The next week, Michael invites Katherine to his house. Up until this point, she’s spent a lot of time around Michael’s older sister, but she hasn’t met his parents or even been to the family home. Michael describes his mom and dad as “a little stuffier” than Katherine’s, but “basically they’re good guys.” Still, she’s hesitant to come over, even though Michael assures her that his parents will be out until midnight. “We don’t have to do anything… we can just go there and talk,” Michael tells her. This time though, the charade has been dropped and Katherine isn’t even pretending to fall for it. “I think I’ve heard that before!” she jokes.

Once she’s through the door, Katherine is fascinated by what she sees. The furniture downstairs is “big, heavy and dark.” She has fun inspecting Michael’s bedroom, where he displays his team pennants and trophies. She even goes through his medicine cabinet, laughing that he “use[s] more junk” than she does and has “at least six different kinds of aftershave.” They banter back and forth about it until Katherine raises the stakes.

“Do you ever put it on your balls?” she asks.

Michael says no, and then wonders if she would like to do it for him. Katherine accepts the challenge, then boldly inspects Ralph in the light of the bathroom. They have sex right there, though Katherine remains unsatisfied. But an hour later, they try again, this time in Michael’s bed. For the first time, he’s able to last a little longer, giving Katherine a chance to get into it. “I grabbed his backside with both hands, trying to push him deeper and deeper into me,” Katherine says. “I spread my legs as far as I could—and I raised my hips off the bed—and I moved with him, again and again and again—and at last, I came.”

Katherine isn’t ashamed. Far from it—she’s celebratory. “I actually came,” she tells Michael afterward. “I’ve never felt so close to you before.” Then, “Can we do it again?” Michael says he needs to rest. They go out for hamburgers and Michael brings her home, where they sit in the den for a while. “I thought how nice it would be if we could go upstairs, to bed, together,” Katherine says. “I was hoping we’d make love again but Michael said he was kind of exhausted.”

By this point, Katherine’s sexuality has been fully awakened. In the logic of the novel she’s done everything right, and her reward is getting to enjoy her intimate experiences. The next time they have sex, after Michael’s high school graduation, she doesn’t just let herself go—she actively pursues pleasure.

Back in the den, Michael notes that she’s being “aggressive” as she kisses him all over his body. She straddles him and asks if it’s okay to do it “this way,” with her on top. “Any way you want,” Michael answers. Katherine describes finding the rhythm between their bodies and savoring every moment. “I couldn’t control myself anymore,” she says. “I came before he did. But I kept moving until he groaned and as he finished I came again, not caring about anything—anything but how good it felt.”

Michael isn’t threatened by Katherine’s newfound sexual confidence. The next generation of boys, Blume seems to be saying, should be able to meet empowered good girls where they are. While they’re holding each other, Katherine gets lost in her post-coital musing. “I thought, there are so many ways to love a person,” she says. “This is how it should be—forever.”

Although she never explicitly tells them so, Katherine’s parents are aware that she’s having sex with Michael. They also know that the young couple are actively plotting out how to stay connected through college, with the intention of being together for the rest of their lives. That’s what makes Diana and Roger’s next steps so unique from a historical perspective. For the parents of yesteryear, the only way to salvage a sexually active young woman’s future would be to persuade her gentleman caller to marry her. But the Danzigers don’t want their daughter to marry Michael, despite the fact that he’s traditionally suitable—smart, employable, and from a similar socioeconomic background—and also that they like him. Even with all that in mind, Diana and Roger set out to help Katherine understand that she should end the relationship.

To them, Katherine’s prospects are actually more promising if she gives herself time before settling down. This wouldn’t have been true at any other time in American history, but thanks to the sexual revolution and the women’s movement, an intelligent, levelheaded girl like Katherine had real options outside of just landing a decent man and getting pregnant. Much to Katherine’s disappointment, her parents arrange for her to take a job teaching tennis at Jamie’s sleepaway camp for the summer. “We both think you could use a change of scenery,” Diana says vaguely when Katherine accuses them of trying to keep her away from Michael. “Camp is just seven weeks,” Roger says firmly as her protest escalates.

Ultimately, they make it clear that Katherine doesn’t have a choice—she’s going to New Hampshire. She’s scared to tell Michael, but then finds out that his parents have decided to send him out of town, too. They’ve helped him get a job in North Carolina, with his uncle who owns a lumber yard. The pair vow to stay together, despite any geographical challenges. “So they’ll find out that separating us won’t change anything,” Michael tells Katherine. “Then maybe they’ll leave us alone.”

