Judy Blume + directors Leah Wolchok and Davina Pardo, JUDY BLUME FOREVER (film)

[1:39]Zibby Owens: I'm Zibby Owens, and you're listening to moms don't have time to read books. This thirty minute podcast features a new author interviewed by me every single day, 365 a year for about thirty minutes. I am also the publisher for Zippy Books, which publishes 12 books a year in fiction and memoir. Our books are already out now. You can check it out on zippybooks.com. And we have a magazine called Zippy Mag where we have lots of wonderful essays and lifestyle features. That's at zippymag.com. We have classes at zippyclasses.com. And I recently opened a bookstore in LA called Zibby's Bookshop at 1113 Montana Avenue at 11th Street in Santa Monica. I hope that you are able to enjoy some of our other offerings, but this here podcast is the basis of all of it and started in 2018, and no matter what I do, this is basically my favorite thing. Enjoy. Hi. This is part two of the Judy Blum special. You may have already listened to my interviews, short but sweet, with Judy Blum and Rachel McAdams and Abby Ryder Fortun, the stars of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. Judy, of course, wrote the book, and Kelly Freeman Craig adapted it. Now we have another movie coming out also about Judy Blum. This is a documentary, which is amazing, called Judy Blum Forever. So for this one, I got to interview Judy Blum again, which is wonderful, and the creators of this documentary, Leah Wolchak and Davina Pardo. They are the producers and creators of the documentary, and you will hear their whole story when we all talk. Please enjoy this episode. Listen to the other one as well. Go see Judy Blum for ever. It is so good. You will learn so much. I also wrote an essay about it for Zippy Mag. So if you go to zippymag.com, you can find it or search Judy Blum and read why I love this documentary so, so, so much. Enjoy. Hi again, Sabine. Hello again.

[3:42]Judy Blume: Hi.

[3:43]Zibby Owens: We didn't get much time with you the other day either. I know. This is so crazy. I wanted to interview you my whole life. And now in like two days, we get a total ten minutes. So thank you so much for the time. And I can't wait to talk to you ladies about the film and everything. Congratulations on the documentary, the movie. Had my girls watch with me. We're all obsessed. Everything is amazing. So, I could not be more of a fan as you hear all the time. And you're a sister bookseller. And a sister bookseller. Yes. How do you like running your bookstore? In this documentary, you said you were ready to just get away from the typewriter for a minute and just like get out there and like be out in the world. I love that moment. And so you're in the store interacting. Tell me what it's like for you. I love it. I love it. I mean, I liked it better

[4:30]Judy Blume: when it wasn't a tourist stop, you know. I liked it better when they didn't know that I was going to be there. I liked just being there. Now it's a little bit harder, and I'm not sure what I'm going to find when I get back. But I love the work. I mean, I love arranging books and I like the creative side of it. I like helping people find the right books.

[4:57]Zibby Owens: I like it. Well, if you get too high profile in Key West, you can just hide out in my bookstore in Santa Monica. So you know. I

[5:06]Judy Blume: was hoping to get there this trip, but I don't think it's going to happen. Oh, well,

[5:11]Zibby Owens: next time. Next time. I also loved in the film how you talked about your third marriage and falling in love again at a certain age and finding your partner who I see I think behind you. Yes.

[5:26]Judy Blume: I see

[5:28]Zibby Owens: see Hi.

[5:30]Judy Blume: Yes. Forty

[5:31]Zibby Owens: three years. Yes. And I just was wondering if we could talk about that, what you said in the film about thinking that maybe just love wouldn't be in the cards for you because I think people can relate to that. And yet next thing you know, life changes. Right,

[5:46]Judy Blume: right. As my kids say, you took so many risks doing that. How did you do that? And that, you know, it was a different time. It was the late seventies and it was trying things out and it just worked from the beginning, but we didn't know that it would. And so we both took a chance, you know, but we were willing to take that chance.

[6:11]Zibby Owens: And that's very emblematic of life itself. Right? If we don't take these risks, who knows? Who knows what might happen? How do you feel now with sort of your life on display in every which way? The documentary and the movie and now the resurgence to come of all of the books and all of it? Like, how are you feeling just going about your day to day life and making coffee or whatever?

[6:32]Judy Blume: I don't I I mean, you can't really think about it because, it's not something that you can focus on except to count how many more days before I get home

[6:45]Leah Wolchok: and go

[6:46]Judy Blume: back to real life. I think George is really counting the days So we get back. This has been, you know, it's been hard and exhausting, but also very rewarding and very uplifting.

