(long heavy sigh) twilight

I was a girl
before I was a feminist.
Tuns out
the girl is stronger.

What could possibly bring me out of my eight month blog hiatus except a young adult vampire romance series? A hiatus bookended by the profound (election of the first African American president) and the ridiculous (werewolves and vampires). So it goes.

But I admit: Stephenie Meyer has captured my imagination. When Twilight mania hit last fall, in conjunction with the release of the film, I ignored it. Eschewed it, even. I added it to the list of fads (Birkenstocks, The Simpson’s, Harry Potter, the umpteenth resurgence of Chuck Taylors) I have avoided so as not to get caught up in the zeitgeist. Working in a high school and being an advisor to ninth grade students, many of whom are girls who fell in love with the series as middle-schoolers, the avoidance was short-lived. Soon after the DVD release, I watched the movie through Movies on Demand. It was good– aesthetically pretty exciting. The characters are beautiful, of course. The scenery is spooky yet magical. The climax is sexy. I was thoroughly entertained, and I thought I could discount the mania with authority.

But, I am almost loathe to admit, the story stuck with me. The love-sick, hopeless romantic 14-year-old girl in me, who is closer to the surface than I imagined, couldn’t stop thinking about the intense against-all-odds love between the two main characters, Bella and Edward. Then, my critical feminist mind started going to work on the details. This vampire romance was a thinly-veiled version of “the purity myth”! The “consummation” or penetration in this case was the bite (of Bella by Edward) that would render her immortal. Bella, eager to be with Edward, at all costs forever and ever, wants the bite. At prom, end of junior year– Bella wants the pain, the burning, the death of her human life that she knows will ensue if Edward injects her with his venom. Edward, ever the chivalric hero, wants to protect Bella from her own hasty desires. It is he who worries about “her soul” and cannot bear to be the cause of the end of her human life– no matter how much he loves her. (He and his clan only bite humans and convert them to the dark side as a life-saving measure. They also control their thirst for human blood and feed only on animals– “thinning the herd” where necessary. These are humane, compassionate and environmentalist vampires.)

And again, I am loathe to admit, I found this conflict sexy! I wanted to know more about the author– Was she trying to use the vampire myth to reinforce abstinence-only propaganda? What was the point of hyper-idealizing the male protagonist? Did she want to inculcate her devoted adolescent female audience to a certain morality?

So, I Googled her, and what I found was the story behind the story:

I know the exact date that I began writing Twilight, because it was also the first day of swim lessons for my kids. So I can say with certainty that it all started on June 2, 2003. Up to this point, I had not written anything besides a few chapters (of other stories) that I never got very far on, and nothing at all since the birth of my first son, six years earlier.

I woke up (on that June 2nd) from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately. For what is essentially a transcript of my dream, please see Chapter 13 (“Confessions”) of the book.

Though I had a million things to do (i.e. making breakfast for hungry children, dressing and changing the diapers of said children, finding the swimsuits that no one ever puts away in the right place, etc.), I stayed in bed, thinking about the dream. I was so intrigued by the nameless couple’s story that I hated the idea of forgetting it; it was the kind of dream that makes you want to call your friend and bore her with a detailed description. (Also, the vampire was just so darned good-looking, that I didn’t want to lose the mental image.) Unwillingly, I eventually got up and did the immediate necessities, and then put everything that I possibly could on the back burner and sat down at the computer to write—something I hadn’t done in so long that I wondered why I was bothering. But I didn’t want to lose the dream, so I typed out as much as I could remember, calling the characters “he” and “she.”

From that point on, not one day passed that I did not write something. On bad days, I would only type out a page or two; on good days, I would finish a chapter and then some. I mostly wrote at night, after the kids were asleep so that I could concentrate for longer than five minutes without being interrupted. I started from the scene in the meadow and wrote through to the end. Then I went back to the beginning and wrote until the pieces matched up. I drove the “golden spike” that connected them in late August, three months later.
So after reading that and the rest of the FAQ pages on her website, I had a new problem. I was now completely intrigued with Meyer as a writer and mother. The genesis of this story was something I could completely relate to– of course not to the same extent. Because Meyer found a way to pursue this story as doggedly as she did makes her a bit of a hero in my mind.

At that point, never mind that I had seen the movie– I had to read the product of this woman’s labor! As someone who is curious about the writing process, I had to see the result of something that began as a dream and became a constant distraction from motherly duties.

At this point, I never thought I’d get past book one. Book one in the Potter series had had no lingering effect on me. I was sure I’d be as immune to the world of Meyer as I was to the world of Rowling.

Of course, I was wrong…