The inimitable Judy Blume, who’s currently promoting the film adaptation of her 1981 book, Tiger Eyes (which her son directed, aw), sat down for a Reddit AMA (‘Ask Me Anything,’ olds), and it was nothing short of brilliant. Here are the highlights:

She may be to blame for a wave of children swallowing turtles:

Where did you get the idea of fudge eating a turtle?

Read it in a newspaper. No kidding — a real toddler swallowed a tiny pet turtle. Wrote a picture book about it and got back great rejection letters. “Very funny but this would teach small children to swallow turtles.” Great editor suggested writing a longer book (chapter book) and using that story as the last chapter.

She’s a total fangirl:

Are you and Beverly Cleary friends? Please say yes.

I wish! Beverly Cleary was my inspiration. I adore her books and so did my kids. We were supposed to meet last year but then I got a sinus infection and couldn’t fly.

She’s humble—and funny!

How often do you get recognized, or do you ever get recognized at all?

Well, my family usually recognizes me.

She will make you do your homework:

Im procrastinating my science project for you Judy. What made you realize you wanted to write books?

Do your science project!

Sadly, Blume finally had to sign off and go to dinner:

Loved chatting with you. Thanks for all the love and the questions.
Hope you get to see Tiger Eyes. Making it was the highlight of my professional life.
Going to get that pasta dinner now. Husb is starving!

We love you, Judy.

(Photo by Evan Agostini/Getty Images)

Related: Judy Blume, Still Awesome

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“I have finelly a grand son,” the Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk wrote to me in an email three years ago. “wonderful at my age to be a new grabdfather. Life is shit but now I am awiming better then ever so there is hope
Yoram”

Over the course of the past several years, the notes I received from Kaniuk were often elliptical—lacking in standard punctuation and littered with misspellings. Part of me thinks those errors—and more than the mistakes, the “Life is shit” attitude—were intentional, to better allow him to project himself as a man possessed of an addled imagination and to wallow in the idea of the aggrieved writer, ignored by the Israeli (and worldwide) literary establishment in favor of younger, less controversial minds. I sometimes took it, perhaps unfairly and erroneously, as a pose designed to make me and others in similar relationships with Kaniuk write about him.

And there was so much to write about. Kaniuk was a member of the Palmach. He fought in the War of Independence. He helped shepherd Holocaust refugees away of Europe. He left Israel, lived in New York City and Paris, befriended the likes of Charlie Parker and Susan Sontag. He studied art and painted tiny pictures on matchboxes.

Having married a non-Jewish American, his daughters were not considered Jews in the country in which they were raised and so, more recently, he petitioned to change his legal status from Jew to no-religion, to match that of his grandson.

For the past several years, Kaniuk fought cancer, the illness that prevailed Saturday. And perhaps he had a point in his messages to me and others, that he did not receive quite the same recognition that peers like Aharon Appelfeld enjoyed. But it’s untrue to say he was unknown. His 32 books (including 17 novels) were translated into 25 languages and the Israeli establishment bestowed on him some if its greatest prizes. Messages for him on Facebook prove he was beloved by younger Israeli readers.

Kaniuk did not want platitudes—he did not want to be told “I liked your book”—an empty affirmation, to him. As he wrote me on another occasion, he was not “an American who stand before a painting and says: Ho, isn’t something! I really like it. and so on.”

I don’t claim a deep friendship with Kaniuk. I interviewed him once, and commissioned a few pieces of writing from him in 2006, when Israel seemed on the cusp of war with Lebanon. Those essays were—they are—like jazz, rhythmic with a feeling of impetuosity, filled with color and passion, invoking themes of aging and obsolescence and Israel’s precarious standing. They are balanced too by observations of occasional joy and whimsy. And there is nostalgia in them, as well.

When I last was in Israel, five years ago, I went to meet Kaniuk in his home in Tel Aviv. He was gracious and warm, as was his wife Miranda, and he offered to take me on my next visit to his favorite café. There, he’d introduce me to my future husband, he said. It was a suggestion rooted ever in hope.