[7:05]Zibby Owens: That's amazing. Well, I am sure I must have written to you because I wrote to authors all the time. And I was thinking when I watched your documentary, I bet that my letters and so many other girls who grew up to be authors are mixed in at the Yale University archive. I just it must be so interesting to dig through and see whose letters are in there.

[7:28]Judy Blume: I think so. I mean, right now I have a biographer. And so he is spending all of his time at the Beinecke Library at Yale with the boxes and the boxes. And he sometimes, he'll send me an email and say, I'd like to contact this person who wrote to you and somebody who maybe is famous now. And I'm like, really? Person wrote to me as a child. Wow. So, I mean, it's exciting, just like Leah and Devina, we're able to find so much. I don't know if I told you this the other day. I don't keep things. I'm terrible. I throw everything out. And the fact that I kept all the letters, always, I never let a letter go, must say something. Yeah. So I'm so, so grateful that I was wise enough to keep those letters.

[8:25]Zibby Owens: Yes. Good call. Very good call.

[8:28]Judy Blume: Because the family movies disappeared, so they couldn't use the family movies. Endless movies of me trying to do cartwheels, nine on the beach. Yes. But they disappeared

[8:42]Zibby Owens: somewhere. Of the whole documentary, the part that I couldn't stop thinking about is that you were right there when your father passed away, and he was saying what terrible timing. Because what when is ever a good time for any of us to die? Just Never.

[8:59]Judy Blume: When is because my wedding was coming?

[9:01]Zibby Owens: Yeah. He said, what terrible timing. How did it feel for you to watch that and to have to go back into it, but then also watch yourself talking about it?

[9:11]Judy Blume: It's very hard. It was hard, but it was cathartic in some ways. It's an experience that I had. And I think it colors your whole life. You never get over it in some way, you know, it's always there with you, but you move on. And my father would he would love all this. He would just love it. Know, he would have loved having grandchildren. He would have been a great grandparent. And he was so young. He was 54 years old. You know, all of our three children, George and mine, they're all beyond that age now. And when I think how young he was, it's just it's very sad. But I had him. I had him until I was 21, and he's there with me always.

[10:14]Zibby Owens: Oh, thank you for sharing about that. Thank you. And thank you for everything, particularly these two new movies, all of your work. I just I relate so much, and it's all just so amazing. I just can't thank you enough. I'm just so honored to be talking to you. Thank you. Thank

[10:37]Judy Blume: you. We're gonna get to know each other in person. Oh, good. Okay. I'm in. Anytime.

[10:42]Zibby Owens: Okay.

[10:44]Davina Pardo: Thank you.

[10:46]Judy Blume: Bye

[10:48]Davina Pardo: Judy.

[10:50]Judy Blume: Bye. Now we're just gonna leave. Here we go. Alright.

[13:44]Davina Pardo: Hi.

[13:46]Zibby Owens: Hi. Well, sorry for gushing. I'm, like, embarrassed by what Love it. If I hadn't known you had compiled everyone's collective gushing for the movie, maybe I would have felt even worse. But anyway, well, congratulations. The documentary is so amazing, and I felt like I got to learn all about her in a new way. I thought I knew Judy Blum and who she was until I watched your movie and learned so much more. And I read that you had been trying to get this to happen for a long time and that finally in February 2020, she said yes. Like, tell me what that call was like. When did you find out? I remember I was about to go to yoga class and

[14:24]Davina Pardo: I got the email. And I think the first line was my answer is yes in all caps. And I had to rush out because I knew I had to go to this class. And I remember getting there and seeing my teacher who I knew pretty well and telling her and bursting into tears. It been a year's long effort conversation. And I just felt so deeply that this film should be made that it would mean so much to people. So

[14:54]Zibby Owens: yeah, it was definitely an emotional moment when she was finally ready. Wow. And I read that you went back and reread all 28 books.

[15:03]Davina Pardo: Is that true? Multiple times. Multiple times. We know the first time is really just this emotional visceral experience. I don't know if you've gone back to any of them recently, but when you pick them up for the first time, especially the ones that you read and reread a million times, it's hard to be objective and think about their place in the film. I was just trying to bring them to have that experience the first time. And then there was a lot of going back to the books and thinking about know, how does this connect to Judy's personal story? How is it going to fit into the arc of the film? Which of these books are we going to include? Because there are so many and we had to leave some out. So that was a conversation we were having as we were, Bia was reading them for the first time and I was rereading them. You didn't read them as a kid, Leah? Oh my God. Your tone of your voice just changed so much. You're like, You didn't read them as a kid? What

[15:51]Leah Wolchok: planet were you living on? I was

[15:55]Zibby Owens: like, Let me just make sure I understood that properly.

