Since 1969, Blume has published 29 books, garnering dozens of awards. Because I always felt that I, too, would die young.' I felt that the second I sent off a manuscript - this was even before anything was accepted for publication - I was on to the next one.

'And when I started to write, I was in that same kind of hurry that mother had with her sweaters.

'My mother told me once that she had her talk with God whenever she started a new sweater: 'Please don't take me in the middle of the sweater.' And as soon as she finished knitting a sweater and it was blocked and put together, she already had the wool to start the next sweater so that nothing bad would happen. There was a small, almost imperceptible sob. And my 25-year-old cousin died earlier that spring, leaving a 2-year-old baby. When I was 21, my father died that summer a few weeks before my wedding. So I grew up sitting shiva and not just for those aunts and uncles. I grew up sitting shiva, do you know what that is? My father was the youngest of seven siblings. 'But you know what? I've always felt that way. She is a cheerful conversationalist, and yet the monologue that followed was ruminative and self-reflective: 'I just have to live long enough to finish it.'īlume chooses her words carefully, stopping every so often to gather her thoughts. And anyway, I had to stop writing it for two years because we were involved with writing and making the movie.

'That's a joke because I've had to put it away these few months until the movie promotion is over and then I'll take it out again this summer. 'I'm writing a novel right now,' Blume said. The movie opens in theaters next weekend and it has been an all-consuming project for Blume. (She also has a daughter, Randy, both from her first marriage.) These last few years she's been focused on a movie adaptation of her 1981 novel 'Tiger Eyes' - amazingly, it is the first film slated for theatrical release to be made from one of her books - directed by her son, Lawrence. Born in 1938 and raised in Elizabeth, N.J., she and third husband George, a retired law professor, keep an apartment in New York City but spend most of their time in Key West, where he runs an art house cinema and she continues to write.

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