The Novel: Wifey, the first adult novel published by the phenomenally popular children's author Judy Blume, tells the story of Sandy Pressman, an attractive, college educated wife and
mother in her early thirties who lives with her successful businessman husband
Norman and their two children in suburban New Jersey. Set at the beginning of the 1970s, the
book examines — in an amusingly candid and sometimes ribald manner — Sandy's emotional
dissatisfaction and delayed sexual awakening, offering the reader a decidedly feminine view of life in middle class mid-century North America that earned the ire of many a male chauvinist pig for its realistic portrayal of marriage and the compromises women were (and in many cases still are) expected to make in exchange for hypocritical promises of 'security' and 'stability.'
Sandy is the quintessential product of her conservative Jewish upbringing, a woman who has spent her life being the 'good little girl' her parents wanted her to be and the 'good little wife' she was trained and inevitably expected to become by them and the rest of her family. But life with her husband Norman, comfortable though it is despite his occasional bullying and her being afflicted with various minor illnesses, has become stifling and unfulfilling, producing feelings of disenchantment and ennui she's unable to shake off by participating in the activities — joining the Country Club and taking up golf and tennis, building an expensive new house, sending her kids off to summer camp for the first time — that a young wife and mother is automatically expected to find socially and spiritually rewarding.
What Sandy craves most is a genuine sense of connection with another human
being in both the physical and emotional sense of the term — something she's never really known with Norman who, despite his grudgingly professed love for her, remains unwilling to experiment in the bedroom, preferring to stick to a sexual routine that's become as predictable as it has always been perfunctory. 'One bed for
Norman,' we're told, 'with cool, crisp sheets… And one bed for Sandy, where once a
week, on Saturday nights, if she didn't have her period, they did
it. A Jewish nymphomaniac. They fucked in her bed, then Norman went
to wash his hands and penis, making Sandy feel dirty and ashamed. He'd
climb into his own bed then, into his clean, cool sheets, and he'd fall
asleep in seconds, never any tossing, turning, sighing. Never any need
to hold hands, cuddle, or laugh quietly with her. Three to five minutes from start to finish.'
But this is the early 1970s, a time when women of all ages are being encouraged, thanks to the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, to actively pursue their own contentment by whatever means available to them. Sandy is no stranger to these concepts thanks to her uninhibited college friend Lisbeth, a woman who spends each Thursday night making love to other men while her husband Vincent spends his own 'night off' making love to other women. While Sandy has no intention of adopting Lisbeth's free-and-easy swinger lifestyle, she is having a dalliance of sorts with an anonymous
flasher, a man who likes to park his motorcycle on her front lawn early in the morning and enthusiastically
masturbate in full view of her bedroom window.
Sandy has no idea who this mysterious masturbator is, assuming only that he's the same man who periodically calls her on the telephone to politely enquire if she's ready to fuck him today. Sometimes she wonders if he might be her first serious boyfriend Shep Resnick, the exciting older man who introduced her to sex — an introduction that did not include intercourse as such — before he was drafted into the army and she reluctantly broke up with him. Sandy hasn't set eyes on Shep for eight years, when she and Norman crossed paths with him and his wife Rhoda at a restaurant. Could Shep be her mysterious self-abusing admirer? While this thought unsettles Sandy on one level, she can't help but feel aroused by it on a purely sexual level.
 |
Pocket Books US, c 1979
|
For the present, however, Sandy remains unhappily stuck with Norman, the man she met in college and lost her
virginity to in less than ideal circumstances on their wedding night. Sometimes she finds herself wishing that her husband — who keeps pressuring her
to make new friends at the club and improve at tennis
and golf despite her clumsiness and lack of interest in all forms of sport — would drop dead. 'Because then,' she guiltily realizes, 'she'd
be free. Oh, she knew that was a terrible thought, a wicked thought
and she certainly didn't wish him a long, horrible, cancerous death…
She'd never been free, could only imagine what it was like. She'd never
been on her own. She'd gone from [her parents] Mona and Ivan straight to Norman. Little girl to little wife.'
As the summer progresses, Sandy finds herself growing increasingly frustrated with Norman and the unfulfilling, rigidly circumscribed marriage they endure. And her frustration continues to grow when she spots Shep Resnick on a train one afternoon on her way home from a visit to New York. Too shy and flustered to approach her former beau again, Sandy can only fantasize about what life might have been like had she married him — fantasies that become much harder to dismiss as girlish folly when she and Norman once again cross paths with Shep and Rhoda at a Country Club party.