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Next week, Lena Dunham’s Girls will return to TV, and no writer in recent memory has been as talmudically dissected. Her work and her life tend to bleed into one another, with questions of Dunham’s privileged upbringing, her connections to the art world and Manhattan’s cultural elite, and her supposedly limited life experience seeming as consequential, to many commentators, as anything she produces in her fictional TV drama. Of course, Dunham has fueled this process by creating a show that’s very much about her peers, but the discussion surrounding her and Girls is also evidence of the hunger commentators have for sifting a creator’s life from the work and judging it accordingly. (Philip Roth has toyed with this phenomenon to great effect.)

Writers have the peculiar position of working in private for a public audience. This produces tension between the story a writer tells himself and the one he tells others. When the work is ready and it’s time for a writer to run the publicity gauntlet, a narrative is created ex post facto. How did this book come together? What motivated this or that choice? How’d you get your start as a writer? Who helped you? Suddenly the jumbled events and workaday struggles of months or years must be stitched together into something resembling a story, and sometimes the story isn’t always the full truth.

That this kind of close reading is ultimately circular and exhausting hasn’t stopped it from being the favored sport of the New York commentariat. And to some extent, I understand it. Rampant success, particularly at such a young age, attracts suspicion. There’s no doubt that Dunham has had some advantages in life. To expect her to own up to it in an interview, however, to think that she might flagellate herself or in some way apologize or refuse these perks—that strikes me as an unrealistic expectation. And by doing so, we overlook what should largely inform our judgment of a writer: the work itself.

Still, despite however much I may excuse Dunham, or at the very least tire of the moralistic debate over her upbringing, I’ve recently found myself submitting other writers to similar scrutiny. What aren’t they copping to, I ask myself. And if they won’t say it, why won’t the journalists covering them do it instead?

A new literary journal, The American Reader, has earned an inordinate amount of press coverage, much of it based on the perceived glamour of its founders, their Ivy League degrees, and their connections, much like Dunham, to Manhattan’s art scene. Few of the profiles of the magazine—in the Observer, in the Daily Beast, and in the New York Times—pay much attention to what is in the magazine. (When they do, they often find it lacking.) A glittering social world, one largely populated by a monochromatic cast of the rich and well-connected, is the unacknowledged subject.

Separately, the New York Times this week profiled Nathaniel and Simon Rich, brothers who, at 32 and 28 respectively, already have an enviable roster of accomplishments behind them. (Peer envy is part of the subtext of any Rich brothers profile.) The two are indeed talented, with Nathaniel about to publish his second novel and regularly writing smart features and criticism for The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, and Simon, having left a job as the youngest staff writer in Saturday Night Live’s history, now a writer at Pixar and the author of several books. (Even that is an abridged version of their resumes.) What raises the specter of nepotism though—and it’s mentioned in the first sentence of the NYT profile—is that their father is Frank Rich, doyen of America’s liberal pundits, their mother is Gail Winston, executive editor at HarperCollins, and their step-mother is Alex Witchel, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. You couldn’t ask for better bloodlines or for an easier entree into the New York literary world.

After reading these stories and many like them, and perhaps more importantly, after living in New York, where in a short time I’ve encountered less successful (but similarly pedigreed) versions of some of the aforementioned characters, I’ve realized that expecting these people to prostrate themselves, to admit their advantages, is a self-defeating game. It doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to ask these questions—journalists and critics should always push for uncomfortable truths; we should be trying to make journalism and publishing open to any socioeconomic class—but in the case of a young writer, by asking him to cop to nepotism, you are essentially asking him to admit that he’s a fake.

