Judy Blume is here to save us

Judy Blume: How Life Changed for Susan Blume and her Aftermath as a Teen High School Student in Key West

Editor’s Note: Sara Stewart is a film and culture writer who lives in western Pennsylvania. The views expressed here are solely the author’s own. View more opinion articles on CNN.

All of these women speak about the ways Blume’s books changed them, made them feel seen and understood in a way that their parents often did not. There were few formative issues that Blume’s body of work didn’t touch on. Menstrual periods and religion and crushes in “Margaret.” Scoliosis and controlling parents and masturbation in “Deenie.” In “Forever”, she wrote a book about a high school student who had sex outside the wedlock and didn’t die from it.

The documentary shows how much Blume is loved, and it has interviews with the author’s more famous fans, including Molly Ringwald. It also showcases her correspondence with now-adult women who wrote to Blume, initially, as teenagers – and she wrote back, beginning friendships that would last decades.

You would think the 84-year-old author would have earned a laid-back existence in her home of Key West, but no. As Matthew McConaughey once said, time is a flat circle. In her new book,Judy Blume tells of the time when everything changed for her in her career after the election of Ronald Reagan.

Edits of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Matilda”: What happened in Los Angeles at the turn of the century?

There was much discussion at the festival about author censorship. A survey of women in 1976, known as the Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexualities, found the female orgasm was less elusive than had been thought. “After publication, Hite was lambasted for being a man-hater and berated by the Christian right for destroying traditional family values,” the New York Times reported.

Hite died in 2020 in London, having renounced her citizenship after years of persecution for her work. But Blume is still fighting the good fight. She is the co-founder of a Key West store, Books & Books @ the Studios of Key West (affiliated with a local Florida chain of beloved independent bookstores), where the shelves bear signs proclaiming, “We Sell Banned Books.”

I hope that the book-banning contingent will listen to her words. Maybe I won’t.

The British prime minister, the queen consort and hundreds of other people were annoyed when it was reported last month that hundreds of words had been changed or removed from the most recent editions of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Matilda” and other books by Roald Dahl to make them less offensive Salman Rushdie referred to the edits as “censorship.”

Dahl died in 1990 at the age of 74 after writing children’s books and stories that have been translated into 68 languages. Some of his books became classic movies as well. His book was the subject of a musical film that was released last year.

The Indian-American author of “The Witches” and the issue of children’s censorship in the era of Singularities

However, the author has long been regarded as controversial and in 2020 his estate officially apologized for antisemitic comments made during his lifetime.

These revisions have been worked on by “sensitivity readers” from an organization called Inclusive Minds , which describes itself as “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion, diversity, equality and accessibility in children’s literature, and are committed to changing the face of children’s books.”

In a lengthy report published on Saturday, British newspaper The Daily Telegraph revealed that it had found hundreds of changes across the author’s many children’s books. Language relating to weight, race, gender, mental health and violence had been cut or rewritten according to analysis by journalists. This included removing words such as “fat” and “ugly” and descriptions using black and white.

Journalists working on the piece found 59 changes in “The Witches” alone, with hundreds more discovered in Dahl’s other popular books, such as “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Matilda.”

Rushdie, 75, is no stranger to the debate around censorship. In 1988 the leader of Iran issued a fatwa calling for his death after the release of a novel by him. The Indian-born author lost the sight in one eye after being attacked at a lecture in New York last year.

When asked at a press briefing on Monday whether it is right to censor children’s books, Sunak’s spokesperson employed Dahl’s own terminology, saying: “When it comes to our rich and varied literary heritage, the Prime Minister agrees with the BFG that you shouldn’t ‘gobblefunk around with words.'”

The spokesperson added that “it’s important that works of literature and fiction are preserved and not airbrushed,” and said: “We’ve always defended the right to free speech and expression.”

Puffin and The Roald Dahl Story Company, which manages the copyrights of Dahl’s books and works with publishers, didn’t respond to NPR’s requests for comment.

Why should we care about what might be perceived? A comment on Augustus Gloop, whose books are not exactly fat, and why women shouldn’t wear wigs

She said the organization was “alarmed” about the changes which had been made in an effort to scrub the books of that which might offend someone.

She wrote: “If we start down the path of trying to correct for perceived slights instead of allowing readers to receive and react to books as written, we risk distorting the work of great authors and clouding the essential lens that literature offers on society.”

Millions of older editions are still being used even though changes might be made today.

Augustus Gloop is no longer referred to as fat in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Instead he is described as “enormous,” The Telegraph reports.

Further, the changes to these books include adding language not originally written by Dahl. In his book The Witches, he states that witches are bald. According to The Telegraph, an added line in new editions says, “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”

About Dahl’s Little Frogs, Augustus Gloop in “Fantasy Mr. Fox” and “Esio Trot”

Holly Thomas is a writer and editor in London. She is morning editor at Katie Couric Media. She uses the handleHolstaT. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. There are more opinions on CNN.