At the end of June, they both leave to start their new jobs, vowing to write each other every day. Their letters are mushy: “I miss you,” “Ralph misses you,” “Love forever,” etc. But slowly, Katherine finds her footing at camp. She starts spending time with Theo, the tanned, mustached, twenty-one-year-old head tennis counselor. One day, he asks her about her necklace. “What’s forever supposed to mean?” he says, flipping it over. When Katherine tells him, then asks him what he thinks, he’s honest: “I think forever’s a long time for a kid like you.”

Katherine takes issue with being called a kid, especially by a guy who’s not much older than she is. Over the next few weeks, their banter evolves into flirtation, and she’s startled when she wakes up from a vivid sex dream about him. Immediately, she writes Michael a four-page letter as penance. But soon, her letters to him start slowing down. When her grandfather dies, she turns to Theo for comfort.

Michael shows up at the camp to surprise her one afternoon, and Katherine immediately knows it’s over. They go to his motel room and start making out, but she can’t pretend that she’s into it.

“There’s another guy, isn’t there?” Michael says.

“In a way, I guess…” Katherine says—and Michael freaks out.

Remember: Boys can feel just as much pain, Blume said. Michael takes the breakup hard. He shuts himself in the bathroom and flushes the toilet over and over so Katherine can’t hear him crying. Then he drops her back off at camp, telling her it’s fine, actually he “screwed [his] way around North Carolina.” The statement has the ring of a lie, and Katherine calls him out. But it doesn’t matter. When she gets out of the car, Michael pulls away so fast that his tires “left marks on the road.”

It was important to Blume to show the depth of Michael’s suffering. Equally important: the fact that it’s Katherine, not Michael, whose intense feelings fade. The morality tale version would show Katherine being used; once she’s had sex, she’s no longer a conquest. But Forever doesn’t take that stance. It’s Michael, not Katherine, who is left behind.

They see each other once more back in New Jersey, in an awkward run-in. They exchange quick pleasantries and Katherine thinks to herself that she has no regrets. “I’ll never regret one single thing we did together because what we had was very special,” she says. “Maybe if we were ten years older it would have worked out differently.” When she gets back home, her mother tells her that she missed a call from Theo.

Katherine isn’t miserable—she hasn’t been punished. She still has her whole life to look forward to. And for a surprising number of parents, that wasn’t acceptable.

Chapter Twelve Paperbacks

“We’d all whisper and certain pages would fall open.”

Even with Are You There God? and Deenie behind her, Forever wasn’t what readers expected of Judy Blume. Dick Jackson and Bob Verrone—who had moved Bradbury Press from northern New Jersey to the Westchester, New York, town of Scarsdale—knew as much. To protect themselves they created an entirely new division and released the novel as Blume’s “first book for adults.”

“Labeling it an adult book… was our way of saying that it didn’t belong on children’s shelves,” Jackson said years later, “and that we were not recommending this for every fourth grader.”

Judy herself disagreed with that decision. She told School Library Journal that seeing the book described that way right on the hardcover flap came as a “shock.” By then, Judy had clout and employees at Bradbury were told to do whatever it took to keep her happy. “Dick told me, ‘Judy Blume is our big author, Judy Blume is the person who keeps this business going, basically,’ ” Peter Silsbee remembered. “She kept the lights on.” But in this case, Jackson did what he thought was best to keep himself and his star writer out of hot water.

Blume had become wildly successful, thanks in part to a paperback deal with Dell. “The way Dick told the story was, they published her first books, all in hardcover, but then when they went to paperback… that’s when they really got into the hands of kids,” Silsbee said. A paperback at the time cost around $1.75, which was quite a bit less than the hardcovers. “They were on racks in the drug store. And that was it, it was all word of mouth. Like one kid would read it and pass it to their friend, pass it to their friend, and pretty soon you had this huge fan base.”

That huge fan base was ravenous for books by Blume. In August 1976, the New York Times reported that Dell had printed over 1.75 million copies of her titles, calling her “a kind of heroine to the kids who read and re-read her books.” She was a complicated figure for parents, who supported their kids in reading but weren’t always in love with Blume’s subject matter. The paper of record’s review of Forever, which had run the previous winter, called the novel “a convincing date-by-date account of first love.” It made no mention of the various sex scenes, but rumors of the book’s contents traveled swiftly from kid to kid, mother to mother.