Again, that doesn’t mean that these questions shouldn’t be asked—a denial might reveal something interesting. But it means that we shouldn’t be outraged when we don’t get the full-throated confessions we want. This conclusion is best expressed by Simon Rich himself. In a thoughtful but overlong profile, which appeared in the New York Press in 2008, journalist Kimberly Thorpe spends a while meditating on the brothers’ background. At the time, Rich told Thorpe:

“It’s just not our job to talk about it. It’s your job to talk about it, if you want to. I feel like it’s not our responsibility to talk about that subject. We’re not the ones getting paid to do it.”

I reluctantly agree. Our outrage is better directed at the journalists who carry water for their gifted subjects, who dismiss these matters with a rhetorical wave of the hand. For example, when the New York Times’ Laura M. Holson writes that Nathaniel Rich “was slower to find his way, working for nearly two years as an assistant at The New York Review of Books before moving to San Francisco to write a nonfiction book about film noir,” it’s time to cry foul. For young writers, a gig at the NYRB, particularly straight out of college, is a dream job (even more so in this economy). It’s hardly a deviation from the path to literary success; rather, it’s a valuable waypoint.

If you’re looking for writers to reveal the benefits they reaped from being born in the right zip code, or attending the right school, look to older generations. Read their memoirs, where there’s less risk in sharing these revelations, where age often leads to wisdom and self-examination. Or listen to the Longform Podcast, where successful, mid-career magazine journalists talk candidly about the help (or lack of) they’ve had in their careers. Don’t look for this in young writers, even fabulously successful ones, who are still in the formative stages of their careers and still may be unable to recognize the boon of their privilege. And if you’re a journalist covering one of these bright young things, keep probing; but don’t patronize your readers by acting like these issues don’t exist.

Previous Kvetches: Holiday Movies As History Books
My Sheldon Adelson Complex

Art by Margarita Korol

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Before the Beatniks drew national attention, before Elvis, before a thousand kids who had never met a black person began listening to the blues, before John, Paul, George and Ringo; before Dylan, before hippies, before the 1968 riots in Paris, before punk rock, and before people realized that there was a lot of money to be made off youthful rebellion, there was J.D. Salinger.

Salinger might not be the greatest American fiction writer of the 20^th century, but there is plenty of evidence that says he’s the most important. He may or may not have written the great American novel, he created characters that will live on for decades to come, and he has a hold on artists of all kinds, an allure that both attracts readers and bleeds into contemporary literature.

For all we know, J.D. Salinger didn’t care about this unfaltering legacy, and if he could have gone on living another 200 years, he would probably still be hiding out in his fortress in Cornish, New Hampshire, hoping we’d all just leave him alone.

But since God, nature, or whatever, works in mysterious ways, Salinger is no longer of this Earth, and that is why Kenneth Slawenski’s biography, J.D. Salinger: A Life, is one of the most anticipated biographies of the year.  Salinger is back in the spotlight, but this time he can’t object.

Attempting to piece together the life of a man who dropped out of sight for 40 years –at the height of his popularity and influence—is hardly a task to be envied; yet, it reads like a labor of love, and Slawenski does everything short of spying on Salinger.  His book is part biography, part literary criticism, and succeeds in connecting Salinger’s work to his own life, giving us as good of picture as we may ever get; and makes the picture a bit more clear.

For years, Salinger lived under the impression that both of his parents were Jewish, but he eventually came to find out that his mother was of Irish-Catholic descent. Although this has been a source of controversy and discussion among Salinger aficionados for years, Slawenski notes that as Sol Salinger’s social status advanced, he began to turn his back on his Jewish background.  Similarly, Holden Caulfield’s obsession with all this is “phony,” suggests that perhaps Salinger’s works were filled with veiled autobiographical references.

One of the book’s most interesting stories is about Salinger’s time spent in Austria, right before World War II.  Salinger, living with a Jewish family, falls in love with his host family’s daughter — only to lose her in the chaos that would claim millions in the coming years.  Salinger grieved the loss of his Austrian family, and his first love, and would later attempt to retell that story in “A Girl I knew.”

