“He had married this little girl, and he was happy that way.”
Judy wasn’t happy in her marriage. At low moments, she wondered if it had been doomed from the start. Five weeks before her and John’s wedding, her beloved father, her Doey-Bird, had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of fifty-four. She was holding his hand when he lost consciousness. Judy was still crumbling under her grief when she walked down the aisle.
Sixteen years later, and just three years after the Blumes bought a bigger house with a swimming pool, Judy asked John for a divorce in the spring of 1975. He agreed, but then they decided to live together until June so that Randy, then fourteen, and Larry, then twelve, could finish out the school year before moving. After that, the kids headed off to sleepaway camp and Judy packed up their lives and moved to a townhouse an hour away, in Princeton.
She was thirty-seven years old and alone, she realized, for the first time in her life.
The kids hadn’t taken the separation well. Before Judy and John told them, Judy had consulted a family counselor who warned her that the children would have questions—and she needed to come prepared with answers. Unlike other kinds of unhappy couples, the Blumes weren’t demonstrative in their moments of friction. They weren’t big yellers or fighters. As far as young Randy and Larry were concerned, their polite, upstanding parents were perfectly content. “It was a nice marriage,” Blume later said, “but inside I was dying.”
To explain herself, Judy wrote letters to the kids before they left for the summer, which they read alone in their rooms and then came together to sob. When home feels safe, divorce can be catastrophic to the children. Judy knew that all too well, having put herself in Karen’s shoes to write It’s Not the End of the World. Despite the book’s sunny title and its optimistic ending, Judy recognized the pain that it took to get there.
Still, she felt she had no other choice. A few years before she initiated the split, Judy felt herself, at the age of thirty-five, undergoing a massive change—one that she’d eventually describe as an adolescent rebellion, just delayed by twenty years. Essie, who she spoke to twice a day, became representative of Judy’s subtle, lifelong indoctrination into a role—the self-annihilating housewife—that no longer suited her. That perspective transformed John in her eyes from a good-enough spouse and a solid provider to a figurehead of her mother’s middle-class values. Judy was sick of it all: the PTA meetings, the dinners at the club, the aqua-lined pool in the backyard. Suddenly, she felt an overwhelming urge “to taste and experience life,” she said in Presenting Judy Blume. “I wasn’t terrible. I was responsible. I was working. I loved the kids. But I was rebelling… My divorce was all part of that rebellion.”
Judy recognized a level of childishness in herself, which she came by honestly, having gone straight from her parents’ house to her husband’s. She felt immature in ways she didn’t like, and realized that John treated her in kind, like something delicate and unformed. Before the divorce, Judy had understood—with a level of dread—that she wanted desperately to take shape. She wished to be a person with edges and depth and firm, well-defined corners, just like one of her characters.
John blamed Fear of Flying. Erica Jong’s unrestrained roman à clef, about marriage and a successful female writer’s messy interior life, came out in 1973, before the Blumes separated. Isadora White Wing is a twice-wed Jewish poet from New York who, five years into her second marriage to psychoanalyst Bennett Wing, finds herself desperate for adventure and sexual novelty. She still loves Bennett but can’t deny the sense of yearning that has cast a shadow over her daily life with him. “What was marriage anyway?” Wing wonders early in the novel. “Even if you loved your husband, there came that inevitable year when fucking him turned as bland as Velveeta cheese: filling, fattening even, but no thrill to the taste buds, no bittersweet edge, no danger.”
“Fear of Flying was a very, very important book to me,” Blume told Bust magazine in 1997. “I was becoming aware. My husband blamed it for my unhappiness—which is simplistic, to say the least.” Over the course of Jong’s novel, Wing comes to understand that her quest for passion—and the infamous “zipless fuck”—is part of a larger identity crisis about being an artist, a wife, and potentially a mother (she’s grappling with the decision of whether or not to have kids). “Was I going to be just a housewife who wrote in her spare time?” Wing asks herself at a crossroads between her husband and another man. “Was I going to keep passing up the adventures that were offered to me? Or was I going to make my fantasies and my life merge if only for once?”
Wing chooses the latter, running off with Adrian Goodlove, another analyst who is the crude and domineering funhouse image of her rigid and respectful husband. The book’s title refers to Wing’s very real phobia—she’s terrified of air travel—but also the nagging suspicion that she’s always holding herself back. When she leaves with Adrian for a road trip across Europe, she feels, at least at first, like she’s finally taken flight. But as time wears on, Adrian’s shortcomings start to surface. He’s mostly impotent, for one thing. He’s also full of crap. When he leaves her without warning to go back to his wife and children, Wing finds herself alone in a hotel room in Paris, wide awake through a bout of insomnia and raking herself over the coals. What had she done to her life? “Leaving Bennett was my first really independent action,” she resolves as the night wears on. It was the first thing she’d ever done that directly defied her parental and cultural programming.
By morning she understands that she’s always been afraid of growing up. “I was afraid of being a woman,” she says. “Afraid of all of the nonsense that went with it. Like being told that if I had babies, I’d never be an artist, like my mother’s bitterness, like my grandmother’s boring concentration on eating and excreting, like being asked by some dough-faced boy if I planned to be a secretary. A secretary!” In the end, she goes back to Bennett. After all, he’s kind, smart, and good in bed, and it isn’t his fault that the world makes it nearly impossible for women to be on their own. Isadora can only hope that he’ll live up to his surname and help her soar.