Following dinner and a few too many drinks on her part, Shep approaches Sandy and asks her to dance. He soon feels embolded to enquire if she 'plays around'
and, when Sandy says no, suggests they talk a stroll around the pool to help clear their heads. As soon as they're outside and conveniently out of sight behind the cabana, Shep takes Sandy in his arms and kisses her. 'He still had that delicious way of kissing,' she discovers, 'licking
the corners of her mouth, running his tongue along her teeth, sucking
on her lower lip… How different from Norman's cold, toothpaste kisses.
Shep tasted of wine, of salad dressing, of sex. Shep was hard. Oh yes,
she could feel it against her.' Deeply aroused by her former boyfriend's obviously rekindled desire for her, Sandy
nevertheless pushes Shep away, only to see him immediately lose interest
in trying to take things any further. After suggesting that she give him a call if she ever changes her mind about sleeping with him, Shep walks away,
leaving Sandy to return indoors alone.
The following evening sees Sandy and Norman attend another party, this time a pool party held at the lavish new home recently purchased by Sandy's sister Myra and her gynecologist brother-in-law Gordon. (It was at their wedding, where she served as Myra's seventeen year old bridesmaid, that she first met Shep.) When the behavior of the drunken male guests becomes too raucous for her liking, Sandy, more than a little drunk herself by now, seeks refuge in Gordon's darkened study where she attempts to make sense of her feelings about Shep and everything he formerly meant to her. She's still attempting to process these feelings when Gordon, also drunk and wearing only a swimsuit as she herself is, enters the room and begins to complain about the 'shittiness' of his life. Soon Gordon is sharing a lot of other feelings with Sandy, including the feelings of lust she inspires in him each time she visits his office for her regular gynecological examinations. Gordon begs to be allowed to make his 'penis dance inside her' and Sandy lets him, an experience that ends with her brother-in-law becoming overwhelmed by remorse and sobbing in her arms like a traumatized child.
As off-putting as her encounter with Gordon was in almost every respect — although the sex, she's honest enough to admit to herself, was not half bad — it does break down the last of Sandy's childhood inhibitions regarding the sanctity of marriage. At Lisbeth's insistence she makes a Thursday night dinner date with her college professor husband Vincent, a man who is, in almost every respect, the physical opposite of Shep, Gordon and her own unsuspecting, hypercritical husband. But the date ends awkwardly for Sandy, with Vincent losing his erection after taking her back to his office for sex and confessing, somewhat shamefully, that this always happens when he tries to sleep with women other than Lisbeth because he doesn't really enjoy being in an open marriage. Unwilling to try sex with Vincent again, Sandy does the only thing she can do as a disempowered wife and returns to New Jersey and her safe if now even more unsatisfying life with the still clueless Norman.
But the episode with Vincent is far from being the end of Sandy's one woman sexual revolution. Throwing caution to the wind — something much easier to do without her children around to monopolize her attention — she soon calls Shep and arranges to meet him at a nearby motel. 'She wasn't sure,' she wonders, 'if she liked the sex best or the closeness following. She felt so safe sleeping in his arms, their bodies curved around each other.' But her happiness is almost spoiled by Shep talking to her about his wife Rhoda. 'She didn't want to think about Rhoda, didn't want to acknowledge her existence… She wished Rhoda were dead. Rhoda and Norman, killed in an accident together. How easy that would make it for them… She could imagine what they'd say when they found out she was going to divorce Norman and marry Shep. Norman wouldn't believe her at first, wouldn't take her seriously… I'm in love with another man,' she imagines herself calmly informing her apoplectic husband less than a week into her renewed romance with Shep, 'and we're going to be married. It's very easy to understand if you try.'
In Sandy's mind her marriage to Shep is already a foregone conclusion, lacking only the necessary documentation required to make the arrangement a legally binding one. But it's not long before reality begins to intrude on these dreams of a blissfully perfect future. On a weekend trip to Maine with her lover — a stolen, hastily arranged pleasure for both of them — Sandy begins to notice how other women look at Shep. She can't help feeling jealous, not only of the attention these women pay him and his habit of shamelessly rewarding it with slyly lascivious glances but also of their beauty, youth and freedom, things she once possessed herself but will never possess again, she realizes, even if they do manage to divorce their respective spouses and eventually become man and wife.