Slawenski also mentions an unpublished, proto-Inglorious Basterds story about a Frenchman who kidnaps Adolf Hitler.  There was also the writer’s first hand experience with the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis, written during his time with a division that helped liberate victims in Dachau.  Salinger never talked much about this time in his life, but the effects on his writing must have been immeasurable.

Telling the tale of Salinger by recounting his formative years, his rise and eventually his disappearance from the public eye; Slawenski doesn’t rely on hearsay, and has done a good job at playing detective. Slawenski doesn’t rewrite history, but J.D. Salinger: A Life is an honest account of a writer who really didn’t want to be worshiped or praised.  Slawenski is respectful of Salinger’s wishes, and delivers a worthy biography.

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Some writers spend an entire career seeking critical and popular success.  For Myla Goldberg, it came early with the success of her book Bee Season, and the eventual film adaptation of the novel helped Goldberg score a bestseller with her first try.

Goldberg’s notoriety continued to flourish when the band The Decemberists, wrote the song, “Song for Myla Goldberg.”  Goldberg’s reputation as one of the finest and most popular scribes of this generation was solidified early on, and her writing prowess has become even stronger.  There is no greater evidence of this than with the publication her latest novel, The False Friend. The story of 30-something Celia Durst, who returns to her hometown to come clean about a secret that has haunted her since childhood.

The first thing I thought of when I was reading The False Friend is that I always hear so many fiction writers talk about how there are so many of their life experiences and their own personal stories in their fiction, and at the risk of sounding cheesy is there a lot of Myla Goldberg in this book?

I actually take the opposite approach to fiction.  I don’t want my literal experiences to be in a book – that’s not fiction, that’s thinly disguised memoir.  What I aim to do is to take emotional experiences or memories, psychological experiences or memories and distill those from my personal experiences into events and characters and scenarios that bear little to no relation to anything that’s ever happened to me.  And that’s basically the blueprint for all my books to one degree or another.  Sure, for a novel to be written it’s got to have a little bit of its author in there, but there are a lot of ways to go about that.  So while this book certainly does have a lot of me in there, it’s not in terms of actual events.  Nothing that happened in this book actually happened to me.

Location seems to play a really strong part in this book and Jensenville seems to be this small boring middle American kind of town.  Why did you decide the book would take place in anywhereville USA?

Jensenville is an invented town.  I basically ripped off upstate New York — which I’ve visited for the past ten years because my in-laws live up there.  It’s a fascinating place.  It’s this total place of fallen empire, which is what drew me to want to write about it because it’s beautiful and depressing all at the same time, because, as I talked about in the book – all the stuff I talked about in the book – that is all very real.  You have these beautiful turn of the century early twentieth century architecture and it also speaks of some kind of grand place, except that there is no one living there anymore there are no opportunities there anymore, and it’s a shadow of its former self.  And it was really only as I started writing about that area that I realized that it was the perfect place to set that story because the book is about people who are looking back at who they used to be and wondering about that difference.  This is a town that is looking back at what it used to be.  I hadn’t planned that in advance but as I was writing it and putting it in this area I realized it was just totally perfect.

You switch up so much from book to book and I was thinking if I were to hand a person who wasn’t familiar with all three of your books —Bee Season, Wickett’s Remedy, and The False Friend– and I said to read them in succession, I think they’d be surprised at the transition.  My question is: how do you finish one book, like Wickett’s Remedy, and then say The False Friend is the next book I’m going to write.  How do you prepare yourself for that?

Well it takes time, quite honestly.  I never go right from one thing into the next thing.  There’s usually at least six months to a year of downtime where I’m really just doing a lot of reading and a lot of thinking and just trying to leave myself open to the idea of what will come next.  But thank you for saying that because one of my goals is to never repeat myself.  I admire those who are always doing something different and you never really know what is going to come up next and how it’s going to read and what it’s going to be about.  I don’t want to be the writer whose every book has the father who abandons the family. I mean, you can’t help but have themes that come back in your work.  And now that I’ve written three novels I find that I’m drawn to memory and its various permutations and I’m drawn to people who are trying to make the world a better place in one guise or another.  But I think they turn up in different scenarios and ideas and plots and it doesn’t feel like repeating itself and tonally I always try to do it a little bit different in terms of setting a time and all that stuff, so yes that’s hugely important to me.

