Recently, in a bout of morbid curiosity, I rescued from my parents’ house the stack of diaries that I had religiously kept throughout my teenage years. I was surprised by what I found – the near-daily entries didn’t read like the juvenile and mundane scrawlings of the strait-laced secondary school student I remembered. Younger me wrote lucidly about her sexuality; her shortcomings; the complexities of her friendships. She described not only her feelings, but her feelings about her feelings. She did this with more candour than I think I am often capable of as an adult: there was something unabashed and rich about the life I had been living inside of my head.
When adults underestimate children, I think we are often engaging in this kind of flawed self-referencing – not simply minimising “young people” as an abstract group, but revising, patronising and selling short our younger selves. Judy Blume, whose 1975 book Forever has this month been adapted into a Netflix series, was never one to do this. The American author has sold over 82 million copies of her books since the late 1960s, and is credited with having shaped the contemporary young adult genre; she has said that she remembers her childhood vividly. This much is obvious – you only need look at the way that her stories have managed to connect with young people across generations. In Judy Blume Forever, a 2023 Prime Video documentary about the author’s life and career, scores of children in archival footage of book signings marvel at her ability to articulate their thoughts and feelings. One girl says that Blume understands her better than her parents.
To many, though, Blume’s realness was threatening. The housewife-turned-author’s books were full of discussions of masturbation and breasts and period blood and handjobs, peppered among the day-to-day teenage stuff. Forever, which candidly charted an emerging romantic and sexual relationship between high school seniors Katherine and Michael, was perhaps the most controversial of all. One mother told The New York Times in 1978: “I’d rather have my daughter read pornography than Forever.” While the sexual content meant critics and even Blume’s own publisher dubbed it a book for grown-ups, it seemed that adults were the ones most scandalised by it – with Forever being banned intermittently in the US until as recently as 2024. But the continued censorship of Blume’s work just goes to show how political her stories have always been, despite being ostensibly written for kids. And while adapting her work remains a daunting proposition (for all the factors listed above), Forever proves that Blume remains both universal and timeless.
The Netflix TV show, created by Mara Brock Akil, captures perfectly the spirit of Blume’s writing, with a few twists. Katherine and Michael become Black Gen-Zer Keisha (Lovie Simone) and Justin (Michael Cooper Jr), old classmates who cross paths at a house party full of mostly white teens. Tonally, the show starts out feeling relatively twee – an innocent portrayal of young love, sprinkled with trips to the mall and the movies. Then, all of a sudden, there’s sex. I don’t mean euphemistic, offscreen or sanitisingly alluded-to sex, but an incorporation of sex that feels just as surprising and jarring as when I stumbled across it in my own teenage diaries. I didn’t necessarily find its appearance jarring because it was young people doing it, but rather, I didn’t expect these seemingly sweet and innocent young people to be doing it, in this particular show. It was as if a plotline from Euphoria had wandered its way onto the set of Heartstopper.
While there are parallels to the book, Akil also makes obvious departures. The Blackness of the show isn’t confined to its casting – it’s threaded throughout the script. Keisha wears a headscarf to bed and shares her dreams of going to the historically Black Howard University, while Justin’s mum aspires for her son to settle down with a Black girl. It’s also firmly situated in the 21st century, with a large chunk of the romantic tension emerging through text messages, and thorny present-day realities of teenage sex – like revenge porn – taking a front seat.
These creative choices might take some adjusting to for loyal Blume fans, some of which are entering their fifties and sixties. But these choices also carry forward the political spirit of Blume’s work, which often goes unnamed. While Blume’s characters don’t usually talk politics explicitly, the sexual content in many of the author’s books mirrored the broader societal rebellion of the Sixties and Seventies. Gabrielle Moss, author of Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of ’80s and ’90s Teen Fiction, tells me: “Books like Forever reflected the massive changes that women were experiencing in US culture at the time, in a way that pretty much no one else writing for young people did. In short, Blume brought the feminist and sexual revolutions to teens.”
It was, and still is, notable, that Forever is about a “nice girl” who has sex – written on the request of Blume’s then teen daughter Randy, who bemoaned tragedy narratives in which rebellious girls have sex, get pregnant and are either sent away or die via self-managed abortions. Moss tells me that, in this context, Forever was one of the only resources to learn about sex in a healthy way. “Sex education class at school wouldn’t teach you about the pleasures of sex, just the dangers. Forever floated the idea that a teen’s first sexual experiences could honestly be pretty wholesome – a simple, pleasant part of their growth into an adult. I think that’s still a pretty radical idea.”
Akil’s unapologetic adaptation of the story, about a “nice Black couple” falling in love, also brings the daily realities of a different social movement to its audience. Episode one opens with an argument between Justin, who is an aspiring basketball player, and his mother, who doesn’t think it’s safe for a young Black boy to go out to a party late at night: “We got cops out here shooting Black boys like it’s open season – and I’m trippin’?” While some might dub these themes “mature” for younger viewers, their inclusion shows an awareness of what young people are exposed to in the real world, just as Blume’s books did. Amid the politics, Akil’s depiction of a young, wholesome Black love also feels quietly radical.
Blume didn’t initially license Forever for adaptation, fearing it wouldn’t translate to today. But the series’ eight episodes boldly step up to the task of adapting such a beloved, canonical author. Director Kelly Fremon Craig, who adapted Blume’s groundbreaking Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret as a film in 2023, told Variety: “You can feel like with every change you make, someone is going to be like, ‘Why would you change that?’ Like painting over a Picasso.” Akil’s Forever doesn’t shy away from that, and simply grabs a new canvas. It seems that the strength of Blume’s work lies not in its universality, but its ability to actually describe the specifics of young life to children, to take that responsibility seriously, and to tell the truth.
‘Forever’ is streaming now on Netflix
