Watch Stephenie Meyer talk
about Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse
A gaggle of 50 or so tween-to-teenage girls gather at the public library in
Naperville, Illinois. Inside, the tables are sprinkled with rose petals,
while ornate plastic goblets brim with a concoction called Bella’s bloody
punch. Those in attendance are all clad in vampire garb — with the exception
of the accompanying mothers, who busy themselves by painting vampire “bites”
on the girls’ necks and adding spray-on sparkle to their daughters’ clothes
and hair. It is the Twilight Prom, held last weekend as a precursor to the
evening’s main event. At 7.30pm, the girls will troop down to their local
cinema and watch what, for them, is the most eagerly anticipated film of
this, or indeed any, year. All across America, similar scenes unfold, as
devotees of Twilight, a teenage love-story-cum-vampire-tale, flock to
cinemas. By the time they close that Friday night, the film will have taken
more than $35m, a better first-day haul than that recorded by either of the
first two Star Wars prequels, or indeed any of the Lord of the Rings films.
Twilight’s extraordinary success should come as no surprise. The movie rights
were optioned before the first novel was even published, and American
booksellers have dubbed their author, Stephenie Meyer, “the new J K
Rowling”. The four books in her saga (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and
Breaking Dawn) have helped stem the fall in sales precipitated by the Harry
Potter series coming to a close. For their publisher, Little, Brown, the
books were a bombshell. “I’ve been in the business for 20 years,” says the
imprint’s Megan Tingley, “but I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Another surprise is that Meyer was, until five years ago, just “a humble
housewife”, a devout Mormon (she doesn’t drink or smoke) with no pretensions
to a career in writing. The idea for her tale came to her, she says, in a
dream. Her unlikely personal saga now sees the bubbly, if shy, 34-year-old
established as the fastest-selling author in the world. “Honestly, I’ve
never had a dream I wanted to write down, either before or since,” she says
with a smile. “But one night, about five years ago, I woke up with this
image seared into my mind. It sounds cheesy, but I’d had this dream about a
boy and a girl. The boy was a vampire, and he was telling the girl he wanted
to kill her because she smelled so tasty! But he wasn’t a monster. He
yearned to be human.”
Within an hour of waking up — “I had to change a few diapers and get breakfast
for my husband and kids going first” — Meyer was sitting in front of the
family computer, pecking away at the first few lines. She wrote Twilight in
three months straight. She insists she had no intention of publishing the
story — she even kept her literary endeavours secret from her husband,
Pancho, and her three boys, Gabe (now 11), Seth (8) and Eli (6).
“It seemed silly to say I was writing a story about vampires,” she says. “And
I have no idea where the idea came from. I have no interest in horror or
being scared. The only connection I can think of is that I’m very pale,
especially for someone growing up in Arizona, and in high school I had
therapy because there were a lot of people who called me ‘ghost’ and were
generally pretty horrible. People used to pretend I was like a mirror where
they could see their reflection. So maybe there’s an inner part of me that
said, ‘Pale is beautiful, damn it! And you are all going to admit that.’ ”
Meyer’s story quickly took shape, recounting the tale of Bella Swan, a teenage
girl from Arizona who moves in with her father in Forks, a logging town in
rain-soaked Washington state. There she meets a mysterious boy, Edward
Cullen, and, as the story unfolds, learns he is a vampire. “I wasn’t going
to show the story to anyone, but I told one of my sisters about it, and she
insisted on reading it. I let her have a look when I was done, and she was
adamant: I had to get it published.” Meyer relented, sending out her
manuscript and receiving 14 rejection letters in reply. Then, finally,
Little, Brown offered her a $750,000, three-book deal.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the secret to the books’ success is rooted in Meyer’s
upbringing. She insists her characters do not directly reflect her Mormon
faith, but her story is, undeniably, shaped by her own experience. Growing
up the second of six children, with “traditional, authority-figure” parents,
Meyer had what she terms a “long childhood” and says her dating experiences
were mundane. “I was never really attracted to bad boys — well, there was
one guy who dated all my friends at the same time, but he was still a very
sweet boy at heart — and generally everything in my life was so safe. I was
very practical and I chose the nice boys, like my husband. I actually met
him when we were four years old, although we didn’t get together until I was
20.