You mentioned writers you admire – who are some of those writers?

Well I can say that for False Friend there are three writers who were hugely influential and who I also admire very much. Kazuo Ishiguro is a beautiful writer and the things that particularly attracted me when I was working on False Friend is that he is really great at writing around an event without actually necessarily telling you what has happened, but he fills in the perimeter enough that you’re able to fill in the middle as a reader and to my mind that ‘s the ideal collaboration as a writer you want to strike between a writer and reader because if you’re working together to construct something, it’s going to be much more solid in the reader’s mind. It’s going to be a much more participatory and collaborative experience.  I know that as a reader,  I don’t like being told too much. I like being able to weave that tapestry in my head. And then Ian McEwan was a huge influence with the book because he knows how to tell a story like it’s just so suspenseful.  He knows pacing and how to dish out information in just the right amount of time and so I was really thinking about that a lot.  The third writer for this particular book was Graham Green because number one his books are great, but particularly the way he explores moral grey zones.  He knows there are no easy answers to anything and he loves that.

Do you take different influences from book to book?

Yeah.

That’s interesting. I don’t hear many people say that.

I mean it’s funny, because I didn’t start out writing thinking that these are the authors I want to emulate but they were the writers I was reading a lot of as I was writing.  Like, oh man, these are my guys.

Do you write more from memory or from research?

It’s a combination.  Memory is research when you’re a writer, as it turns out.  Like, I didn’t know that for the past ten years when I was going to visit my in-laws that I was doing research on that town but apparently I was because it called upon my memory of that town and that area to recreate it. I knew that I wanted her driving around the Chicago area because she loves to drive so that was just me going on the Internet and finding, you know, things around Chicago that were of interest to a driver.  The clique of the five girls and the cruelties, while none of the things that they did were things that happened to me,  I had a very strong memory of what it was like to be that age and what girls inflicted upon each other.  So, its a delicate interplay between memory and research at all times.

You had a lot of success early in your career with Bee Season and your novel continue to receive acclaim, but was there a point earlier in your career when you were stifled or overwhelmed by all the notice or success?

Probably.  The huge success of Bee Season probably changed or distorted the way that I wrote Wickett’s.  When Wickett’s got well reviewed, I think that freed me up a bit and allowed me to go back to being a writer in a room writing a story in a way that I think was probably liberating.  And this is all in retrospect.  While I’m writing I’m not aware of any of this stuff because how can you be?  You know, you can’t get that much outside of yourself in the moment.

I noticed that you dedicated The False Friend to your daughters.  When they’re at the right age, is this the first of your novels you’d want them to read.

You know what?  It doesn’t really matter to me.  I’m not really invested –  you know, I like the idea of them reading me when they want to.  I guess I just hope that whenever they do get around to reading this, it can become something that we share between us.

So are you going to start pushing certain books in their direction when the time is right?

Sure, but you gotta be careful with that though, because if you push something too much on the kids, they’re going to feel that and they’re gonna push back.  So I guess the thing I hope the most is that they’re people who are excited about reading.  And then, if that is the case, then my best job as a parent is to listen to them, listen to what it is they like to read, and then to guide them according to those interests.  But oh sure, so many books that I love – I’ve already gotten them into Roald Dahl, and I have a couple in mind for later on that maybe when they get older I’d like to steer their way and see what they think.

You talked about how after a book comes out there’s a bit of a lag and you just read, but do you know what’s next for you?

Yeah, I’m in the very most embryonic stages of knowing what I think I want to write next.  It’s developing slowly over time, but when I’m touring – touring is actually a really good time.  Lots of reading, lots of listening to music and lots of germinating of ideas.  For me, being in motion on a train or on a plane can be really good for brainstorming, so I try to use travel for that purpose.

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