And it turns out that Shep, for all his talk of loving her and wanting them to be together, is not in any sense prepared to leave his wife. For all his philandering — Sandy is not his first mistress nor, it's clearly implied, is she likely to be his last — he intends to stay with Rhoda and their children, two of whom are recently adopted refugees from war-torn Vietnam. Shep wants to continue their current arrangement but Sandy, shattered and humiliated, refuses to live that way and tells him so, eliciting the response that she should still leave Norman and do whatever she needs to do in order to 'find herself.' The answer she offers Shep speaks volumes: "I don't know where to look."
Sandy's problems only multiply following the loss of her relationship with Shep. She soon learns that she may have contracted gonorrhea, possibly from Vincent who may have contracted it from Lisbeth via one of her Thursday night hook-ups — a revelation that comes with its own set of potentially serious if somewhat farcical consequences.
 |
Penguin Books, 2004
|
As
expected, Norman hits the roof when he learns that Sandy been sleeping
with other men, angrily demanding to know who
she's been seeing behind his back. This time, however, Sandy finds the strength to argue with him, eventually fleeing to their attic while Norman, needing to calm down, takes their dog for a long walk around the neighborhood.
In the attic Sandy finds a stack of recently mailed letters sent to Norman from a woman named Brenda Partington
Yevelenski in which she expresses her appreciation for the $5000 he
loaned her — money, it transpires, that allowed her to open a restaurant following her
divorce. The letters also make it undeniably clear that Brenda and Norman were once in a relationship, a union that Brenda hoped to revive until Norman refused to do this out of loyalty to her, his suddenly demanding and adulterous 'little wifey.' Rather
than hypocritically hating Brenda for trying to steal her husband from her, Sandy instead finds herself envying the financial and social independence her rival apparently enjoys. 'She had a sudden desire to call Brenda, to ask her what Norman had really
been like way back then. Because she could see now that there must
have been another Norman. A Norman who dreamed of becoming a biologist…
of saving the world. A Norman who loved intensely. Could that Norman
still be locked inside the Norman she knew, just as another Sandy was
inside her, struggling to get out?'
The
next day, which happens to be the day before their twelfth wedding
anniversary, Sandy awakens to find her husband gone and the house completely
silent. She has no idea if she and Norman are going to separate or
stay together, an issue that remains unresolved even after he walks in from work at the usual time, carrying a pizza for their dinner. They talk again,
more honestly than they probably ever have, and agree to try to stop
hurting each other, with Norman even apologizing for pushing her too
hard to fit in at the Country Club. In return he asks
Sandy to accept him as he is and try to relax, insisting their
marriage can and will survive if only she'll stop questioning its validity so frequently. Norman
even agrees to try a few new things in bed, things that Sandy freely admits to having
done and enjoyed with Shep.
It remains to be seen, of course, if any of this will make any difference to Sandy's life in the long run or if these compromises,
small though they are on Norman's part, will be enough to keep them together after their kids return from camp and their life slips back into its predictable well-worn groove. The airing of grievances is a step in the right
direction but it takes more than that to establish a connection and
connection is still what Sandy craves along with a sense of what it may mean to live her life with some degree of autonomy and the possibility of obtaining some sense of ongoing fulfilment. What remains unclear, to her and the reader, is whether Sandy has any chance of finding these things without making some kind of drastic change in her life. Nor is it insignificant that all of the men she's involved with — Norman, Gordon, Vincent, the wrongly idealized Shep, even her anonymous masturbating admirer — ultimately fail to give her what she wants, be it sustained sexual satisfaction or true emotional commitment or even a clue, in the case of the latter, as to their true identity.
Wifey quickly rose to the top of the national bestseller list in 1978 and it's not difficult to explain what made it so popular. Its combination of humour, acute social observation and plainspoken detail concerning the facts not only of sex but of marriage as an institution designed for no other purpose, it seemed, than to deny women their individuality and the right to any kind of self-determination must have a struck a deep chord with readers of Blume's generation, women who had begun to question traditional gender roles and what had to be sacrificed in order to be perceived as someone who was 'successfully' abiding by them. The novel remains a perfect literary snapshot of its time, showing what frustrated 1970s wives like Sandy were really dealing with behind the locked doors of their upscale suburban ranch houses and how marital relations were changing both in and out of the bedroom, aided and abetted by the rising divorce rate and the shift from a culture of monogamy to one that had begun to view infidelity as a stepping stone to a sexier, more satisfying lifestyle. Sandy often feels confused, is often taken for granted and marginalized by Norman and the other men she knows, but she refuses to give up searching for what will ultimately provide her with some measure of control over her own life. It is this willingness to search, Blume implies, and to keep searching in the face of what can sometimes be very strident male opposition, that truly matters in the end.
