My copy was an ancient, dog-eared edition, passed down to me with great ceremony by a girl a few years older, like the teen equivalent of a precious heirloom. The dirty passages had been read and re-read so many times that the book fell open at them, so I kept it hidden in the drawer in my bedside table, away from my mum’s prying eyes.
The book was Forever by Judy Blume, the ultimate female coming-of-age novel. Published almost five decades ago, it became a landmark for generations of teenage girls, captivated by its authentic depiction of first love and – thrillingly – first sex between 17-year-old Katherine and her boyfriend Michael. Millions of women around the world can still vividly recall the name inexplicably given by Michael to his penis: Ralph. Many of them still think of it (and smirk a little) when they hear the name now.
Now Forever, along with the rest of Blume’s 29 groundbreaking novels, are set to be embraced by a whole new generation. This year, there’s a major buzz around the author thanks to a documentary celebrating her work and a movie adaptation of one of her most famous books. Judy Blume: Forever, a magical exploration of the author’s life and impact on her readers, will be released on Amazon Prime on April 21, while the film version of Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret starring Rachel McAdams and Kathy Bates hits British cinemas on May 19.
To date, Blume’s books have sold 90 million copies worldwide. For so many women, she’s the prophet whose warmth and honesty guided us through adolescence, arming us with wisdom to carry far beyond those years.
For millennials and Gen Zs who haven’t read them, however, it might be easy to dismiss novels written in the 1970s and 80s as dated – and there are definitely aspects, such as the fact none of her characters’ mums work, which feel passe.
But it’s her unvarnished honesty and lack of condescension about subjects ranging from tricky friendships and periods to masturbation, sex and abortion, as well as her remarkable ability to capture complicated adolescent emotions, that make her books timeless.
Blume was a restless young suburban housewife with two small children when she began writing in her spare time as an outlet for the creative energy bubbling inside her. Are You There God?, published in 1970, was her first big hit, and it revolutionised teen fiction. Its heroine, Margaret, grapples with her feelings about everything from puberty to whether God exists - and on reading it, teenage girls finally felt understood. In the documentary, Blume says she has ‘total recall’ of her own adolescence, which allowed her to create characters whose experiences, hopes and worries feel real.
The new film of Are You There God is one of the year’s most hotly-anticipated. Starring Abby Ryder Fortson as Margaret, the movie – which shows the teen attempting to fit in after moving from New York City to the suburbs of New Jersey - is described by Blume as ‘better than the book.’
Directed by The Edge of Seventeen director Kelly Fremon Craig and with Rachel McAdams playing her mother and Kathy Bates her grandmother, it certainly looks as funny and heartwarming as its source material. Craig decided to keep it set in 1970, as it was in the book, because, as she explained: ‘While certain details have changed over the years, the experience of growing up is really universal.’
In her other novels, Blume addressed a litany of issues facing young people. Tiger Eyes is about a girl trying to learn to live without her father, who has recently died; Blume says in the documentary she now realises she based it on her experience of her own father’s sudden death aged just 54. In Deenie, the protagonist grapples with discovering that she has scoliosis, a curvature of the spine which puts an end to her hopes of becoming a model. It's Not the End of the World’s Karen is devastated when her parents split up and Blubber’s Linda is bullied for her weight.
Before her seminal novel Forever was published in 1975, books in which teenage girls had sex invariably served as cautionary tales, ending with them becoming pregnant and their lives being ruined, or having botched abortions which resulted in their death. Blume’s daughter, Randy, asked her if she could write a story ‘about a couple of nice kids who fall in love and do it and nobody has to die,’ she recalls. ‘I thought YES, I should write that.’
Do the originals stand the test of time?
The result is a totally realistic, utterly unpreachy love story, in which Blume depicts Katherine’s first sexual experiences as initially painful, then highly enjoyable. Ever aware of her responsibilities to her audience, she sends Katherine to a family planning clinic to get contraception. And it feels modern in its feminism: Katherine is a strong-minded young woman who doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to.
It features other weighty issues, too, including a teenage boy struggling to work out his sexuality, a suicide attempt and a teen pregnancy. The period just before we reach adulthood is often filled with turmoil, and most of us face some dark moments. Like so many of her books, Forever encapsulates the turbulence of that strange, often exhilarating but also terrifying time.
But writing so honestly about the things teenagers desperately want to know about hasn’t been applauded in all quarters. As superfan Lena Dunham says in the documentary: ‘Judy’s books speak about the unspeakable. That’s the reason why they’re so complicated for people.’
From the 1980s until the present day, her books have been banned in many American libraries; recently, she said that a rise in intolerance in the US has led to a ‘much worse’ epidemic of book banning than she experienced 40 years ago. She continues to receive constant death threats from right-wing zealots who claim she’s poisoning young minds. In Judy Blume: Forever, footage is shown of her being interviewed in the 80s, saying she won’t be deterred because ‘kids have a right to read and get honest answers to their questions.’ At 85, she continues to campaign against censorship.
This year is just the start of the Judy Blume renaissance: her book Superfudge is being turned into an animated series for Disney+, Netflix is planning a series based on Forever and a series based on Summer Sisters, her 1998 adult novel, is also in the works.
So here’s to women and girls continuing to discover this incredible woman’s work long into the future. Times change, trends come and go, but some books resonate, well, forever.
Judy Blume: Forever is on Amazon Prime from April 21st. Are You There God It's Me Margaret is in cinemas from 19 May.
