An Extraordinary Intergenerational Friendship

Writing a biography of a publishing legend

At age 25, working as a secretary for Doubleday, Judith Jones found the manuscript for The Diary of Anne Frank in the slush pile. Later, as an editor, she brought Julia Child and dozens of other cookbook authors to American audiences. She edited John Updike and Anne Tyler. She rejected Alice Munro — twice! She spent 57 years at Knopf, arguably the most venerable publishing house in America. In 2013, Sara B. Franklin met Jones, then 88, to begin a series of oral histories for the Julia Child Foundation. This book, The Editor, is partially the result of those histories — but it is also the story of a friendship, and grappling with how to tell the story of a person with a life as textured, documented, and purposefully invisible as Jones’s.

Even if you have no interest in the publishing industry, this interview will lead you somewhere interesting — particularly when it comes to the purposes of oral history and the fruits of intergenerational friendship.

You can find more from Sara B. Franklin here and buy The Editor here.

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As a means of introducing readers to Judith Jones, I’m going to ask you to do something very difficult: what connects Judith Jones’ editorial projects? Or more simply: what makes something a Judith Jones book? (Sidenote: Your book was pitched to me in part as “the woman who found The Diary of Anne Frank in the slush pile,” and I’m also curious how much you think of that book as a typical or atypical Judith book) 

I love this question, in part because it’s so difficult to try to answer. Judith was atypical of editors of her time—and would still be, in the field today—for the breadth of her work. She edited poetry and novels, cookbooks, memoir, reported journalism, academic scholarship, and narrative non-fiction, all. Among the more than 100 writers whose books Judith had a hand in shaping during her 57-year career at Knopf are iconic cookbook authors Julia Child, Claudia Roden, Edna Lewis, Lidia Bastianich, James Beard, MFK Fisher, and Madhur Jaffrey; renowned poets Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, and Langston Hughes; and canonical writers of prose including Anne Tyler, John Updike, John Hersey, and Elizabeth Bowen. Inevitably, across a career so long and varied, her taste and style changed over time. The difficulty of pinpointing what, exactly, links Judith’s books to one another is, in some ways, a testament to her deftness and skill.

It's both interesting and helpful to trace the thread of her politics—what I call a quiet resistance—through Judith’s work. She took great joy in making mischief all her life, but she often did it while performing a kind of buttoned-up conventionality that appeared to many, at surface, like old-fashioned conservatism. But that was a careful ruse on Judith’s part, a disguise that worked to her advantage, granting her more leeway within The Literary Establishment to work how, and with whom, she wanted. She was seldom overtly confrontational, but her mischievous nature shows up in her career-long interest in helping shape and publish books that moved the needle of cultural conversation, taste, and what (and who) was seen as normative or proprietary. Judith wasn’t afraid of making good trouble, though she rarely, if ever, wanted to be identified as a ringleader. 

On a larger, more—how shall I put it? Philosophical? Spiritual? Meta?—level, what I see as the most powerful common thread connecting Judith’s books is an acknowledgement—sometimes tacit, sometimes more explicit—of lived experience, both individual or collective, as a powerful and worthy source of knowledge and wisdom. Judith followed the trail of her curiosity about these ways of knowing towards food and cooking, poetry, spiritual texts, novels that explore sex and emotional entanglements of all sorts. She was deeply interested in the ineffable, and endlessly fascinated and motivated by humans’ drive to put language to those experiences. 

Is Anne Frank’s diary a typical Judith Jones book? In some ways, yes: The book is both unique and almost universally resonant because of the singularity of Anne’s voice, and what Judith saw as the book’s potential (now long since proven true) to change the cultural narrative not only about Jews and the Holocaust, but about girls and women—how and what they think, how and why their stories matter.

I also think it’s important to acknowledge what an outlier that book is as an example, for while Judith did discover the manuscript of Anne Frank’s diary from the slush pile and advocated for its publication with her (male) boss at Doubleday’s Parisian office, she didn’t edit it. (There’s a fabulous letter where Judith said she wished to hell she’d had a chance to, though, a letter she wrote after she went to Doubleday once she was back in New York, looking for a job, and was not offered one, despite the fact that the book had become a tremendous success for Doubleday by then). Judith wasn’t credited at all for her role in the book’s publication until much, much later in her life. 