“So I think, for me, Twilight was dangerous. It was new ground; I was nowhere
near as mature as Bella at her age, and I would never have dated Edward.
Bella, however . . . she’s like, ‘Oh, I’m in love with a vampire? Fine, I’ll
deal with it!’ ”
For all the story’s smouldering passion, however, a clever plot thread in the
opening books denies the young lovers the chance of a physical consummation
— in Bella’s presence, Edward is torn between a desire to love and a desire
to feed, so he can’t surrender to his passions. This, in turn, shapes
Twilight, in particular, as a metaphor for carnal restraint. It has
certainly bewitched its target readership, allowing them to splash around in
the waters of adolescent desire without having to dip their toes into the
darker depths of sex.
“That was something I worried about while they were making the movie,” Meyer
continues, “that they might want to put in gratuitous sex scenes and things,
but I got on so well with Catherine [Hardwicke, the director] and she was
always so courteous, asking my opinion on things.” These are no idle
platitudes: the director made changes to the first cut of the movie after
Meyer had given her feedback. Apparently, in one or two scenes the author
thought the young cast were exposing too much flesh. Hardwicke switched to
footage from her B camera, editing in close-ups instead. And, says the
film-maker, it actually proved beneficial, making the scenes even more
intimate.
“Obviously, watching the movie was a little weird,” concedes Meyer. “But so
much has been weird for me these past five years. I'm a shy, quiet person,
and all this has really forced me to become more confident. I’m glad success
has come later in my life, when I’m old enough to be grounded. My husband
has given up his job as an accountant to manage my career, while I try to
keep the family’s feet on the ground. Most of the time with the kids, it’s
quite simple. My middle boy, Seth, has a bit of a speech impediment and the
other day he was talking to this little boy who I could see was having
trouble understanding what he was saying. So I went over, and what he was
trying to ask was, ‘What books does your mommy write?’ Because to him,
that’s what mommies do.”
Given her success — and the pleasure it brings both the writer and her legions
of fans — it’s what this mother will be doing for some time yet. But the J K
Rowling comparisons do seem to make her uncomfortable. “There’s only one J K
Rowling. And all that kind of talk puts unnecessary pressure on me; she’s
sold millions and millions of books. Far more than me.
"Anyway,” she laughs. “I’m glad I am Stephenie Meyer.” Given last
weekend’s box-office figures, so are millions of others — chief among them,
no doubt, those who gathered at the Twilight Prom in Naperville, Illinois.
Twilight is released on December 19
Making a killing
* Worldwide sales of the four books Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking
Dawn now top 25m. The United States accounts for 20m, although Breaking Dawn
debuted at the top of bestseller lists in France, Italy, Ireland, Spain and
Britain.
* The four books held the top four spots on USA Today’s bestseller list —
which, unlike some lists, ranks young adult books alongside adult fiction —
in the two weeks leading up to the film’s release.
* The Twilight saga has been published in 37 languages, including Vietnamese,
Chinese, Croatian and Latvian.
* The fourth novel, Breaking Dawn, sold 1.3m copies in the United States on
its first day on sale.
* The film recouped its shooting costs ($36m) and marketing budget ($30m) with
its first weekend’s takings of $69.6m.
* The film’s November 21 release date in America is the day traditionally used
for Potter films (the final movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,
has moved to July 2009).
* Twilight’s opening-day US box-office figures eclipsed both Harry Potter and
the Chamber of Secrets ($29m) and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
($32m).
* The lead vampire is played by the British actor Robert Pattinson, 22, who
starred as Cedric in two Harry Potter films. He had never heard about the
books when he took the part. Fans were “100% negative” about his being cast
at first, he has revealed.
* The publisher Little, Brown has announced that The Twilight Saga: The
Official Guide will go on sale early in the new year, with new material,
genealogical charts, maps, kitchen sink and so on.
