The History Behind Judy Blume’s Most Controversial Novel, Forever

In 1975, Judy Blume released Forever, a YA novel about a young woman falling in love for the first time and losing her virginity. Almost immediately, it was deemed controversial by those who believed it was too sexually explicit for young readers, with some states going so far as to ban the book from schools.

Fifty years later, the best-selling Forever is considered Blume’s most controversial novel, but it’s not her only work that has been challenged by censors. The octogenarian writer’s earliest books, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Deenie, were also taken off school library shelves for featuring girls talking about menstruation and masturbation, respectively. “It never occurred to me, at the time, that what I was writing was controversial,” Blume wrote on her website nearly 30 years ago. “Much of it grew out of my own feelings and concerns when I was young.” (On her website, Blume explained that she wrote Forever after her 14-year-old daughter Randy “asked for a story about two nice kids who have sex without either of them having to die.”)

It might be why Blume’s stories, which she says were her attempt “to write the most honest books I could,” are still a source of inspiration today. In adapting the book for Netflix’s new series, Forever, creator and showrunner Mara Brock Akil looks to honor the novel and the author by putting her own spin on a story that feels timeless.

“I’ve always credited Judy Blume as part of the seasoning of my voice as a writer,” the creator behind pioneering TV shows Girlfriends, The Game, and Being Mary Jane said in a Netflix press release. (Blume is an executive producer of Forever.) “She was one of the first writers I read who dared to be honest about the human condition in young people, and you can see traces of her writing style within my own.”

Before pressing play on Forever, learn more about the controversy surrounding Blume’s seminal coming-of-age novel that inspired Netflix’s new series. 

What is Judy Blume’s Forever about?

High school seniors Katherine and Michael meet at a New Year’s Eve party in the late 1970s. The New Jersey teens quickly start up a relationship that leads Katherine on a journey of self-discovery. 

With Forever, Blume looked to offer a different kind of teenage love story than the ones that she and her teenage daughter grew up reading. On her website, Blume wrote that she wanted to write a book “in which two seniors in high school fall in love, decide together to have sex, and act responsibly.”

But what made Forever stand out for so many readers was how it presented a young woman’s sexual awakening. Blume gave Katherine agency to make her own decisions regarding her heart, mind, and body—and encouraged young readers to do the same.

When did the controversy over Forever start?

Right after Forever was released, some parents took issue with the frankness in which Blume’s teenage characters talk about sex. Not to mention, the detail in which Blume writes about it. “I’d rather have my daughter read pornography than Forever,” one mother told the New York Times in 1978. “At least she’d know that was wrong, instead of having this book about a nice, normal girl who has sex and then it ends and the book’s over.”

Before Katherine loses her virginity to the more sexually experienced Michael, the two perform oral sex on one another with him teaching her how to perform the act, and engage in mutual masturbation. The book also includes a candid conversation about birth control between Katherine and her grandmother, which leads to her going to Planned Parenthood to get the Pill. Katherine’s decision to go on birth control was another reason why the young adult novel drew backlash from religious groups, and schools.

By 1982, schools in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio had challenged the book for not promoting abstinence or monogamy. One school district complained that it was “basically a sexual how-to-do book for junior-high students,” while another claimed it “demoralizes marital sex.”

Between 1990 and 1999, Forever was the seventh most frequently challenged book, according to the American Library Association (ALA). This means that the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) received reports from libraries, schools, and the media on attempts to ban these books across the country. Forever was routinely flagged for sexual content and offensive language. The books that ranked higher on the ALA’s list included Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, Michael Willhoite’s Daddy’s Roommate, and Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories series, which came in at number one for the decade.

Four of Blume’s other books—Blubber, Deenie, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, and Tiger Eyes—also appeared on the list.

Judy Blume's response

The anger aimed at her work turned Blume into an outspoken advocate against censorship. “In the ’80s is when it all broke loose, after Reagan’s election,” she told Variety in 2023. Her first experience with censorship was when her children’s elementary school principal refused to put her 1970 debut, Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?, on the library shelves. “He believed that menstruation wasn’t a topic that girls should read about,” she said, “nevermind how many kids already had their periods.”

Book banning has often been positioned as a way to protect kids, but Blume believes it has always been about fear. “And because fear is contagious, some parents are easily swayed,” she wrote on her website. “Book banning satisfies their need to feel in control of their children’s lives. This fear is often disguised as moral outrage. They want to believe that if their children don’t read about it, their children won’t know about it. And if they don’t know about it, it won’t happen.”

However, she explained, keeping these kinds of books away from kids does not keep them from having sex or thinking about it. Instead, banning books like hers keeps kids from learning about sex and talking about it more openly with the trusted adults in their lives. “Protecting your children means educating them and arming them with knowledge, and reading and supporting what they want to read,” she told Variety.

