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Naturally when I considered this topic, the first thing I wanted to do was find a picture of Vegemite—which if you’re not familiar is spread that is popular in Australia made from brewer’s yeast. And funny enough I saw this picture of Vegemite with a banana and was horrified—who is eating Vegemite with bananas?? Poor, innocent bananas!! Vegemite is really polarizing, people really love it or hate it, and lately I’ve been thinking about what drives extreme yuck for others yums.
When the Twilight series came out I was reasonably interested. I’ve always been huge into vampires, starting from my tween years, and Twilight was such a phenomenon: it’s one of only a few books/series this generation to developed into a huge sensation. I read the first book and was like, Meh. I read the second book, then stopped reading them. For quite some time, I was annoyed at its success. Why did those books in particular deserve to sell so many copies? And have a fan base so rabid that when I was in a movie theater and they played the preview for the adaptation girls starting screaming hysterically? And I had read a lot of vampire books. When I was in high school I read basically every vampire novel I could get my hands on, whether adult or YA, or even Bunnicula if you count that. In high school I was particularly a big fan of LJ Smith’s Vampire Diaries, also YA, but I thought much better, so I didn’t get why Twilight blew up so hard.
If you’re not super online, you might have known that Twilight was big among young girls, but maybe would not know that men—I think mostly young men, but I’m not 100% sure—were weirdly fixated on denigrating young girls for liking these books. They were so stupid, girls were so stupid for liking them. Like weirdly, obsessively fixated on this. Way more than the two seconds I spent thinking Ready Player One was awful and at no point did I feel like making grand statements about the male gender for liking it.
The first Twilight book came out during my second year of grad school. I wrote a lot from grade school through 2003, but when I started grad school I had a pretty long hiatus of not writing fiction when I was there. But I remember reading Twilight and of course feeling irked because I felt a sense of ownership over vampires, particularly since one of the two books I wrote in high school was about vampires. This book isn’t that good, I thought. Couldn’t I write a book better than this? One of the few things I did write in grad school was the first 100 or so pages of a college paranormal novel where one of those characters (aptly named Casey) bears a really strong resemblance to Casey Cooper, who is a MC in my second published novel.
Several years ago, I heard an interview with Gerard Way, the lead singer of My Chemical Romance and a comic book author, and he was talking about Twilight specifically, and the anger people had towards it, and he said simply, “It isn’t for you.” It’s such a simple, brilliant idea.
Here’s the thing. I wrote a book about a bunch of unlikeable psychopaths. My characters curse. There’s some cheating, there’s some violence. That book just isn’t for people who can’t stand morally gray characters or who would clutch their pearls at a scene where someone’s head gets bashed in by a geode. My second book is long (it’s 500 pages, but they made it look like 440). There’s a lot of characters in it. There’s also a lot of character development in it, so it isn’t as fast a page turner compared to other books on the same shelf. But that book is for a very specific group of people: people who want to disappear into a long book that takes all summer to read. (this was my intention— people apparently read it faster than I want them too haha) It’s for readers who want an adventure that is so big that it feels epic without it being a fantasy. People who really want all the character development or maybe even more than I offered. I haven’t read my own Goodreads page (I made my computer ban me), but I’m willing to bet there are quite a few people saying this book is too long. But the thing is, I didn’t write this book for them. I wrote it for the people who email me and tag me in reviews and say “I could have read a hundred more pages.) [just between you and me.. those extra hundred pages exist. I had to trim them out to get the book under 500 pages.]
Oftentimes writers get caught up with an imagined audience in their head and they are unfortunately thinking of the worst possible reader. They’re thinking of the absolutely snidest, biggest asshole on Goodreads. The sort of person who delights in writing negative reviews and attacking the author as a person. But you’re not writing for them. Imagine the person you are writing as your best possible audience, not your worst possible audience. I wanted to write a book that was very earnestly focused on friendship. I’m seeking the reader that wants all the friendship feels, not the sort of person who would roll their eyes at the earnestness. This is the audience that falls in love with this book and recommends it to friends who are looking for the same vibe. If you ever find yourself fixated on this snide imagined audience, make a list of what you consider the five most important works of American literature and then look up the one or two star reviews. People will literally give Beloved a one-star review because it’s… sad. Or it makes them uncomfortable. Which is why it is banned so often. But Toni Morrison straight up said that she writes for Black people, not white people. When she’s writing about an incredibly sensitive, emotionally painful topic for Black Americans, she’s not picturing the snidest, most racist white person. If she did, she’d end up holding back everything that makes that book so good.
But let’s go one step beyond that. Pretty recently I watched/rewatched all the Twilight movies. I was watching New Moon or Eclipse—I forget which, and I had an epiphany. If you’re not familiar the story, it revolves around a love triangle featuring a very basic human girl, a vampire (Edward), and a werewolf (Jacob). There’s a part where Bella needs to be protected from some evil vampires, so the only plan—the only plan—that makes sense is for Jacob to carry her with his shirt off so that she doesn’t leave a scent trail and his covers hers. Then the boys snark at each other over her. All the sudden, I got it. This book was wildly popular because its a playbook for nonthreatening teen/tween girl fantasies. Hot boys fighting over you. Some scenario where they would have to carry you shirtless. Having to camp overnight and have one of them hold you because it’s too cold out. The books have been criticized for their weird Mormon sensibility about sex but the way sex is handled in the books makes sense if you think of it from the perspective of a tween girl. You’re intrigued about sex but also scared about it. You want it to some extent—as Bella does—but you don’t want to be pressured by a boy (Edward refuses to sleep with her). You want a hot boy to want you, but you don’t want to be tricked into sleeping with someone who then abandons you. Which is why Edward is “old fashioned” and keeps insisting on marrying her. Here—here is someone who is safe to want who won’t make you pay a price for wanting them. These books really did do something effective for a huge audience segment.
Rather than being angry about about a book that you don’t like that others do, ask yourself, what did this book do for what audience? How did it do it? Why did it do it? Maybe you disagree with the message of the book, or the tone, or the delivery, but rather than being angry, maybe think of it as a learning experience. I thought about what made Twilight a hit. All of the above, plus it very deliberately has a basic, dish-rag-like main character, because when you make all your female characters badasses who are martial arts experts who speak 12 languages, basic teen girls won’t feel like her. That character would be aspirational, not reflective of who they are. The books are in first person, and more than a couple 30-something women I talked to about them said they really glommed onto first-person voice, that it brought them back to when they were in high school.
Don’t get angry. Study. People are angry about Colleen Hoover, and Sarah J Maas, and James Patterson. But that doesn’t get you anything.
FWIW, I think the Twilight movies even more profoundly understand what they are compared to the books. They’ve reached cultlike status for very good reasons (see below).
Photo by Duane Mendes on Unsplash
Shades of my late ‘70s and early ‘80s teenhood, when us guys invested far too much time and energy in trying to make girls question their choices every time we saw them with a V.C. Andrews book. At a time when I was inhaling Clive Cussler! One of those women brought that up at my 40-year reunion last year. I sometimes wish I could relive my teen years knowing what I know now so I could erase all my adolescent assholery.
This was great. I have on my bookshelf a certain infamous and controversial bestseller from the last few years. I started it, and couldn’t believe in its setting/language/culture (a foreign culture and place not familiar to the author, and it shows) within the first pages, and I set it down. But I’ve been meaning to try again and to more gently ask, “Why did SOME people (the ones who don’t give a crap about cultural accuracy) love this? What’s working for them?” Thanks for the inspiration as well as the permission to be annoyed—ha!