You came to Jones’ writing in a pretty circuitous way — and then were able to develop a relationship with her (and, ultimately, her papers!) that many historians dream about. Can you tell us some of that story, and how it both made your work simultaneously more and less straightforward? (I love, for instance, how you relate that Judith often surprised both you and herself in the stories she recalled — but those sorts of revelations and hindsight are so difficult to reconcile with the historical record of her own correspondence, etc.)

Ours was an extraordinary intergenerational friendship—a love story, really—that lasted until Judith’s death in August of 2017, and, through the process of researching and writing The Editor, has, for me, has continued to deepen since.

Judith and I first met at her Upper East Side apartment in January of 2013. We’d been set up on a blind date of sorts: Judith was just a year retired from her position as senior editor and vice president of Knopf, and the folks at the Julia Child Foundation (JCF) had had the foresight to recognize that the editor’s stories were invaluable and should be collected.

Judith, then eighty-eight years old (I was twenty-six), was something of a hero to me. I’d first learned about her when I picked up her 2007 memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, at random in a bookstore near my college campus. I’d never heard Judith’s name before, but her book’s subtitle caught my eye; I’d always loved to eat and had become very interested in food, and had learned to cook by watching The Food Network and experimenting with a handful of dusty, workhorse cookbooks in our suburban kitchen. I’d also always loved books and writing, and began (privately) aspiring to write about food for a living. When I discovered Judith Jones, it felt like I’d found someone whose life and work offered both a model and some practical tips for finding my own way into that world. 

So when, in the fall of 2012, during my first term as a PhD student, I caught wind of the JCF’s plans to pursue an oral history project with Judith, I wrote volunteered to be of use in whatever way I could. I thought maybe I’d be able to help with preparatory research for some more practiced (and senior) lead interviewer. Best case, I hoped I’d get to shake Judith’s hand. So I was both surprised and completely over the moon when the foundation’s board members said the job of collecting Judith’s oral histories was mine, as long as Judith and I met and got on well enough to work together. 

I was incredibly nervous to meet Judith. When she came to greet me at her apartment door, I was surprised to see that she was tiny—no more than five feet. I marveled that such a giant could be so small. 

I suppose I should have had questions for her at the ready, but she must have sensed my unease. A true editor, she subtly coaxed me into talking about myself as a starting point. We compared the merits of New York City and rural New England, shared feelings and stories about books, romance, and leftovers. We talked for an hour or so, and afterwards, Judith said she’d work with me on the interviews. I was elated. 

As I was getting ready to leave, Judith asked what I did for work. A bit of freelance writing, I told her, but I’d just started graduate school, and that took up most of my time. I told her I wasn’t sure academia was right for me. I told her what I really wanted to do was write about food. Judith put a hand on my shoulder, looked me straight in the eye, and said: “Sometimes, you just find your own way.” 

What began that day evolved into one of the most influential and enduring relationships of my life. Over cooking and eating so many lunches together, swims in Vermont, walks in Manhattan, Judith became a mentor and beloved friend. She became, in many ways, my editor, too; observing, listening, drawing me out. Helping me discern, organize, and prioritize. She helped me—with such grace and lightness of touch that I hardly recognized it at the time—understand where I might cut, and to what I ought to pay more attention, expand. Not in my writing, in my life. 

As for trying to reconcile revelations from Judith’s and my conversations together with the historical record (her editorial archives, personal correspondence, the interviews I conducted with her colleagues, family, and friends):

By the time I began doing research for the book, I was well aware Judith contained contradictions, and was practiced in different performances of self for different situations and audiences. So I wasn’t surprised that some of the narratives suggested by the archival materials didn’t square neatly with what she’d told me in the context of our relationship, which became personal and intimate. Still, her papers opened up entire chapters of her life—political views, romantic relationships, professional decisions, disappointment and pain—that she’d never volunteered to speak on, and about which I’d never known to ask. That archive helped me situate both what Judith told me directly and what I discovered in those papers within larger contexts, not only of her personal life, but in the history of Knopf, of the publishing industry, and of American culture at large. It also helped me begin to get a grip on her reticence around certain topics and memories. In that way, it actually became easier to conceive of a more complex, nuanced portrait of Judith once I began to broaden my sources. It was exciting.