[15:59]Leah Wolchok: I know. It's hard to be around all you you fangirl gushers all the time and and be honest about where I grew up and what it was like in the eighties in Jacksonville, Florida, and her books were banned and seen as taboo. Puberty was not something anyone talked about. Girls bodies were something to be ashamed of, and women's bodily autonomy was something to be feared. And I drank that Southern Kool Aid and I did not read her books because I didn't want to break the rules. And I sort of put Judy Blum out of my mind, always knew that, Oh, she wrote those books you're not supposed to read as a kid. Although I will tell you, we read B. C. Andrews. We read Flowers in the Attic. That was somehow Okay. I don't know how those books were accepted. Like, we passed those around under our desks in fifth grade, but not Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, which could have helped me so tremendously as a shy, insecure, flat chested 11 year old. It would have been amazing to meet Margaret on the pages of that book and sort of think about myself and my relationship to my body and my friends and my family and my religion. Anyway, so I was reading them for the first time as an adult, and I was introducing them to my two kids at the same time. So I was sort of experiencing through their eyes what it's like as a kid to read her work for the first time and then experiencing as an adult just how magical the worlds she created. I mean, the realism is so magical. It was an intense spring and summer of twenty twenty, obviously, for everyone around the world. But we were so lucky that we were able to sort of dive back into our childhoods and escape,

[17:43]Davina Pardo: in some ways, the pandemic by rereading her work and for me for reading her work. And I think the film is better for having Leah and Leah's perspective. I mean, it's actually like Leah's brilliance and sense of humor and all the other things she brought to this film. I think having the perspective of a person who doesn't have that nostalgic attachment, the film can't just be that connection. We really wanted it to be broader than that. And I think we really helped on that front.

[18:11]Zibby Owens: How did you decide who else to bring in as experts like Cecily Von Zagazar and Lena Denham and all of the people who talked about the books

[18:21]Leah Wolchok: and Judy herself. Well, we always knew from the beginning when we were pitching the film that it would be an absolute dream to have some of the authors that we were able to interview. Authors like Jason Reynolds and Alex Gino, Jacqueline Woodson, Mary Choi. Some of them, their work was being challenged even then, even before this crazy resurgence of book banning that's taken over the country in the past year. Alex Gino and Jason Reynolds books have been on the top of the banned book list, you know, for the past several years. So we knew we wanted to talk to them and hear their perspective as writers who are writing for young people today and whose books are being challenged. And we also wanted to talk to creators of pop culture who sort of revolutionized the way girls and women are seen on TV and on the big screen. So we knew we wanted to talk to Lena Dunham, Molly Ringwald, Anna Kunkel. When we started watching PEN15, we thought, Oh my God, it would be amazing to talk to these two women who have gone back into their awkwardness of seventh grade and captured it so perfectly and so irreverently on screen. Mean, that masturbation episode is like that. Those those women had to be Judy Blum fans, right? We were so delighted and honored to be able to talk to so many of them that had been sort of in our dream scenario of interviewees. And

[19:38]Davina Pardo: in a way, they're all Judy Blum. I mean, thought of them all as readers. We wanted to treat them all the same way, whether you're a librarian or a celebrity or an author, you're being interviewed in the same setting against this wallpaper. Experts in their They're experience of Judy Blum. They all had this sort of intimate experience of reading a Judy Blum book when they were young. So there are no sort of expert interviews in the classical sense. Everyone is an expert and everyone is a reader. Wow.

[20:10]Judy Blume: Including the middle schoolers.

[20:12]Leah Wolchok: We've interviewed this group of sixth graders at a middle school in Long Island whose teacher had introduced them to Judy Blum. And some of them, their parents had, but mostly they were being introduced and learning about Judy Blum for the first time. That was really part of the film we knew was going to sort of take us just out of the realm of nostalgia and bring us into contemporary day.

[20:37]Zibby Owens: Amazing. So what you had in your head beforehand versus like the product and the experience of reality of what happened, was it aligned? Like, is this what you expected when you did it? Or were there many things that were better, worse, or not worse, but unexpected?

