Happy 71st to Judy Blume, the American writer whose books taught several generations of young adults that sometimes kids are as cruel as Nazis, sometimes kids are obsessed with Nazis, sometimes kids find confusing moisture in their underpants (menstruation for girls, nocturnal emissions for boys), sometimes parents get divorced, sometimes models get scoliosis, and sometimes wangs have names.

My all-time favorite Judy Blume book: Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, the nearest thing she ever wrote to autobiography, the plot of which is neatly summed up in this Sally J. Freedman-related rhetorical question from Jezebel:

Okay, everyone, quick poll: raise your hand if, after V-Day, you want your brother to get sick with nephritis so your dentist father can send you, your mom and your bubeh from NJ down to Miami for the winter to help him get better and you can go to school in a trailer and bike around being afraid that your neighbor, Mr. Zavosky, is Hitler, while you get your braid tugged by a boy you only later figure out you like and your grandmother calls you "mumeshana" and you dream of your dead cousins, Lila and Tante Rose, killed in the Holocaust, and you drink cocoa with whiskey because you're trying to make the creme de cacao your Mom drank in Cuba, and then you get stung by a Man O' War and complimented by said brother on being braver than he thought and catch Virus X and eat two bowls of chicken with rice soup, then try on some toe shoes.

My all-time favorite fan-mail story: After reading Blubber in 1980, I wrote Judy Blume a love letter, and she wrote me back, by hand, on fancy New Mexico-styled stationery.