In June, Alfred A. Knopf will release Judy Blume’s new adult fiction book In the Unlikely Event. The story came to Blume from an event back in the 1950’s where three plane crashes descended on her hometown of Elizabeth, N.J. within a two-month period.
Usually, Blume relies much more on life experiences to inspire her storytelling. For this project, she elected to try a different creative process and conducted extensive research to inform her writing.
Here’s more from The New York Times: “She spent hours at the Key West library, going through Microfilm in a room so dusty she wore a surgical mask, until her husband bought her a Microfilm machine on eBay to use at home. As she started writing, she lavishly layered in the historical details that define the small, specific universe of the book: the names of the department stores in Elizabeth where each person would have shopped, the songs and jingles that ran through their minds, the way young women stored their angora sweaters in the freezer to keep them from shedding. Her characters’ lives, and how the crashes changed them, started to take shape in her mind.”