I wanted to tell him that I will never be sorry for loving him . . . I’ll never regret one single thing we did together . . . I think it’s just that I’m not ready for forever.
Which Forever edition are you?
This month I went back to Forever. Although I had it in my possession just the once, thirty-five years ago, I was never in doubt about which edition I’d borrowed from the public library: Pan Horizons, first published in 1986, with an illustration of Katherine and Michael gazing at one another and a starring role for the infamous rug (if you know, you know).
Here are a few more editions: if you were a Judy Blume fan, have I included the one you remember?
Ralph, Rugs, and the Fat Problem
My memory of reading Forever as a teenager is strong on feeling and vague on detail. I remembered that the main character’s boyfriend calls his penis Ralph, that there was an important rug, and that Forever was one of the only stories I had access to in which the portrayal of sex was designed for me.
(Almost . . . I’ll get to that.)
While main character Katherine is an object of desire, a state girls are familiar with before we even reach high school, she navigates being desired by a boy of her age and makes it about what she wants to feel and do. It’s obvious why Forever is one of the most challenged books of all time: Katherine has sex because she wants to, she describes it openly and honestly, and even more outrageously she enjoys it.
While Forever helpfully discloses the curiosities, awkwardness, fun, self-consciousness, and pleasures of sex, where it excelled for me story-wise in my re-read is in respecting and challenging our notions of romantic love. I think it does that so well for young readers, and for that and the frank sex I wish I’d read it more than once back then.
But I understand now why I didn’t.
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