Some people fear committing to a romantic partner or a life plan. My phobia, on the other hand…

You know, one of the hardest parts of having a book blog, for me, is feeling locked into my opinions once I write them down. (I know, my life is so full of challenges.) But that’s not really how I relate to my books — certainly not ones that I like enough to keep thinking about them.

I bring this up because after I read FOREVER… on Friday, what I felt compelled to post was largely a complaint about the kinds of stories I don’t see often enough in young adult publishing. That’s mostly just because it’s stuff I’ve been thinking about, and maybe also because I was in such a bad mood when I actually read the book.

But since Friday, I’ve also found myself thinking a ton about all I things I love about FOREVER… Like how the boyfriend character, Michael, is a really convincing mix of unbelievably sweet and kind of manipulative. And how economical Blume is in developing most of the side characters into real people (though, what’s up with Sibyl, who goes through pregnancy for “the experience”? Uh…). And how it remains, to this day, one of the only YA books I’ve seen in which teenage girls’ sex lives are portrayed very positively (even though Emily and I have been kind of making fun of this in the comments to Saturday’s post).

It’s not that I don’t believe everything I said on Saturday; it’s just that I also believe a lot of other things about FOREVER… Like that it, seriously, is an amazing book that fully deserves the enormously strong positive feelings it elicits in many, many women (and at least a few men) across America.

This is one reason why I don’t usually do straight-up reviews on this blog. It’s a commitment to an opinion that I’m not always up for.

’70s culture doesn’t last Forever…

An older ('80s?) version of the FOREVER... cover

I had food poisoning yesterday, which totally sucked, and led to my not doing things I really needed to and instead lying in bed finishing Markus Zusak’s GETTING THE GIRL and re-reading Judy Blume’s FOREVER…, which would have been really fun had I not felt like crap.

And one of the things that struck me about FOREVER… (which, remarkably, I had not read since a boyfriend introduced me to it in high school) is how so very 1970s it is. I mean, check this out, you guys; this is a scene between the 17-year-old narrator Kath and her 13-year-old sister Jamie:

“What were you two doing in your bedroom? [...] I know all about sex.”
“Congratulations!”
“Were you fucking?”
“Jamie!”
“That’s not a bad word… hate and war are bad words but fuck isn’t.”

The FOREVER... I bought at WalMart last month

More generally, FOREVER totally inhabits this upper-middle-class liberal world that I feel like really existed in the early 1970s, when there was a women’s movement and the recession hadn’t really hit yet. And Judy Blume, who’s long been a lefty and who was already a big publishing star by this time, would have certainly been inhabiting this world herself.

And it’s funny to be reading it today, because on the one hand, I kept being struck by how much more political the characters were than in almost any books today. I feel this over and over again when I read YA books from the ’70s; the sense of social transition and the normalcy of political debate are just palpable. It’s a lot more fun than the blandly liberalized world of most YA publishing today, I think. (And, I mean… he names his penis Ralph. Does anyone not love this book — I mean, besides the people perpetually trying to censor it?)

But I have to say, I am sick to death of reading books where everyone’s parents have glamorous middle-class or upper-class jobs. (Renowned film critic! Philanthropist!) It’s a long-standing complaint of mine against people who’ve produced some of the literature and TV that rings emotionally truest to me in the small scale (Sarah Dessen; Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick); they only seem to write about their own world, in which everyone is some form of small-business owner, and near everyone is white, and after a while I just don’t believe in it anymore.

It’s hard to level that complaint against any individual book, but in a whole oevre it grates on me.* None of this changes that FOREVER… is a damn good story. Despite the artificiality I feel in the world being created by the publishing industry as a whole, I believe in Michael and Kath.

Although, not necessarily in how quickly they develop a sex life that many adults might be envious of. Just sayin’.

* I might also be particularly sensitive to this today because of how annoyed I was by one of today’s “Most Popular” articles in the New York Times, the latest in their never-ending series of uncritical lifestyle features on the thoughtlessly privileged, which features sentiments like, “Like most new parents, we just assumed our child would attend a private elementary school in Manhattan!”

UPDATE: Can you see this post? This seems to be the incredible disappearing post. I do not know why.