It has received an unexpected injection of credibility as the enthusiastic refrain most associated with people who habitually say what they please has received an enthusiastic refrain.

It is not necessarily bad that the idea is new. Remember the live-in workforce that was brought from the deepest and darkest part of the African jungle in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”? In Dahl’s original version, published in 1964, they were Black pygmies. His 1973 rewrite, published after the 1971 movie starring Gene Wilder, recasts them as “little fantasy creatures.” I am sure we can agree on a welcome improvement.

This posthumous overhaul has gone much further, however. The monsters in “ Fantastic Mr. Fox” are not black at all. The earthworm in “James and the Giant Peach” isn’t pink, doesn’t have “lovely pink” skin but “lovely smooth skin.” Mrs. Silver of the show “Esio Trot” said no one ispale, notattractive or fat.

The effect was to add a little something to the books. There is no material effect on the narrative or prose when the Small Foxes are female. But many of the changes obfuscate the intended meaning. The worst of them are the ones that reinforce biases.

Take Augustus Gloop from the movie. A description of him from the 2001 edition reads: “a nine-year-old boy who was so enormously fat he looked as though he had been blown up by a powerful pump.” The 2022 version says: “a nine-year-old boy who was so enormous he looked as though he had been blown up by a powerful pump.” To adapt, it says, “Great folds bulged out from every part of his body and his face was like a ball of dough.”

The reader has a mental picture of Augustus Gloop. He is clearly a fat child. The word “fat” is offensive and misdiagnosing the problem. “Fat” is — or ought to be — a neutral descriptor, and it’s being reclaimed as such by fat activists and writers. Removing it implies that there is something embarrassing about that label in particular, and reactivates a taboo many people are making a passionate effort to shift.

This retroactive application of shame rears up again in “The Witches.” Even if she is a cashier in a supermarket, a scientist or a businessman, the witches will still hunt children no matter what they are doing. In Dahl’s day, women were less likely to do certain jobs than they are now, and we can accept in good faith that things have changed for the better. Here’s to everyone typing their own emails! However many people still work as cashiers, which is perfectly respectable. The upgrade to “top scientist” is also thought of as aspirational, but it also bears a trace of snobbery.

Other updates might have flown under the radar had they not been so poorly written. In “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “Each man will have a gun and a flashlight” has become “Each person will have a person and a flashlight.” Badger sat and put a paw around his son, now he’s put a paw around the small badger. One suspects that Dahl would be every bit as offended by an editor unable to swerve unnecessary repetition as he would by the inference of sexism.

This recurrent example of clumsiness shows a less than precise eye for detail than one would hope for from the arbiters of correctness. Mrs. Silver can’t be attractive. Being kind and being attractive are mutually exclusive, who should say that attractiveness is physical? The implication that such things are true erases the nuances that give characters depth, and flattens the edges that give writing character. In some cases, the quest for seemliness strips Dahl’s words of meaning altogether. In the 2022 version of “George’s Marvellous Medicine,” a line describing the miraculous effects of George’s potion is changed from “Look at you! You’re standing up all on your own and you’re not even using a stick!” to “Look at you! You are full of beans!

There is something absurd, however, about the amount of preening occasioned by a handful of alterations to books about Brobdingnagian fruit and talking insects. Whatever Dahl’s place in the annals of 20th-century children’s fiction, it is striking that these culture war arguments somehow always revolve around authors like him and Dr. Seuss; one is forced to confront the distinctly horrifying possibility that “If I Ran the Zoo” and “James and the Giant Peach” are the only books that millions of Anglophone readers have ever actually finished. The level of attention brought to the books sold by tens of thousands of copies each year should tell us a lot about how reader attention is received.

The British arm of Penguin Random House children’s has a new collection of stories from the author, “The Roald Dahl Classic Collection.” Not everything will be exactly the same. It’s described as 17 titles that will be included in the new children’s collection from Puffin that are designed for children who are navigating lit content independently for the first time.

Susan Nossel, the PEN America CEO, and his books “Horsey Face”, “It’s the least of my offenses,” and “I’m sorry to hear that you’re offended”

Suzanne Nossel is the CEO of PEN America, and she found this week’s debate to be “heartening”. There is a fair amount of unity, but not total unity, in the debate that happened over the last week. “This is not the right answer to what’s going to happen if you’re offended,” Nossel told NPR. “People would rather deal with the original work, have to understand it and explain it to their children, and maybe even have someone come in and scrub away anything that people might object to.”

It is believed that his books’ appeal is due to his mischievous, mean-spiritedness. Words such as “horsey face” and “idiots” could be considered the least of his offenses.