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.”
Judy wasn’t happy in her marriage. At low moments, she wondered if it had been doomed from the start. Five weeks before her and John’s wedding, her beloved father, her Doey-Bird, had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of fifty-four. She was holding his hand when he lost consciousness. Judy was still crumbling under her grief when she walked down the aisle.
Sixteen years later, and just three years after the Blumes bought a bigger house with a swimming pool, Judy asked John for a divorce in the spring of 1975. He agreed, but then they decided to live together until June so that Randy, then fourteen, and Larry, then twelve, could finish out the school year before moving. After that, the kids headed off to sleepaway camp and Judy packed up their lives and moved to a townhouse an hour away, in Princeton.
She was thirty-seven years old and alone, she realized, for the first time in her life.
The kids hadn’t taken the separation well. Before Judy and John told them, Judy had consulted a family counselor who warned her that the children would have questions—and she needed to come prepared with answers. Unlike other kinds of unhappy couples, the Blumes weren’t demonstrative in their moments of friction. They weren’t big yellers or fighters. As far as young Randy and Larry were concerned, their polite, upstanding parents were perfectly content. “It was a nice marriage,” Blume later said, “but inside I was dying.”
To explain herself, Judy wrote letters to the kids before they left for the summer, which they read alone in their rooms and then came together to sob. When home feels safe, divorce can be catastrophic to the children. Judy knew that all too well, having put herself in Karen’s shoes to write It’s Not the End of the World. Despite the book’s sunny title and its optimistic ending, Judy recognized the pain that it took to get there.
Still, she felt she had no other choice. A few years before she initiated the split, Judy felt herself, at the age of thirty-five, undergoing a massive change—one that she’d eventually describe as an adolescent rebellion, just delayed by twenty years. Essie, who she spoke to twice a day, became representative of Judy’s subtle, lifelong indoctrination into a role—the self-annihilating housewife—that no longer suited her. That perspective transformed John in her eyes from a good-enough spouse and a solid provider to a figurehead of her mother’s middle-class values. Judy was sick of it all: the PTA meetings, the dinners at the club, the aqua-lined pool in the backyard. Suddenly, she felt an overwhelming urge “to taste and experience life,” she said in Presenting Judy Blume. “I wasn’t terrible. I was responsible. I was working. I loved the kids. But I was rebelling… My divorce was all part of that rebellion.”
Judy recognized a level of childishness in herself, which she came by honestly, having gone straight from her parents’ house to her husband’s. She felt immature in ways she didn’t like, and realized that John treated her in kind, like something delicate and unformed. Before the divorce, Judy had understood—with a level of dread—that she wanted desperately to take shape. She wished to be a person with edges and depth and firm, well-defined corners, just like one of her characters.
John blamed Fear of Flying. Erica Jong’s unrestrained roman à clef, about marriage and a successful female writer’s messy interior life, came out in 1973, before the Blumes separated. Isadora White Wing is a twice-wed Jewish poet from New York who, five years into her second marriage to psychoanalyst Bennett Wing, finds herself desperate for adventure and sexual novelty. She still loves Bennett but can’t deny the sense of yearning that has cast a shadow over her daily life with him. “What was marriage anyway?” Wing wonders early in the novel. “Even if you loved your husband, there came that inevitable year when fucking him turned as bland as Velveeta cheese: filling, fattening even, but no thrill to the taste buds, no bittersweet edge, no danger.”
“Fear of Flying was a very, very important book to me,” Blume told Bust magazine in 1997. “I was becoming aware. My husband blamed it for my unhappiness—which is simplistic, to say the least.” Over the course of Jong’s novel, Wing comes to understand that her quest for passion—and the infamous “zipless fuck”—is part of a larger identity crisis about being an artist, a wife, and potentially a mother (she’s grappling with the decision of whether or not to have kids). “Was I going to be just a housewife who wrote in her spare time?” Wing asks herself at a crossroads between her husband and another man. “Was I going to keep passing up the adventures that were offered to me? Or was I going to make my fantasies and my life merge if only for once?”
