Newsweek Q&A with Judy Blume.

From Newsweek:

Why have you chosen to devote so many of your books to the subject of adolescence and coming of age?

I was wildly interested in puberty as a child. Even though I was envied for having a warm and loving father, one who claimed I could talk to him about anything, I never actually asked him the questions I had. I waited for him to tell me. And then I didn't always understand what he was saying. I was so curious about sex. I looked it up in the encyclopedia, but all I found were pages and pages of plants and how they reproduce. I never found characters in children's books that I could identify with. Looking back to the young woman I was in my 20s, I wanted to write the kinds of books I would have liked to have read.