Fear of Flying spoke to Judy, as did another feminist novel published in 1967, called Diary of a Mad Housewife. That book, by Upper East Sider and Vassar graduate Sue Kaufman, follows New York City mother of two Bettina Balser in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Balser, thirty-six, is a Smith College–educated former artist who can quote Baudelaire and Proust, but whose life now revolves around shopping, decorating, cooking, and throwing parties. It’s all at the behest of her husband, Jonathan, a former activist turned nouveau riche social climber who demands that his wife head up their home life to his exacting standards. With no outlet to express her anger, Balser—who shakes uncontrollably when Jonathan issues his unreasonable orders—takes to drinking, smoking too much, and writing in a secret journal. She also starts having an affair with a piggish playwright named George Prager. He isn’t very nice, but the pair share an explosive sexual connection.
Prager is dominant in bed, and Balser finds that she likes it. For a while, that uncomfortable truth scares her. But then she begins to understand that what she’s acting out with her lover is just another angle on her relationship with Jonathan. “Why should I be disturbed by the sado-masochistic aspects of that relationship, when I have another one going?” Balser writes in her diary. “Why not face the truth: it’s an enormous relief to have that sort of thing out in the open and act it out, instead of having to deal with it in a disguised form, all veiled and gussied up with domestic overlay as it is with Jonathan and me.”
Although Balser can’t stand who her husband has become, she understands she’s trapped—after all, he controls the money. At one point, her period is late and she believes Prager has gotten her pregnant. Her options, or lack thereof, flash before her. “Without a cent of my own, without a checking account, the only other way [ beyond asking Prager for cash] I could have paid for an abortion would have been to try and get the money secretly from my father, and even I shied away from all the filthy implications of that,” she realizes. Luckily, her period shows up and she doesn’t have to debase herself. But even that relief doesn’t solve the problem of the larger social constructs that frame her marriage, in which she has to be the “submissive woman,” the “obedient wife” to the “forceful dominant male” breadwinner.
Blume nods to Diary of a Mad Housewife in Wifey, when Sandy’s sophisticated best friend, Lisbeth—who lives on the Upper West Side and who is experimenting with an open marriage—slips her a copy. Sandy wonders if she should be offended: “Did Lisbeth think she was a mad housewife too? Was that why she’d given her the book?” The novel doesn’t come up again until Sandy’s husband, Norman, mentions it during a fight, when Sandy is trying to express why their relationship leaves her unsatisfied.
“Have you been reading that book again?” Norman snipes.
“What book?”
“The one Lisbeth gave you.”
“This has nothing to do with Lisbeth or books,” Sandy says.
Like Bettina Balser, Sandy feels she has to choke her own voice down in order to stomach her marriage. Like Isadora White Wing, Sandy worries that she’ll never know true sexual liberation firsthand. Did Judy relate to these predicaments, too? And if so, what did she do about it?
Blume is forthright about one part of her “rebellion,” which overlapped with Isadora Wing’s—her marriage to John left her feeling inept. “He had married this little girl, and he was happy that way,” Blume told a reporter for the Chicago Tribune in 1985. Divorcing him meant she would have to grow up, which wasn’t easy, either. John was cold toward her; the kids were angry. Judy found that the period after her divorce left her more confused and depressed than ever.
“Just getting through the day was a real struggle for me,” she writes of that time in Letters to Judy. “I woke up crying every morning and I went to bed crying every night. I wasn’t sure I could cope. I had very little left over for my kids.”
She worried a lot, fearing that she’d ruined all their lives. The only thing she didn’t have to stress about was money. Thanks to her career, she wasn’t financially ensnared like Bettina Balser. She wouldn’t have to work as a cocktail waitress—“That’s what divorced women on TV always turn out to be—cocktail waitresses,” Karen muses in It’s Not the End of the World—or transform herself into the sad woman Sandy’s sister, Myra, describes in Wifey.
Myra is having a turbulent moment with her wealthy gynecologist husband, Gordon. She doesn’t trust him anymore, but she can’t imagine leaving, either. “If I divorced him, I’d have to give up the house and move to an apartment in Fort Lee, with all the other divorcées,” she whines. She’d have to “eat at Howard Johnson’s instead of Périgord Park, get a job in a department store.” For Myra, who has embraced the upscale suburban lifestyle in ways Sandy cannot bring herself to do, it’s a nonstarter. She’ll have to look past his suspected dalliances (it’s only one, with Sandy incidentally) and stand by him.
Judy didn’t have to brave financial ruin to leave John, and so the exes settled into their new routines as co-parents. She had the kids during the school week, in Princeton, and on the weekend they went to John’s, where he would take them out to fancy dinners and plays in the city. “He entertained them lavishly,” Judy later explained, “not to compete with me, but because he didn’t know what else to do. He wanted to show them that he cared.”
This went on for a bit, until John realized that he couldn’t sustain paying for expensive outings every time he had his children with him. The big-ticket jaunts abruptly stopped, which disappointed them. It took a while, Blume has said, for the family to find its rhythm within their joint custody arrangement. And then, another change upended their shaky balance.