[20:52]Davina Pardo: Or did it kind of go down the path you expected it to go? I think part of what's unexpected is how politically resonant it is at this very moment. And we knew that books were still being banned. We knew that bodily autonomy I mean, Trump was president when we started. We knew that bodily autonomy was in question, but we had no idea that Roe versus Wade was going to be overturned during our edit and that book banning would surge in the way that it has. It's at the highest it's been in over twenty years. So that's been really shocking, upsetting, infuriating. But we hope that the film can sort of become a part of that conversation and a reminder to people of how important books are for kids that we shouldn't be afraid of books, that these books can only help your child. Your child is going to find this information on the internet anyways. No book will just open their mind and make them have more empathy,

[21:45]Zibby Owens: make them feel more comfortable in the world. It really blows my mind that this is happening. I mean, I it's like you read about it, but it's like, oh, that can really be happening. Is that really happening? But it is. It's crazy. Right. Right. Denial. But anyway and what was it like collaborating on this project?

[22:01]Davina Pardo: It was awesome. I mean, I'll throw this to you because I feel like I've just been talking. We were in different places for a lot of it. I'm in Brooklyn and Leah's in New Jersey. So we had a very intense phone relationship where often we would be sort of working but doing a lot of thinking and listening to each other breathe on the other line. So really spending a lot of time together in that way, sort of trying to find the shared vision for the film, especially early on talking through all the choices that we had to make.

[22:29]Leah Wolchok: It's been really wonderful. I know I have such deep respect for Devina as a filmmaker and such deep love for her as a friend. It was really wonderful to collaborate on this project, which is such an I mean, this film has brought up so much, like intimate conversations between us, but with everyone that we've worked with. Because I mean, it's not just the two of us, obviously, this huge, wonderful team of people. Our producer, Marcella Garcia Steingart and our co producer, Emily Schumann, who were, you know, behind the scenes doing so much work throughout the entire preproduction and postproduction process. But any time we were on set, we would have a crew and we would have these conversations over lunch that you would never have if you weren't working on a film about Judy Blum. And the interviews, you know, we were talking everyone who menstruates shared their first period stories with us. Like how often are you going back in time to when you were a teenager or elementary school and remembering what it was like that first day you discovered blood on your underwear? So it was so nice. It was wonderful to collaborate with Divina and then to have this collaboration with our huge team. I mean, we had two great editors and a consulting editor who really sort of transformed the way we thought about the film. It felt like this intimate family, I think always happens when you're working on a film. But Judy Blum just brings out, you know, emotional honesty in everyone that she meets and everyone that talks about her. So that was kind of exhilarating.

[23:56]Davina Pardo: We've definitely seen middle school photos of almost everyone on the crew. Like, at some point, know, a story came out, some embarrassing story, and then people were pulling up photos. I mean, it just yeah. Judy just inspires that in people.

[24:09]Zibby Owens: They should do I'm sure they have lots of social media campaigns planned around all this stuff, all the Judy Blum stuff. But there should be a thing where everybody has to post, like, the age they were when they read the book and a picture of that or some middle school picture. There should be, like, a whole don't know. My mom says she still remembers when I was reading the Judy Blum books. I don't know. It's really sweet. And I thought the film was just so well done. I mean, my husband and I watched together. He's a producer also. Anyway, we were watching it and, like, just everything. He's like, this is so good. And he didn't he probably didn't read Judy Blum, and I was like, but I'm obsessed. So anyway, thought it was really well done. I think people are gonna learn so much more about her and all the advocacy, activism almost with the book banning and her life, her dad, of it. It's just so poignant. All those letters all the time in the stacks. Oh my gosh. Anyway, you two did an amazing job. I loved it. You so much. You. And your bookstore's in LA? Yes. I live in New York City, but yeah, I opened a bookstore in Santa Monica just to make my life easy. But they really needed one there and we spend a lot of time there. My brother's there and my husband works out there. So yeah, I opened it in February and it's been so amazing. Oh, what's it called? It's called Zibby's Bookshop. Oh, okay. Yeah. We curate everything by emotion or by topic, not by genre or anything. So we do it all differently. So when you walk in, you can kind of discover who you are on the shelves and what you want. Pop in if you're in I wish we had more time this time. Know. Yeah. Oh, are you out there now? Mhmm. Oh my gosh. For two days. Oh, well, I should have offered to host something. Mean, I I think I did offer to host something. But anyway, doesn't matter. I'll put, I also wrote this essay about the film if it helps. I just put it in the chat. It's on Zippy Mag, and we ran it last week, but it's just my rave my rave review of the film and everything. Thank you. It's great to talk to you. It was great to talk to you.

[26:17]Zibby Owens: and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.