Not Oprah’s Book Club Retro Edition: Forever

Hi Everybody, I’m Miriam and I’m back with a Retro edition of Not Oprah’s Book Club. The book I want to talk about today is over 30 years old.
I was home earlier this week at my mom’s house where I grew up and I was looking at my bookshelf and saw this book, Forever by Judy Blume. This book always pops out at me because it was a pretty big deal when I read this in middle school so I wanted to talk about it today.
For those of you who don’t know, its a book about a young girls first sexual experience, really her first romance at all. She’s a senior in high school. “A moving story of the end of innocence” The book goes into a lot of detail with her experiences with her boyfriend Michael, losing her virginity, the trials and tribulations of her first sexual experience.
I remember buying this book at Barnes and Noble, actually my dad bought it for me (pretty innocent looking cover) and going home and reading the entire thing cover to cover in like three hours. It was big. I was the kind of kid who always read books about teen romance and was really really into that kind of thing. This book was amazing because it gave so much more detail than any other book I had read about sex and her first sexual experiences. I learned a ton.
I was about 12 or 13 probably, and I ended up taking the book to my middle school and passing it around to all my friends. You can actually see in the back here, where my friends who read it signed their names in the back. We also dog eared the “good parts” that were sexual.
This book was just a big deal for me in terms of opening my eyes to the details of what a relationship between a teenage boy or girl is like. Looking back there’s a lot of limitations and she talks about that. The book was published in 1975, so she talks about how things have changed since then with the advent of HIV, and safe sex, and some of the concerns that these kids have are really different than kids today because of that.
Obviously it’s pretty heteronormative, it’s about a girl and a boy, but I was in the closet until I was about 20 so I read a lot about straight relationships growing up. I think the honesty of this book is what makes it such a classic and the reason why people keep reading it to this day.
Feel free to share your comments about this book in the thread!