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Introduction

She was a consummate New Yorker, born, bred, and educated in the city. Her world, and the world she wrote about, was often the world of the Upper West Side of Manhattan where she lived with her husband and two daughters. She was a graduate of Barnard College. I was a New Jersey girl who’d always dreamed of living across the river and she was a city girl who had trouble imagining living anywhere else. When I moved with my family to New Mexico she was flabbergasted. She called me a pioneer. I took that as a compliment.

She was my first friend who also wrote. We had a lot in common. We were born in the same year, our favorite childhood books were the “Betsy-Tacy” series, and each of us, as Norma put it, “rushed into reading adult novels at eleven or twelve, to find an alternative to the idealized, sanitized, sentimentalized books meant for readers our ages.” For a short time, we even shared the same literary agent.

We met in the early seventies and bonded over tuna fish sandwiches at Schrafft’s on our way to a meeting of children’s book writers. I had read an advance copy of Norma’s first book for children, Mom, the Wolfman, and Me, and was charmed by the characters and the story.

A few years later we found ourselves together on the “most censored list.” Norma’s work was banned because of the nontraditional families (in Mom, the Wolfman, and Me the spirited protagonist is raised by a mother who has never married) and the fact that she accepted and often wrote about her young characters’ sexuality.

She had a gift for creating believable, complicated characters, and a keen observant eye. Her dialogue, her wit, the matter-of-fact way she told her stories, often in the first person, made them impossible to put down. She would explain to those who disapproved, “When you’re young, reading about life (and life includes sexuality) is a safe way to explore it. Reading about it is not the same as giving permission to do it.” She wasn’t a rebel, trying to stir things up just to be provocative. She simply could not believe there was anything objectionable about “telling it like it is.”

One of my favorites of her books is Naomi in the Middle, a warm story of a loving family with two small daughters. The mother is expecting a third child, and Naomi, the youngest, is concerned about being displaced. The illustrated book contains silly rhymes—“I’m going to China to see your vagina. / I’m going to Venus to see your penis.”—and a few sentences about how conception occurs, both of which make it a favorite target of the censors. A couple of years ago I was on a panel discussing censorship and Naomi when a woman in the audience stood up and asserted the book should be banned because it promotes alcoholism. (This was in New York City.) None of the panel members had a clue what she was talking about. She explained that on the night of the birth, when the father and mother go to the hospital, the grandmother comes over to stay with the two young sisters. After reassuring them that all will be well, she fixes warm milk laced with rum, to help them get back to sleep. “We don’t want anyone telling our children it’s okay to use alcohol!” the woman in the audience shouted, proving when it comes to censorship, if it’s not one thing, it’s another.

Norma knew writers who’d grown so discouraged, they’d given up and left the field of children’s books altogether, and others who’d backed off to escape the fallout of the censors. But she kept going full steam ahead, refusing to water down her books for children and teens. (There was no YA category then.) “I’ve never written anything I wouldn’t want my own daughters to read,” she said.

Smart, feisty, and enormously talented, Norma was a prolific writer, publishing one or two books for young readers and teens a year, plus a novel for adult readers every few years. The children’s book world was shocked when she died suddenly in 1989. She was fifty years old. I miss her friendship. I miss her voice on the page. Sometimes I’ll take down one of her books and begin to read, just to hear her again.

If she were alive today, Norma would still be speaking out on the same issues, encouraging other writers to keep going, full steam ahead.

—Judy Blume

July 2014