon as he became Premier. With trademark duplicity, he said library funding was untouched – because they are funded by the municipality -- but the service that was lost supported the interlibrary loans. A harsh blow that reduced access to books by small and rural libraries.
We may be in no immediate danger of book burnings, but we need to be vigilant. Each of us needs to find the Judy Blume within us who loves books and believes that they are an essential artery in the circulatory system that binds the generations together.
