Mark Oppenheimer ’92 is just a few hours from heading out the door of his Connecticut home and driving to Boston, another stop in promoting his newest book, Judy Blume: A Life. But first things first. He’s wrangling some laundry. There seems to be a glitch. “Hold on one second,” he says during the interview. “What did I do? ... I think I’m giving you the attention and not the laundry.” 

Mark’s life right about now is a bit like he’s on spin cycle. Round and round he goes. To this city and that city. “Last week I was in Madison, Conn., then New Jersey then North Carolina then Florida,” he says. “Today Boston, tomorrow Chicago, the next day Milwaukee, next week St. Louis. ... It’s a wonderful, thrilling month of taking my book on the road.” 

His biography of Ms. Blume is frank, as one would expect of a journalist who has written for newspapers such as The New York Times and magazines such as The New Republic, hosted a podcast for eight years about Jewish life and culture, taught courses at Yale and Wesleyan, contributed to radio programs, and earned recognition as an historian of religion. The book has been called thoughtful, thorough, revealing, and tender. Ms. Blume agreed to be interviewed extensively, and Mark had access to much of her archives in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. A New York Times review said Mark spoke to more than 100 people for the book.  

Mark started the project in the summer of 2022. He sent a draft of the book to Ms. Blume, and she got back to him in 2024 with suggested revisions. They have not been in touch since early 2025, he says, shortly before the book went into production. 

“I made some changes and not others, and they were incorporated into the final manuscript sent to the publisher,” he says. Ms. Blume was not part of that process. 

He said it was a privilege to have her look over the draft, but he didn’t agree with all of the suggestions.  “Ultimately the final product is mine, and I stand behind it,” he says. “The errors are all mine, as they say, but having her eyeballs on a draft of it definitely made the book much better.” 

The book was published March 10. 

Mark grew up reading Ms. Blume’s books.  

“As a young boy I really enjoyed reading, but the books that were recommended to me were usually the wrong books,” Mark says. “A lot people recommend for boys in particular a lot of fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, adventure, basically everything but realism. And I was a kid who really wanted to read about other kids doing normal things, and Judy was one of the great practitioners of realism for young people, so her books spoke to me in that way.” 

And to many others.   

“First,” Mark said, “Judy has a great ear for dialogue, so you believe you are listening in on authentic conversations. They really ring true. She also tackled a lot of subjects that other books didn’t, some having to do with sexuality, bullying, divorce, religion. She didn’t shy away from the heavy topics. She also created great characters. I think people felt they knew Margaret, they knew Deenie, they knew Blubber, they knew Tony. These were kids that came across as authentic written by someone who seemed to really understand children.” 

The character Margaret comes from her famous book Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, published more than 50 years ago and read by millions. Ms. Blume explores subjects such as adolescence and puberty through 11-year-old Margaret, who does not identify with an organized religion but has a lot of questions in her conversations with God. 

Tackling sensitive subjects at a time when others were not earned Ms. Blume scorn 50 years ago, and through the years her books have made many banned-books lists.  

“They only try to ban books that are reaching people,” Mark says. “So it’s kind of a backhanded compliment when a writer’s books are challenged, and Judy’s books were challenged from the start because they resonated with children and they took on subjects a lot of parents didn’t want their children to be reading about. And the books were immensely popular — they were getting passed from child to child. ... They were being read so much [that] they were falling apart.” 

Ms. Blume’s 29 books have sold more than 92 million copies in 40 languages, according to her website. Mark says he hopes readers of his book walk away “with an appreciation for how Judy created this incredible body of work.”    

Mark says he is not a writer “who pulls all-nighters. Not someone who gets obsessed with my subject.” He says it is important to him to have a life outside of his work. 

He also says it was important for him to have a variety of tasks each day in the process of writing the Judy Blume book — some combination of working in his home office, looking at her transcripts in the Beinecke Library, interviewing someone by phone, and hitting the road to meet someone or see a place that was part of Ms. Blume’s life. “I felt if I kept a good mix, that kept it interesting,” Mark says.  

Mark’s other books include Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate. The memoir is about his years as a high school debater, set mostly at Loomis Chaffee. Wisenheimer is dedicated to faculty member Curt Robison, who has led the debate program for 45 years, and includes “people recognizable on campus to this day.” 

Mark also is proud of his book Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood. In the book he explores the Pittsburgh neighborhood at the center of the 2018 tragedy in which a gunman killed 11 Jews who were worshipping at the Tree of Life Synagogue.  

“I think it is a meaningful account of gun violence and antisemitism in America,” Mark says. “I had written a lot about Jewish life in America, and this also presented an opportunity for me to go into Pittsburgh, which was where my father had grown up. My father was a fifth-generation Pittsburgher, so when this tragedy befell Pittsburgh Jewry, it seemed to be calling out to me as an important topic to write about.” 

Another subject involving Jews in America also has called out to him: the 1958 exclusion of many Jewish students from Princeton eating clubs in what became known as the “Dirty Bicker,” bicker being the process of selecting members for the eating clubs.  

Mark is working on a book exploring this topic, with an expected completion in the spring of 2027. He came across the subject when researching the history of Jews in the Ivy League. He has an eight-episode podcast, “Gatecrashers,” about the hidden history of Jews and the Ivy League. 

Eating clubs date back to 1879, according to princetoneatingclubs.org, which says, “In the early years, the university did not provide students with dining facilities, so students created their own clubs to provide comfortable houses for dining and social life. Eating clubs are unique to Princeton and the most popular dining and social option for students in their junior and senior years.” 

“I was able to interview wonderful men in their 80s who were able to tell me what happened, so it was calling on my chops as a reporter,” Mark says.    

He says those “chops” were developed at Loomis Chaffee, where his daughter Klara is a sophomore. When he was a senior, Mark was awarded multiple honors, including the Sarai Ribicoff Prize in Journalism, the Charles Edgar Sellers Faculty Prize and the Norris E. Orchard Prize in English. “My English classes at Loomis were hugely important to my development as writer,” he says. He cites a few: Andrew Watson’s sophomore class (“a terrific teacher of writing”); Jane Archibald’s Advanced Placement English class (“an excellent laboratory for learning how to write”); Sam Pierson's class on satire (“We read Catch 22, Gulliver’s Travels, Kurt Vonnegut. Just a great class.”); and Sally Knight’s Shakespeare class (“very formative for me”). 

Formative, too, was what happened outside the classroom. 

“I do think Loomis is a school that really educates the whole person,” Mark says, “and that meant having to interact with people not only in the classroom but on the playing field and in extracurriculars. That really did prepare me for being a journalist. If you only know people in one context, I think you’re inhibited when you have to go out in the world and interview all kinds of people. So having to get to know people not just in the classroom, but in theater, debate, wrestling, cross country, and track, really helped shape me as a reporter and someone who was interested in all facets of life.”