It was also overwhelming, and difficult for me, ethically. Whereas I felt confident naming and wrestling with the contradictions Judith put forth in our conversations because I’d experienced them with her (in oral history, we call that co-creation of a dialogical primary source), I felt less comfortable dealing with her papers, which felt fixed, in a way. I could ask questions of the archive, but no longer of Judith herself. I had to do a fair bit of what the brilliant Dr. Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation” in order to acknowledge and confront the omissions and absences both in my first person with Judith and from other archival and oral sources, and then do my best to use informed speculation to interpret those silences (what hadn’t been recorded, said, or kept, and why?) to help bridge the gaps narratively. 

When in doubt, my relationship with Judith—what I had experienced and knew of her firsthand—was the north star I always returned to. Intuitively, this felt right to me, but it also stems from my training. In oral history, my field of specialty, we use interviews to elucidate individuals’ perception of their own lives—to explore the sorts of things that rarely make it into “the official record” (for example, the goings-on of domestic life; interpersonal relationships; and all the things that didn’t happen). That kind of historical “evidence”— traditionally disregarded as important academic history and in the genre of biography—is then given equal consideration and weight as factual “events” of history and other kinds of archival sources.

Even if there are parts of Judith’s life I recount in this book that she might have told or interpreted differently (or, for that matter, omitted altogether), I wanted to make sure that, where I had access to Judith’s own words—whether from correspondence in the archives or our conversations—I gave that first person perspective pride of place. I wanted to make the book not only Judith-centric, but, to the extent possible, to give her agency in the telling of her own story. That was my way of honoring her, and the trust she put in me. I felt she deserved that. We all deserve that, to be heard in the stories of our own lives. 

Jones reflected later in life that her time at Bennington College taught her, above all, to “live an audacious life.” I feel like this is a framework for thinking through her unruliness — as a woman in publishing, in her personal life, in her thinking — while also keeping in mind some the privileges that provided her with a safety net (how she got her first job at Doubleday, her parents’ wealth and status, her whiteness). I’d love to hear how you think through her audacity paired with what made it possible. 

Judith’s privilege—property ownership, class privilege, access to education, connections to powerful people, and whiteness—inarguably equipped her with myriad advantages, and helped open doors to formal institutions and informal spaces of (very carefully guarded and gatekept) power. That said, she was still a girl—and later, a woman—born in a particular time, in a particular place, and into a particular social milieu. If she wanted to make use of her “feminine” power in the ways that that particular realm of society allowed, she understood, from her earliest days, that she would have to adhere to the norms of what was expected of her. 

There is a lot of archival proof that suggests Judith never gave the adulthood she’d been groomed for any serious consideration. There are also so many letters from her teens and early twenties that show her wrestling, actively, with  her privilege; while she enjoyed the material advantages of her upbringing, she was disinterested—bordering on ashamed—of her family’s myopia, snobbery, and cloistered self-interest. It took Judith time, and a lot of trial and error, to figure out how she could find a relationship with her family and the world of her upbringing that was reasonably comfortable for her. 

One of the questions I found most interesting to ask while writing this book was what were the forces that drove Judith, internally. Starting in childhood, she’d experienced her desire to feel as strongly as she did her desire to know, in the intellectualized, patriarchal, Western sense of that word. The deeper I went into the archives, the clearer it became that Judith’s desire for embodied knowledge—the kind of knowing that comes from experience and perception rather than school or book-learning—is what fueled her ambition, her editorial taste, and her politics more broadly. 

To have taste is one thing, but to have the power and platform to assert it is another. Where Judith’s privilege most powerfully served her audacity was in the publishing industry, where her own sensibilities became a filter through which to hone and nurture stories that made their way into the public realm, and thereby shaped culture. Judith’s harnessing the advantages of her upbringing and wielding them in defiance of the status quo—both in her personal life and in her career—required both incredible savvy, and a lot of guts. 

I’m fascinated by the careful calibration Judith always did—had to do—to hold her appetites in balance with studying, understanding, and working within institutions and structures of power designed to exclude her. In order to exercise her audacity, she had to “pass” enough to gain, and then keep, entry to certain kinds of spaces, and only then, from the inside, was she able to subvert and disrupt.

I like to ask this of all historians doing archival work and the answers are always so strange and delightful: What was your favorite archival find, and how did it texture or challenge or affirm your ideas about Jones? 