Wing chooses the latter, running off with Adrian Goodlove, another analyst who is the crude and domineering funhouse image of her rigid and respectful husband. The book’s title refers to Wing’s very real phobia—she’s terrified of air travel—but also the nagging suspicion that she’s always holding herself back. When she leaves with Adrian for a road trip across Europe, she feels, at least at first, like she’s finally taken flight. But as time wears on, Adrian’s shortcomings start to surface. He’s mostly impotent, for one thing. He’s also full of crap. When he leaves her without warning to go back to his wife and children, Wing finds herself alone in a hotel room in Paris, wide awake through a bout of insomnia and raking herself over the coals. What had she done to her life? “Leaving Bennett was my first really independent action,” she resolves as the night wears on. It was the first thing she’d ever done that directly defied her parental and cultural programming.
By morning she understands that she’s always been afraid of growing up. “I was afraid of being a woman,” she says. “Afraid of all of the nonsense that went with it. Like being told that if I had babies, I’d never be an artist, like my mother’s bitterness, like my grandmother’s boring concentration on eating and excreting, like being asked by some dough-faced boy if I planned to be a secretary. A secretary!” In the end, she goes back to Bennett. After all, he’s kind, smart, and good in bed, and it isn’t his fault that the world makes it nearly impossible for women to be on their own. Isadora can only hope that he’ll live up to his surname and help her soar.
Fear of Flying spoke to Judy, as did another feminist novel published in 1967, called Diary of a Mad Housewife. That book, by Upper East Sider and Vassar graduate Sue Kaufman, follows New York City mother of two Bettina Balser in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Balser, thirty-six, is a Smith College–educated former artist who can quote Baudelaire and Proust, but whose life now revolves around shopping, decorating, cooking, and throwing parties. It’s all at the behest of her husband, Jonathan, a former activist turned nouveau riche social climber who demands that his wife head up their home life to his exacting standards. With no outlet to express her anger, Balser—who shakes uncontrollably when Jonathan issues his unreasonable orders—takes to drinking, smoking too much, and writing in a secret journal. She also starts having an affair with a piggish playwright named George Prager. He isn’t very nice, but the pair share an explosive sexual connection.
Prager is dominant in bed, and Balser finds that she likes it. For a while, that uncomfortable truth scares her. But then she begins to understand that what she’s acting out with her lover is just another angle on her relationship with Jonathan. “Why should I be disturbed by the sado-masochistic aspects of that relationship, when I have another one going?” Balser writes in her diary. “Why not face the truth: it’s an enormous relief to have that sort of thing out in the open and act it out, instead of having to deal with it in a disguised form, all veiled and gussied up with domestic overlay as it is with Jonathan and me.”
Although Balser can’t stand who her husband has become, she understands she’s trapped—after all, he controls the money. At one point, her period is late and she believes Prager has gotten her pregnant. Her options, or lack thereof, flash before her. “Without a cent of my own, without a checking account, the only other way [ beyond asking Prager for cash] I could have paid for an abortion would have been to try and get the money secretly from my father, and even I shied away from all the filthy implications of that,” she realizes. Luckily, her period shows up and she doesn’t have to debase herself. But even that relief doesn’t solve the problem of the larger social constructs that frame her marriage, in which she has to be the “submissive woman,” the “obedient wife” to the “forceful dominant male” breadwinner.
Blume nods to Diary of a Mad Housewife in Wifey, when Sandy’s sophisticated best friend, Lisbeth—who lives on the Upper West Side and who is experimenting with an open marriage—slips her a copy. Sandy wonders if she should be offended: “Did Lisbeth think she was a mad housewife too? Was that why she’d given her the book?” The novel doesn’t come up again until Sandy’s husband, Norman, mentions it during a fight, when Sandy is trying to express why their relationship leaves her unsatisfied.
“Have you been reading that book again?” Norman snipes.
“What book?”
“The one Lisbeth gave you.”
“This has nothing to do with Lisbeth or books,” Sandy says.
Like Bettina Balser, Sandy feels she has to choke her own voice down in order to stomach her marriage. Like Isadora White Wing, Sandy worries that she’ll never know true sexual liberation firsthand. Did Judy relate to these predicaments, too? And if so, what did she do about it?
