What Judy Blume's "Forever" still gives us — and the teen dramas that followed her won't

Remembering Judy Blume’s books without replaying our own childhood memories might be impossible. This is mainly a guess, formulated after reading passionate reactions to Mara Brock Akil’s “Forever,” a montage of lip gloss-smacked frames from across ages of girldom.

“Forever,” the TV show, is one of the first coming-of-age shows in a long while about a period of time in the life of a Black girl that rides the express highs and lows of adolescence, and one of the first to place a Black boy in the same place of emotional tenderness.

Akil continues down the road that Blume's 1975 novel forded, accurately capturing adolescence's hidden longing and confusion. In eight episodes, "Forever" strolls us through a year and a half during which the central concern isn’t "will they or won’t they," but whether high school lovers Keisha (Lovie Simone) and Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.) can hang on to what they have.

Longform dramas like “Forever,” stories lacking inciting tragedies or tensions beyond misunderstandings and a few cases of unfortunate timing, are not easy sells. And yet, “Forever” plainly speaks to something missing from the gratification machinery propping up our age: a view of two people maturing into their understanding of intimacy.

Lovie Simone as Keisha Clark and Michael Cooper Jr. as Justin Edwards in "Forever" (Elizabeth Morris/Netflix). Keisha and Justin are magnets, pressing against each other until, for one reason or another, one suddenly repels the other. Their love story includes stretches of time where Keisha blocks Justin's number and social media contacts, then lets him in, only for him to turn around and do the same to her. Once they reach an understanding of who they are to each other, they become attentive custodians of the other person's anxieties and hopes, even as they weigh what they want beyond their relationship. The sex, when it happens, is sweet and a little clumsy, the way inexperienced love can be. But the action isn’t holding up this show. We’re much more into the conversation.

“Forever” is not a direct adaptation of Blume’s book. Still, Akil’s high school lovers aren’t terribly dissimilar to Blume’s couple. Keisha and Justin meet at a New Year’s Eve party, like Katherine and Michael do in the novel.

This love story begins in 2018 and takes place in Los Angeles instead of a town in New Jersey. Another key difference is that the main characters are Black kids who either attend or used to attend private schools with predominantly white student bodies. Justin is still currently attending his private school, part of the path that his wealthy and connected parents, Dawn (Karen Pittman) and Eric (Wood Harris), have paved in their efforts to give him the best chance of professional success.

Michael Cooper Jr. as Justin Edwards, Wood Harris as Eric and Karen Pittman as Dawn in "Forever" (Elizabeth Morris/Netflix)

Justin meets Keisha as she's getting her life back to normalcy, having transferred out of her previous school after a sexually explicit video featuring her circulated among her peers. This happens more commonly than some might think. One University of New Hampshire study estimates that 23% of respondents between the ages of 18 and 28 that they surveyed had engaged in sexting as minors. Within that group, the study found that 37% were subjected to some form of image abuse.

These numbers tell us nothing about the weight of keeping that secret from a parent, as Keisha somehow manages to do. Justin, however, is understanding and much more aware of how vicious teenagers can be when their mistakes are caught on camera. Besides, her ambition is undeniable — she's a track star who has set her heart on attending Howard University. But her mother, Shelly (Xosha Roquemore), works multiple jobs to make ends meet, trusting that Keisha is making that sacrifice worth it.

Xosha Roquemore as Shelly Clark and Lovie Simone as Keisha Clark in "Forever" (Elizabeth Morris/Netflix)Meanwhile, Justin's mother constantly reminds her son of her high expectations for him and all the ways his golden ticket to a prestigious college could be ripped away by one trigger-happy cop or the whim of a white classmate’s litigious parents.

These details freight the path to their loss of virginity with different hazards than those Blume’s couple faced in the ’70s, in that they’re not simply nice, good kids. They’re emotionally and physically vulnerable ones whose dreams can easily be shattered.

Some may be drawn to “Forever” for reasons similar to those that made “Adolescence” into a worldwide sensation, in that it thoughtfully fosters our understanding of a time of life that, in its present form, seems alien to older generations.

But where “Adolescence” provided an unsparing gaze at online culture’s power to distort a kid's moral framework in ways the parents of the young boy at the center of the show couldn’t conceive, “Forever” is more reassuring. Once the deed is done (and done again, a few times), we see that sex isn’t what holds Keisha and Justin together. It's the way they figure out how to lend support when it matters — sometimes with parental encouragement but mostly following where their emotional intelligence guides them. That must be validating for people watching the show with their teenagers, especially since scenes show them behaving as their natural selves without pretense or app filters.

Few who survive the teen years would want to relive them except, perhaps, if it were possible to rewind into one of Blume’s stories.

This superpower made her stories rite-of-passage classics. Her fans didn’t and don’t simply read her, they empathize with her characters’ insecurities about their changing bodies and lives. Thus, some parents were happy to hand a copy of her 1970 menstruation diary, “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret,” to their daughters once they hit double-digit birthdays. Otherwise, the book passed from friend to friend, which is how I came to receive Blume’s relatable insights, much of which no teacher would or could explain.

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“Forever” was nowhere nearly as widely sanctioned; in fact, it was quite the opposite. Although its protagonists are “two nice kids who have sex without either of them having to die,” as Blume describes on her website, a mainstream novel about teens deciding to lose their virginity was the kind of book one hid within another’s cover if only to prevent the embarrassment of being caught with it. (Speaking for my awkward teenage self here.)

Fifty years and many primetime teen soaps later, “Forever” holds the No. 7 slot on the American Library Association’s list of Top 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books: 1990-1999. Meanwhile, TV’s evolution brought us “Euphoria” and its explicitly nightmarish visions of adolescent sexuality. That doesn’t hold a candle to the bleak sexual scripts lurking on the Internet, spreading dangerous myths about what “good” sex is or should be.

Lovie Simone as Keisha Clark in "Forever" (Elizabeth Morris/Netflix). As such, we quickly come to understand that the deed itself isn’t what scares Keisha and Justin. It’s the risk of tangling their expectations and desires, and the fear that their hunger to stay together might get in the way of their separate futures.

“Forever” leaves us heart first, the same way it draws us in. Justin kisses Keisha on the head, and they lovingly part — acknowledging that nothing is everlasting — except, maybe, what we decide to hold close.

“Forever” is streaming on Netflix, which has officially picked up a second season.