What a question! That’s like asking me to choose my favorite child. There are so many that fundamentally reshaped the story I thought I was going to tell, again and again (Like, for example, discovering that Judith—who insisted not only that she wasn’t a feminist, but disagreed with many of second wave feminism’s tactics and aims—edited Dr. Carolyn Heilbrun, an important feminist thinker and scholar’s 1982 work on androgyny.). But I think the finding I liked most was discovering, in Judith’s letters home from Bennington during WWII, how vehemently she resented the college-wide requirement that students work on the campus farm. She tried all kinds of pleading and trickery to get out of her duties there, especially the role she hated most: plucking chickens.

The irony here is that, within just a few years, her life and, soon thereafter, her work in publishing, would be oriented powerfully towards the production of food. She would go on to cook all kinds of game, from squirrels with Edna Lewis to the tail of a beaver that was threatening to dam up her pond in Vermont. And starting with rooftop herb boxes in the late 1950s, she delighted in growing food (and later raising livestock) for the rest of her life. 

All this to say, seeing Judith’s squeamish, prissy attitude towards farm work during her college years, knowing what I knew about what she published and how she, herself, lived and cooked later in life was actually an early and important clue for me to look out for the ways in which her attitudes towards her body and labor—her own and others’—and prevailing notions of “purity” and its opposites (filth, danger, disgust) changed over time. This was one way I was able to trace Judith’s politics, and support the niggling feeling I’d had since first meeting her that they were actually quite radical, even if she never articulated or claimed them as such. Through working behind the scenes with her authors, Judith expressed her politics quietly and indirectly rather than outright. Still, that streak of radicality powerfully shaped the body of work she edited across her career.

This is ALSO a big question, but I also find your attempt to answer it pulsing through the book: How did Jones help change the way we think about (and the place of) food writing? 

First, I think it’s important to say that it wasn’t just food writing, but food, cooking, eating, and domestic spaces that Judith shaped our thinking around. Food writing is just a means of storytelling about those arenas, as well as many other facets of our culture and everyday lives. Judith helped those topics gain more legitimacy both by making more space for books about them in literary publishing, and by treating those books with the same rigorous editorial attention as any other story or verse.

When Judith developed an interest in cooking and eating, as well as stories about them, as a young girl, her mother, Phyllis, tried to tamp her daughter’s curiosity down. Phyllis made clear to Judith and her sister that cooking was unladylike—both that the work of the kitchen was beneath a girl-who-would-become-woman born into such social standing as the family liked to believe they had, and, what’s more, that to talk about food was as vulgar as speaking openly about sex. 

The way Judith lived and, later, the books about food she edited, challenged notions of what realms of experience were both visible and acceptable in American culture. Food writing, especially the sort Judith published—which focused on home cooks who do the workaday labor of putting food on the table (then, as now, predominantly women) rather than restaurant chefs (then, as now, predominantly men)—brought attention and legitimacy not only to what goes on in the domestic sphere, but who makes the goings-on go. For Judith, helping publish books that give voice to what, why, and how we cook and eat was a way of making space for people who, otherwise, would unlikely be heard from and/or accepted into the public sphere: Judith edited many books about food written by women at a time when it was much easier and more common for men to be published. She also worked on culinary titles by queer men, divorced and single mothers, people who’d fled their homes due to religious and political persecution; a granddaughter of formerly enslaved people, people for whom English was not their native tongue, upwardly mobile people, downwardly mobile people, and an early victim of AIDS. 

One illustrative story I tell in The Editor is about the making and marketing of The Taste of Country Cooking, the first project Judith worked on with chef and food writer Edna Lewis. The book functioned as something of a Trojan horse: the palatable, seemingly unthreatening, form of a cookbook allowed Judith to sneak what might be thought of as controversial history, politics, and people into the homes, hearts, minds, and bodies of people—especially rich, white folks intent on maintaining their stranglehold over power and politics—who might not otherwise be open to such counternarratives. This was part of Judith’s subversive genius. To get someone who might otherwise be contented to live in their bubble of privilege (much like Judith’s own mother was; much like Judith was raised to) to relish Edna Lewis’s strawberry preserves, to learn to velvet chicken the way Irene Kuo instructed, or to bake Bill Neal’s sweet potato pie was to become porous to political ways of thinking and being borne outside the mainstream. Judith, herself, functioned as a Trojan Horse: Because she was white, because she came from money, because she knew how to talk the talk that gave her entry to spaces and institutions of power, she appeared unthreatening. But in using food as a vehicle by which to give voice to people whose histories, religions, languages, indeed, whose very existence in this country has been, at various times (and, in many cases, is still) restricted, censored, and maligned, Judith was powerfully shaping Americans’ individual thinking and our culture as a whole. 

