Otherwise known as Judy Blume the great

NEW YORK —  Standing at the window in Judy Blume’s Central Park West apartment is like looking out at Fudge territory. Remember Fudge, Peter Hatcher’s incorrigible little brother? Remember when Fudge fell off the jungle gym in Central Park while Sheila (otherwise known as “Sheila the Great”) was supposed to be watching him? Remember how the ambulance had to be called once because Fudge had swallowed Peter’s turtle?

Remember what it felt like the moment you realized that characters in storybooks could be your friends?

“Oh, it is Fudge’s neighborhood,” Blume says, taking in the view. “That’s right! And you know what’s really funny? The ‘Fudge’ books were really set in my best friend from seventh grade -- that’s Mary, we’re still best friends -- in her building. She has always lived around the corner from here.”

We are here, in Blume’s pied-a-terre, because, well, because we finally have the excuse. She recently received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This is a big-deal award, one previously given to the likes of Eudora Welty and Toni Morrison, John Updike and Arthur Miller. This is not the literary company Blume usually keeps.

Blume writes mainly for children, from early elementary school up through adolescence. She writes for the fat girl who gets tortured by the popular kids, and for the quiet ones who painfully watch it go on. She writes for the siblings who feel ignored once they get a younger brother or sister. She writes for kids going through divorce and kids who move and find themselves nervously starting at a new school. She writes for girls who are apprehensive about getting their periods and boys who are embarrassed by the physical side effects that come with their first sexual impulses.

Only Blume wouldn’t put it so obliquely. She’d just call them wet dreams.

For legions of young people -- many of whom are now adults, given that she has been writing for more than 30 years -- Blume is, at heart, a childhood friend. She is the author who knew our world better than any other adult did. She is the one who told us secrets, who took the mystery out of the embarrassing stuff. She made us feel normal. She made us feel understood.

And so now we have seized on this award as an opportunity to meet the writer. To know her, as she has always seemed to have known us. How often, after all, do you get the chance to rediscover an old friend?

Blume is curled up on the sofa in her living room, ready to visit. It is tempting to say she looks waiflike, so slight and delicate are her features, but there is an energy to her that makes that word seem inappropriate. Girlish, perhaps, is better. This, we think, is perfect. She’s 66, yes, but Blume was never an actual age for us -- other than, of course, the age of the characters she created. She must always be youthful.

“My son says that all I need to do now is sit back and collect awards,” she says, and then laughs out loud at the thought that this somehow means she’s ready to be put out to pasture. “I was, like, noooo! That’s not what I want my future to be.”

Oh no. Blume has movies to make now -- earlier this year, she (along with her director son, Lawrence Blume, and producer Jane Startz) signed a multi-picture deal with Walt Disney Studios to adapt her novels, starting with “Deenie.” Glamour magazine just made her a woman of the year. And there’s the National Book Award. Apparently, this is her time to be hip.

“It’s like a book tour, but you don’t have to travel,” she says. “A lot of attention coming at a time in my life when I don’t really need or want that much attention. But it’s lovely.”

Blume’s work may be better known for popular appeal than critical acclaim; she’s had mixed reviews, but her 23 books have sold more than 75 million copies worldwide. We snatched up the “Fudge” series (which includes her most popular children’s book, “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing”) and so desperately wanted more that we begged her -- through letters, e-mail and posts on her website -- to write another installment, “Double Fudge,” just two years ago. At puberty, it was copies of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” (about a girl worried about her religious identification and her changing body) or “Then Again, Maybe I Won’t” (about a boy coping with his budding sexuality) or, in many cases, both. “Forever” was the book passed around among friends in their teens, each reading it surreptitiously under the bedcovers, sure that its subject matter -- a girl’s first experience with love and sex -- was something parents would label contraband.

Others got the point: Blume made sense of things in simple, familiar terms. The world she wrote about felt real.

“People say, ‘Do you feel responsible?’ ” Blume says, sighing, when asked about adult protests over her subject matter. “Do I feel responsible? The responsibility, as I see it, is first to be honest. To be honest with your characters. And that, for me, includes the language, which gets me in trouble.”

So how did she know all that stuff about us?

Part of it, Blume says, is that she was raising her own kids during much of the time she was writing. She was, as she puts it, “very tuned in to the school bus culture.” Part of it also is her ability, when she writes, to retreat into the world she’s writing about, to almost get lost in it. “We’ve all felt those emotions, haven’t we?” she says. “We’ve all been through it.”

She just remembers it more vividly than most.

We want to know what Judy Blume thinks about raising adolescents (“It was not my favorite part of being a parent,” she says dryly). We want to know about her kids, her homes -- in Key West and on Martha’s Vineyard -- and her plans for the future. She’d like to do a set of stories about the characters in her first book, a children’s book, “The Pain and the Great One.” She was working on that when this whole National Book Award hullabaloo started. Suddenly, it seemed she was in a constant whirlwind.

“I didn’t expect all of this,” she says. “I thought my last book tour was it. It was the book tour to end all book tours.”

That came in 1998, when the third of her adult novels, “Summer Sisters,” was released. Blume agonized over the story of two friends who summer together every year on Martha’s Vineyard. It took years to write, and when it was finally finished, Blume turned to her second husband, George Cooper, in horror.

“You have to help me get this book back,” she remembers telling him. “We’re going to give back the advance and we’re going to stop this book. I’ve had a wonderful, long career and I don’t want to go out this way.”

Cooper was bemused. “Why don’t you just leave the country,” he told her. “Come back in a few months and it’ll all be over.”

The book wasn’t the flop Blume feared. It was a huge success, her bestselling book ever, and went to No. 1 on several lists. At book signings across the country, she found herself surrounded by women desperate to reach out to her, thank her, share their stories.

“I thought that should be my last book tour,” Blume says, “because I met all these twentysomethings, thirtysomethings, who had grown up on my books.”

It happened again a few weeks ago, when she was in Boston for a benefit organized by author Alice Hoffman. There she met a woman who had come from San Diego to meet her.

“She told me something I always hear,” Blume says. “She told me, ‘You saved my life when I was young and my parents were splitting up and you were my friend.’ ”