Blume’s outspokenness against book censorship and her long-time support for Planned Parenthood has resulted in hate mail. The threats became so bad that her publisher had to hire her a bodyguard for live events. “He was wonderful, I loved knowing he was there,” she told The Guardian in 2014. “And nothing happened and probably nothing would have happened, but it was very scary."

Despite the threats, Blume has continued to fight back. In 2023, just as Forever was being removed from a school district in Florida, where she lives and owns a bookstore, she told NPR that having her books banned so early in her career was a “very emotional” experience. “I was a new-ish, young-ish writer and it was hard to take,” she said, but, “it never stopped me from writing.”

Is Forever still considered controversial?

In a 2023 interview with BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg, Blume admitted she wrongly believed that book censorship was on its way out in the U.S. “I came through the '80s when book banning was really at its height. And it was terrible,” she said. “And then libraries and schools began to get policies in place and we saw a falling-off of the desire to censor books. Now it is back, it is back much worse – this is in America. It is back so much worse than it was in the '80s. Because it’s become political.”

A year earlier, the New York Times reported that conservative groups were fueling the recent surge in book bans. These groups were no longer raising their concerns to their local school districts, but becoming heavily involved in local and state politics so that they could help change censorship laws. “This is not about banning books, it’s about protecting the innocence of our children,” Keith Flaugh, one of the founders of Florida Citizens Alliance, told the Times. “And letting the parents decide what the child gets rather than having government schools indoctrinate our kids.”

During the 2023-24 school year, over 10,000 books were banned across the country, more than double the number that were banned the prior year, according to a report from PEN America. The group found that these bans disproportionately affected young adult books featuring characters of color and those who identify as LGBTQ+.

Last year, Forever was one of 13 books banned from every public school in Utah in accordance with a new state law that allowed lawmakers to remove books from classrooms that were considered to contain “pornographic or indecent” material.

Twelve of the 13 titles banned by the state in August of last year were written by authors that identify as women. (Utah has since expanded the list of banned titles to 16, with 14 having been written by women.) Six of the outlawed works were written by Sarah J. Maas, the best-selling fantasy author behind A Court of Thorns and Roses, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. It was the first time a state has outlawed a list of books statewide. 

For the first television or film adaptation of Forever since the release of a 1978 made for TV movie, creator and showrunner Mara Brock Akil wanted to update the material for the current social media age while also staying true to the book’s radical candor. 

Brock Akil first read Forever in the ’80s as a tween. It quickly became one of her favorite books. “Even though [Blume] did not have a lot of Blackness — or any Blackness — in her books,” she told Vulture in May. “She wrote with such humanity that I could project myself into the story and see myself, and understand.” With her new show, Brock Akil wanted to do the same for a new generation of teenagers.

The eight episode series follows Black teens Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.) and Keisha (Lovie Simone) as they fall in and out of love during their senior year of high school. For the show, Brock Akil changed the setting from New Jersey in the late 1970s to Los Angeles in the late 2010s. “That time period around 2018 really represents how Black people felt we were left on our own to figure out the issues of the day,” Brock Akil said in a statement from Netflix. 

Brock Akil closed her overall deal with Netflix in the summer of 2020 amid the social unrest that came after the murder of George Floyd. The deaths of Floyd and other unarmed Black men made the mother of two sons “posit that Black boys are the most vulnerable” group, she told Vulture. “Your existence, with the thought of dating, is terrorizing, so you parent from that.” 

While Blume’s book was told from Katherine’s point of view as she navigates falling in love for the first time, the Netflix series puts its focus on Justin’s experience. Using her own teenage son and his friends as inspiration, Brock Akil wanted to show how race and class in today’s society impacted one’s adolescence. “The biggest difference between a white family and a Black family in the upper middle class is that Black parents tend to clamp down on our children,” Brock Akil said, “to the point where, between the world and their parents, there’s a very tiny gap for them to have any agency.”

In the series, Justin is a music-loving basketball player whose ADHD makes it difficult for him to focus on his schoolwork. His well-to-do parents, played by Karen Pittman and Wood Harris, do everything they can to help him succeed, but the pressure to get into a good college has left him feeling as if he’s lost his ability to make choices for himself. 

Keisha, on the other hand, is a star athlete and student whose single mom is living paycheck-to-paycheck. She has her sights set on Howard University, but a recent scandal involving her ex boyfriend has made her feel as if her dream is at risk of never being a reality. When the two former classmates meet on New Year’s Eve in 2017, they embark on a love affair that will change their lives forever.

Beyond changing the race of the characters and focusing on a different perspective, the TV show tackles issues that are affecting a new generation of teenagers including consent, revenge porn, and racial profiling.