In my conversations with her, Judith insisted on getting across that this work was carried out in, and by way of, relationship: hers with each of her individual authors, and those authors as a group. She spent a great deal of time facilitating bonds and resource-sharing between her cookbook authors, introducing them to one another, inviting them to one another’s launches and events, encouraging them to learn from one another’s challenges and successes, both in the kitchen and in the wider world. Judith saw clearly the catty competitiveness that emerged as the food world grew and became more commercial, and she was intent on countering it, even if only among the relatively small number of people with whom she had sway, by helping foster a community that was more mutually supportive. 

Judith spent much of her life, personally and professionally, wrestling with the American relationship to food and prevailing attitudes about “the ignominy of cooking,” working upstream against claims of food’s vulgarity or unimportance. And yes, certainly, she—together with her authors—did a tremendous amount to move the needle: For some, food is now openly explored as a site of leisure and pleasure. There are many, many more people who make a living now by telling stories about food than there were when Judith started publishing cookbooks, and doing so on media platforms the editor couldn’t have imagined (I get a kick out of thinking about what Judith would have made of Instagram or TikTok). There are now several cable television channels and whole sections of bookstores devoted to food, and there’s certainly far more room in today’s food media for overtly political discourse. All this reflects marked shifts in American thinking and taste. But because of who it is that tends to engage with food work—disproportionately women, undocumented folks, and people of color—and where their labor takes place—in homes, in farm fields and processing plants, in the basements of restaurant kitchens, spaces that still remain largely hidden from view—food hasn’t escaped, to borrow Phyllis’s language, its “base” connotations. I doubt it ever will. It’s a large part of what has kept me, and what kept Judith, so engaged with food as both subject and lens all these years. 

What did you most want to ask Judith during the process of writing the book — and what do you most wish you could ask her, or tell her, today? 

Do I wish I could have, in real time, asked every question I had to ask to, and of, the archival record to her? Of course. But, though I’m sure this sounds both selfish and oversimplified, all I really wish was that I’d had more time to just be with her.

What do I wish I could tell her? I’ve got a running mental list too long for this space. I’d like to tell her how useful her lessons in shutting out noise, disregarding the haters (god, she’d hate how casually we throw that word around now!) and the endless distractions, have been to me, not only to find focus, but in navigating the chaos of life and the world. 

I wish I could tell her she was right when, as I struggled and wondered aloud with her about how I’d make time to pursue both career and family, she told me that “children are our great editors. They make quite clear what’s really a priority.” For Judith, it was a plain truth; the sort one learns only by living. (Judith believed in inviting richness into one’s life without fretting too much about its costs. On the flip side, she saw the vital need to build protected time and spaces for oneself, particularly for those in caretaking roles.) When Judith was alive, I didn’t have the personal experience that allowed me to recognize her wisdom on those fronts. I do now. 

I wish I could tell her how much I’ve begun (and, at 37, I hope I’ve only just begun) to appreciate that stance, her belief that a life guided and grounded by integrity, hard work, close attention, intimacy, beauty, and pleasure is, by definition, a life brimming with purpose and love. Though I know it may sound saccharine, I’m serious when I say that Judith’s worldview and way of being equipped me with everyday practices that have helped me, many times over, unstick from a stuck place, even beat back despair—personally, politically, and about the fate of the planet at large. 

Judith was well aware of the forces that threaten to destroy us, the forces by which we threatened to destroy ourselves. She lived through some of the most tumultuous and frightening eras and events in world history, at a time when new forms of media brought all kinds of terrifying words and images beaming right into our homes. Judith always paid attention. But she didn’t let the onslaught of information, and the fear that the news (nearly always) incites, diminish her verve. Instead, she responded to the possibility of paralysis by overwhelm with curiosity and ardor. Right up until the end of her life, she remained so curious, so game. More than anyone else I’ve ever known, Judith loved being alive. I feel deeply indebted to her for helping me towards my own expressions of exuberance as a means of joyful resistance, and for insisting on space to experience pleasure, connection, and awe. To feel. 

More than anything, I wish I’d told Judith I loved her when I still had the chance. ●

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You can find more from Sara B. Franklin here and buy The Editor here. And New York area readers — Sara is in conversation with the great Angela Garbes at McNally Jacskson *tonight* (5/29). You can find out more info and RSVP here.