‘I didn't know how I could make Judy Blume's Forever relevant to today'

Almost every woman who became a teenager in the 1980s and the 1990s remembers the first time they read Judy Blume's 1975 novel Forever...
'I was in middle grade, and we were passing that book around so hard, the pages fell out and had to be paper-clipped together,' says the 54-year-old screenwriter and producer Mara Brock Akil, who was 12 when someone pushed a copy into her hand. It was the early-1980s Midwest and Brock Akil was living with her mother following her parents' divorce.
'Missouri was a pretty conservative place, so the truth about that sort of stuff was harder to find. I went from innocently reading How to Eat Fried Worms to reading about sex with Judy Blume. Boom! All her books – Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret; Blubber – I barrelled through them. She was just hammering us. We all remember her because no one else was writing like her back then.'
For the uninitiated, Forever... is the plainly told story of Kath and Michael, two New Jersey high-school seniors who, over several weeks, slowly fumble their way towards having sex for the first time: a satisfactory experience for Michael, consider­ably less so for Kath, who narrates the book.
There have been many YA novels about teenage sex since, but none has the mythic patina and cultural reach of Forever..., a book widely credited with teaching other­wise ignorant and fearful young girls the truth about adulthood. For many, to read it was to feel initiated into a secret club that made them stronger, more curious and less lonely.
'It meant that by the time I sat down to have the chat with my mother about sex, when I was 15, I was ready to go,' says Brock Akil. 'I was like, 'Mum, just give me the birth-control pill!' Forever... ­enabled me to have that conversation.'
On Thursday, Forever... gets its small-screen debut in a dreamy eight-part Netflix series created by Brock Akil, who has relocated the story from 1970s New Jersey to an affluent, sun-addled Los Angeles suburb in 2018.
Where the world the novel inhabits is entirely white, the two families at the heart of this version are black, with Kath and Michael reimagined as the outwardly sexually confident Keisha (Lovie Simone) and the more soc­ially sensitive, vastly more privil­eged Justin (Michael Cooper Jr), who meet at a plush New Year's Eve party and clumsily, giddily, fall in love.
The many modern updates include a 'slut-shaming' subplot and a deeper awareness of race, family expectation and class (­Keisha is the academically precocious daughter of a single mother; Justin the hemmed-in son of strict and overprotective parents). But the essence remains the same: two young people trying to navigate the confusions and complications of first romance, albeit this time often through the not always helpful technology of mobile phones.
Yet Brock Akil – who created the wildly successful and influential Noughties show Girlfriends and is arguably the US's leading chronicler of black American lives on screen – was initially wary about adapting Blume's novel. In the tech-saturated world of today, where a reported one-third of children have seen porn online by the age of 10, very few prepubescents enter their teens with the same innocence as Kath and Michael.
'When Judy wrote Forever..., kids didn't have any understanding. There was nothing to read or watch,' agrees Brock Akil. 'But you only need to go onto Twitter and you are sexually propositioned immediately. Forever... was written against a backdrop of women's ­liberation – the birth-control pill had become this big new thing and, for the first time, women could explore their hearts and bodies, and know they weren't endangering their future. I knew I could translate the excitement of first love, but I didn't know how I could make it relevant to today.'
Her brainwave was to make a ­virtue of the modern world's more complicated sexual climate, by emphasising both the perils of online communication and the ­confusions that can stem from the heightened discourse around issues of consent and assault.
'In the book, Kath is the most ­vulnerable, as a young woman trying to figure out her place in the world. But I'd argue that today it's young black men who are vulner­able. As a mother to boys myself [she has two teenage sons with her producer-director husband, Salim Akil], I find it heartbreaking that before you can talk to them about the birds and the bees, you have to introduce the idea of rape. You have to help them navigate all these complexities around ­language and behaviour, and that's before they've figured out if the girl even likes them. So, once I'd realised that was how we could tell the story, we were off to the races.'
Lately, some of the most dominant tales on screen about young people have been nightmarish, be it the teenage killer at the heart of Adolescence or the sex-and-drugs nihilism of the HBO series Euphoria. Does Brock Akil see Forever... as a way to give back to teenagers a simpler, gooey, young love story?
'Ah, I love that idea! And while I recognise there are some very harrowing challenges in society right now, most people are not having those extreme experiences, right? As a writer, I like to show people's lives as they really are. One of the most radical things you can do today is write a young black male character who is simply a little unsure of what he wants.'
Brock Akil has built a career on exploring precisely these everyday nuances. She created Girlfriends in 2000 in response to Sex and the City, because, as she has said many times before, 'on that show, black people had no seat at the table'.
Her series – which focused on the ­chaotic, loving, up-and-down friendships between four black women and has influenced TV shows that explore black lives in relative fullness, such as I May Destroy You – not only broke with the prevailing trad­ition at the time of depicting black characters only in family sitcoms, it dared to show black women as flawed, messy and all too real.
'The producers didn't want [the actress] Tracee Ellis Ross to keep her natural curly hair for her character, Joan Clayton,' says Brock Akil. 'Can you imagine that? They wanted her to blow-dry it straight. But we won that battle, and over the course of the show's eight series, Tracee's curly hair became a real advert for natural hair.'
Girlfriends also became an advert for the glorious reality of black women's sex lives, as something ordinary, untidy, and often imperfect. 'When I created it, the images of black sexuality on TV were extreme,' says Brock Akil. 'We were either represented as sexless lawyers or as marginalised sexually promiscuous women. So with Girlfriends the idea was very much to say, 'We black women are not just here for the pleasure of men'.'
'That idea of the strong black woman,' she says, 'it's a lie that I've been exploring through all of my work, because if you adopt that rigid ­concept of yourself, it leaves you no room for the full complexity of who we are.'
Brock Akil sees a through-line between that show and her version of Forever... 'With Keisha, I wanted to create a black woman who is clever, but who also makes mistakes. She's a girl trying to figure it out – and what better image for young women is there than that?'
Forever comes to Netflix on Thursday 8 May

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