Thinking back on it all, I'm not so sure reading Forever at the age of ten was a good idea. My parents were always pretty open about letting me read what I wanted, though I'm sure if they had known just what Forever was about they'd have been horrified. And I think the only reason they were so open about what my sister and I read was because it would never occur to them that we would ever read anything questionable.
The book was my first exposure, of any kind, to sex. It would be another two years before we had sex education in class (or "family life" as it was tactfully called when we had it back in the early 80s) and up until then my thoughts mostly alternated between two prevailing theories: one belonging to the stork and the other to a variation on pollination.
Needless to say when I first read Judy Blume's classic novel about teenage love and sex I was absolutely terrified by the things Michael and Katherine were doing. I remember wondering if this was something everyone did and if it were something everyone had to do at some point in their life. If it were, I wanted no parts of it, not so much because it seemed repulsive as that it seemed so clinical and unromantic. Even then, I kind of wondered: don't people value something like this as more than something physical? You should wait for sex because you needed to understand how special and important it could be in loving relationships...
Written in 1975 the novel would go on to be the target of many a banned book list and was also (it is thought, though seriously or not I can't be sure!) to be responsible for the declining popularity of the name "Ralph." I won't go into the reason for this because if you haven't read the book I want to spare you and if you have...well, then, you already know.