 |
JUDY BLUME, c 1978
|
The Writer: As a bestselling writer of unsparingly honest children's, young adult and adult fiction, Judy Blume has never been a stranger to controversy. When the first attempts were made to ban her work in the early 1980s, she immediately fought back, joining the National Coalition Against Censorship and urging her fellow writers to do the same. 'When I started, in the 70s,' she remembered in a 2014 interview, 'it was a good time for children's book
writers. Children's reading was much freer than in the 80s, when
censorship started; when we elected Ronald Reagan and the conservatives
decided that they would decide not just what their children would read
but what all children would read, it went crazy. My feeling in the
beginning was wait, this is America: we don't have censorship, we have,
you know, freedom to read, freedom to write, freedom of the press, we
don't do this, we don't ban books. But then they did.'
Judy Blume (née Sussman) was born in the city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, on 12 February 1938 to homemaker Esther Sussman and dentist Rudolph Sussman. She attended Battin High School, Boston University and New York University, graduating from the latter in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts in Education. By that time she had been married to lawyer John M Blume for two years. Their daughter Randy was born shortly after Blume graduated from college and was followed in 1963 by their son Larry.
A happy and devoted mother, Blume began inventing stories for her children when they were toddlers — poor imitations, she freely admitted, of The Cat In The Hat and other works by Dr Seuss (the pen name of Theodore Seuss Geisel) — and began trying to turn these into rhyming picture books when they entered pre-school and she finally had time to enrol in a writing course at her former alma mater. 'When the class ended after one semester,' she later recalled, 'I took it again. And before the end of the second semester a few of my stories were accepted for publication in small magazines.' The class also forced her to transform one of these stories into what would become her first novel for young adults.
This book, titled Iggie's House, was published in 1970 and was followed that same year by Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret which went on to become a national and international bestseller and remains perhaps Blume's most beloved, most widely read work of fiction. The story of a sixth grade girl who struggles to feel accepted because her mother is Christian and her father is Jewish, it became notorious for its frank depictions of puberty and menstruation and the title character's engagingly personal, non-sectarian religious beliefs. Although it went on to be named 'Outstanding Book of the Year' by The New York Times, it became almost immediately controversial, with many school boards attempting to ban it from school libraries right across North America. Sadly, these efforts to ban Blume's work would persist through the 1980s and 1990s and well into the new millennium.
The 1970s saw Blume publish many other bestselling children's and YA titles, including Then Again, Maybe I Won't (1971), Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972), Deenie (1973) and Forever… (1975), with the latter again proving to be highly controversial because it dared to depict the first sexual encounter between its teenaged female protagonist and her boyfriend along with the eventual ending of their relationship. Sex was also the dominant theme of Wifey, Blume's first adult novel which appeared in 1978 and, like its predecessors, became another national bestseller. Blume would go on to publish three more adult novels including Smart Women (1983), Summer Sisters (1998) and In the Unlikely Event (2015), the latter being inspired by a trio of unrelated airline crashes that occurred near her hometown of Elizabeth when she was a girl.
Blume's first marriage ended in 1975, with her going on to marry her second husband, the physicist Thomas A Kitchens, later that same year. Blume and her children moved from New Jersey to New Mexico, where her new husband worked, but this marriage likewise ended in divorce in 1978. She has been happily married since 1987 to former law professor George Cooper and runs a not-for-profit bookstore with him in their hometown of Key West, Florida where she can often be found working behind the counter, recommending books to curious customers.
 |
JUDY BLUME, c 2015
|
The recipient of many literary awards, Blume was most recently honored with the 2017 EB White Award for Lifetime Achievement in Children's Literature and a 2020 prize from the Author's Guild Foundation for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community. She remains a popular and beloved writer despite the many criticisms leveled at her over the years by conservative organizations, parents and critics who feel her work places too much emphasis on physicality and sexuality and not enough emphasis on the moral growth of her characters. But these criticisms never stopped her from writing. 'For me,' she once admitted, 'writing has its ups and downs. After I had written more than ten
books I thought seriously about quitting. I felt I couldn’t take the
loneliness anymore. I thought I would rather be anything than a writer. But I’ve finally come to appreciate the freedom of writing. I accept the
fact that it’s hard and solitary work. And I worry about running out of
ideas or repeating myself. So I’m always looking for new challenges.'
Blume was the subject of a 2023 feature length documentary film titled Forever Judy Blume, the release of which coincided with the first-ever film adaptation of Are You There, God? It's Me Margaret starring Abby Ryder Forston, Rachel McAdams, Benny Safdie and Kathy Bates.