“Rest assured the kids manage to wangle copies of ‘Forever,’ ” the Times wrote.

The trade magazines panned the novel. School Library Journal hated it, saying, “Obviously it’s not a quality book, but that fact won’t bother the many girls who will read it.” Kirkus was also dismissive. “Cath [sic] and Michael fall in love when both are high school seniors, and Blume leads up to It date by date and almost inch by inch (hand over sweater, hand under skirt),” the reviewer writes. “As usual with this immensely popular author, Forever has a lot of easy, empathic verity and very little heft.”

Forever had at least one powerful ally in its corner. Mary Calderone at SIECUS—with whom Judy would eventually develop a warm relationship—thought the book was excellent. In May 1977, SIECUS put out its monthly report with a front-page story devoted to the topic of sex in children’s literature. Writer Pamela D. Pollack, who worked as a book reviewer for School Library Journal, rounded up a series of recent titles that dared to tackle the carnal experiences of teens. Pollack did not include Forever in her story, and offered a fairly bleak assessment of the way these books portrayed premarital sex. “Not too long ago, if sexual matters were mentioned at all in children’s fiction, a single standard of abstinence-or-else was applied unilaterally to the unmarried and underage,” she wrote. Now, she said, writers acknowledged the existence of teen sex but often did so by presenting the “extreme repercussions” that Randy Blume had mentioned to her mother: unwanted pregnancy, plummeting self-esteem, rape. Even the gentler versions presented “boys at the mercy of their hormones and girls as being at the mercy of boys.” Pollack expressed the need for a novel that guided young adult readers toward a healthier, more humane view of sexuality: “What is necessary is some notion that sex should be a satisfying experience shared by people who care about each other,” she wrote.

And as far as Calderone was concerned, she had found it. Later in the same issue, SIECUS’s president reviewed Forever, calling it “very well-written” and “in good taste.” She also suggested that it was parents, not adolescents, who needed this book the most, agreeing with John Money that authority figures were failing their kids in a rapidly evolving culture. “I believe this is a book that parents (mothers and fathers both, please note) should be reading, not in order that they may fix an accusatory gaze upon their teenage daughters, but so that they might perhaps be helped to face at last how much the world in which their children, their own darlings, are growing up is different from the world that they remember at the same age,” she advised.

Whether or not parents were buying Forever, kids were getting their hands on it. The biggest story surrounding Blume’s novel had to do with the way young readers were smuggling it around their social circles like contraband. One tween would snag a copy, inhale it, and then surreptitiously pass it along to a curious classmate.

Bronx-based middle and high school librarian Julia Loving recalled checking out Forever from the New York Public Library, where her mother and father had given her written permission to borrow books from the adult section. Now in her fifties, Loving was a devoted fan of Blume and loved Deenie in particular. “Being Black, I always assumed that Deenie was white, but I didn’t really think of any difference between her and me being Black and her being white as characters,” she said. “I just knew we were girls and we liked boys.”

Loving remembered reading Forever and then sharing it with a close middle school girlfriend, who was a grade below her. “Her parents found out,” Loving said. “And because it was a mature book, basically [her father] came up to my parents’ house and spoke about me lending the book and this and that, because it was very saucy at that time.”

New York City elementary school librarian Lauren Harrison had a similar experience. “There was a copy of Forever that was passed around in fifth grade,” recalled Harrison, who was forty-six at the time that we spoke. Like Loving, her parents allowed her to read whatever she wanted; her mother is a librarian, too. But Harrison was aware that the book was tricky stuff for other kids her age. “I didn’t have to hide it,” but her friends did, she said. “I remember just sort of, we’d all whisper and certain pages would fall open,” she added, referring to her crew crowding around the novel and perusing its most descriptive sex scenes.

This phenomenon was so widespread that in 1978, the novelist Joyce Maynard—who was also Judy’s friend—did a twenty-column story about it for the New York Times. Maynard went to the “pretty, mostly white, upper-middle-class community” of Bath, Ohio, where Forever was making the rounds among the girls—and making waves among their mothers.

Maynard sat down with a group of kids and moms to hear about their experiences of the book. She learned that Heather Benson, then thirteen, had borrowed a friend’s copy on a choir trip, then brought it home, where her mom, Pat Benson, discovered it. Pat knew Blume’s name but hadn’t heard anything about her latest publication and was shocked by what she saw. She stopped short of forbidding Heather from reading it but put it away in a drawer while her daughter thought over their chat. Heather ended up steering clear of the novel—or at least that copy of it. “I know she didn’t [read it],” Pat, who was fifty at the time, told the Times, “because she knew which drawer I put it in and I arranged a strand of hair on the pages and it’s still there—which is the kind of trick you’ve got to know to keep on top of what’s going on.”

Another mother, Jan Worrall, described buying a copy of the novel at her daughter’s request and then, after bringing it home and paging through it, returning it to the bookstore. In her interview, she told Maynard that she would have preferred for her daughter Jocelyn, then age eleven, to read “pornography… at least then 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.” She felt Blume had dropped the ball when it came to using her platform to mold kids. “Judy Blume had this beautiful opportunity to teach kids a lesson, if she’d just given an example of suffering or punishment. But the girl doesn’t get pregnant or have a nervous breakdown,” Worrall said.

Some of the other moms were less incensed, but still wary of Blume’s latest. One noted that although she didn’t like the book, she hoped that if her daughter Christiane were to have premarital sex, she would take a cue from Katherine and use birth control. Another mother, named Ellie Griffith, took a different stance. “She has the right to publish what she wants,” Griffith said about Blume. “But when she comes out with a book like ‘Forever’ she should use a pen name.”

Despite their mothers’ objections, the girls all seemed well acquainted with the book’s contents, so much so that “mention of [certain] page numbers alone is enough to set off shrieks,” Maynard wrote. (This was the analog precursor to BookTok, where among more literary-minded chatter, young influencers point their followers toward reads with particularly spicy sex scenes.) And even though the girls were fluent in Forever’s juiciest passages, not one of them was actually having sex or planning to do so anytime soon. Most of the girls were thirteen years old, and to them, the boys at school were still “weird” and “gross.”

“How could you look them in the eye afterward?” Christiane said about doing the deed.

Maynard interviewed Blume for the article, and the author defended Forever the same way she would stand up for all her most controversial titles in the years to come. She said that children are not immune to life’s harshest realities, and silence from adults doesn’t help. “I hate the idea that you should always protect children,” she said. “Sexuality and death—those are the two big secrets we try to keep from children, partly because the adult world isn’t comfortable with them either. But it certainly hasn’t kept kids from being frightened of those things.” She also maintained that despite the notoriety of certain passages, sex was not why kids were voraciously reading Forever, or any of her novels. “I can’t entirely explain why they do, myself,” Blume said. “I know I’m no great literary figure. But it has something to do with my feeling about kids.”

More likely it was a mixture of both. This was long before the internet and iPhones dropped the virtual Kama Sutra into everybody’s pockets. Judy was offering up information kids couldn’t find anywhere else and she was doing it in an accessible, entertaining way. Schools weren’t telling adolescent girls that they’d have to practice at sex in order for it to be pleasurable. Parents, for the most part, weren’t volunteering information about birth control, or about being “mentally ready,” or what it might feel like to have intercourse and then fall disappointingly out of love. Without access to this kind of nuanced education—beyond the birds and the bees—children turned to Blume.

Cory Silverberg, who is nonbinary and was fifty-three at the time we spoke, said that reading Forever as a pre-teen in Canada in the early 1980s opened the door to self-exploration about their gender identity. “I read that book so many times,” Silverberg said. “The thing is, I identified with the girl and I in no way understood that.” It wasn’t until many years later that they found language to describe their gender, but Forever offered insight that was missing from sex ed at the time. “I basically turned off sex education because ‘this doesn’t apply to me.’ Because you’re either going to do it this way [as a boy] or this way [as a girl], so I was looking for possibility. I wanted to grow up to be [Katherine].”

Forever was pivotal for Jonathan Zimmerman, too.

“I was fourteen and I remember reading [Forever] and it taught me more about sex than anything I’d ever read,” he said. “My parents had The Joy of Sex, these sort of hirsute figures doing strange and hairy things, but that was not the same. ’Cause it wasn’t kids.”

The fact that Blume animated Michael and Katherine with genuine desires and feelings is what made the book both magic and extremely contentious, Zimmerman explained. “I think it was explosive and it remained so because, I know this can sound pedestrian, but it framed kids as autonomous sexual beings. And it took their sexual lives seriously.” As simple as it sounds, no one had ever thought to do that before.

With Forever, Blume cemented her reputation among children as a writer who would tell them the truth. And, Judy realized, it was about time she started telling the truth in other ways as well.

Chapter Thirteen Rebellion

“He had married this little girl, and he was happy that way.”