Stephenie Meyer's subconscious has a lot to answer for. Almost 10 years ago, as a young mother in Arizona, she had a dream about an average teenage girl and a beautiful male vampire, sitting in a meadow, lost in conversation about the difficulties of their relationship.
Stephenie
Meyer: 'True love is that you would hurt yourself before you would hurt your
partner
The specific problem
was that if they became too close – if they gave in to the girl's intense
desires – he'd hurt and potentially kill her. Meyer wanted to remember the
story, but was struggling with her small sons' relentless needs, so began
writing it down for safe keeping.
It was the first story she had ever put to
paper. A modest woman, a committed Mormon, she loved books, had always conjured
up stories, but had previously thought the idea of writing anything herself
would be presumptuous.
They have also
inspired another colossally successful series; EL James has said her Fifty
Shades of Grey trilogy, about a young woman who falls for a sexual sadist,
began as Twilight fan fiction. When I ask Meyer whether she's read Fifty
Shades, she quickly, emphatically, says no. She doesn't wish James ill at all,
she says, but "it's so not my genre. Erotica is not something I read. I
don't even read traditional romance." Why not? "It's too smutty.
There's a reason my books have a lot of innocence. That's the sort of world I
live in."
Beyond her outstanding contribution to the survival of
publishing, the most interesting outcome of Meyer's work has been the window it
has opened on the desires of a generation of girls. Just what is it about the
controlling, mercurial vampire Edward Cullen – a character who constantly tells
his girlfriend he's dangerous, who constantly polices the couple's sexual
boundaries – that they're so drawn to? Meyer's public appearances often inspire
febrile crying from fans, the shaking and sobbing more usually associated with
devoted Beliebers.
The day we meet, she is due at a book signing in the
evening, and reports have arrived that girls are already camping out, wrapped
up in silver survival blankets.
The film she is promoting, The Host, is based on a book she
published in 2008, which also topped the bestseller lists. I can't describe the
film, since the publicists weren't too keen for me to see it; suffice to say it
has an interesting cast including Saoirse Ronan and William Hurt, and an
interesting director, too, in Andrew Niccol, who directed and wrote Gattaca and
also wrote The Truman Show.
Meyer's novel is a science-fiction story about a
world in which aliens have taken over the Earth, very few humans survive, and
those who do run the risk of having their body co-opted, an alien soul
implanted in their neck.
Meyer, who is now 39, wrote the book because she needed an
"escape from my original escape", she says. Since she published
Twilight in 2005, her life had become surprisingly stressful. She had
anticipated an indifferent response to the novels – she is remarkably
unassuming – but instead there came "the massive amount of fans that I
hadn't expected, and the massive amount of people who hated it, which I also
didn't expect".
Twilight's critics have certainly been excoriating. The
books have been accused of being "abstinence porn", a series
deviously designed to convince teenagers of the need for sexual purity, centred
on one of the blankest female characters ever created in Bella Swan, a girl
defined by low self-esteem, who has few interests besides worshipping her
vampire boyfriend.
It has been suggested that they eroticise domestic violence,
and push an anti-abortion message, and there has been brutal criticism of their
literary merits. (Stephen King famously said Meyer "can't write a darn.
She's not very good.") Not surprisingly, she found some of the responses
tough to take.
Today she seems relaxed. Meyer is now also a film producer,
a role that began with the final instalments in the Twilight saga, and includes
an upcoming adaptation of her friend Shannon Hale's novel Austenland, about a
Pride and Prejudice fan who goes in search of her own Mr Darcy.
She also
produced The Host, and says it was important for her to portray a positive
relationship between the two women at the centre of the story: Melanie, a
resistance fighter, and Wanda, the alien implanted in her neck. (If ever you
need to have a good relationship, I suppose, it's when you're forced to share
the same body.)
Max Irons and Saoirse Ronan in The Host. Photograph:
imagenet
Despite all the criticism of her work, Meyer says she is a
feminist, and that this is really important to her. "I think there are
many feminists who would say that I am not a feminist.
But, to me ... I love
women, I have a lot of girlfriends, I admire them, they make so much more sense
to me than men, and I feel like the world is a better place when women are in
charge.
So that kind of by default makes me a feminist. I love working in a
female world." She was thrilled when Catherine Hardwicke's adaptation of
Twilight made her one of the most commercially successful directors in
Hollywood, and says of working on Austenland: "It was almost an entirely
female production, which is so rare, and to be able to work with female writers
and female directors and even our co-producer was a woman – it was a totally
different feel than you would have on a more traditional, male-centric
set."
The Host was also inspired by her feelings about body image.
Meyer is attractive – when she speaks, she resembles the actor Julianna
Margulies – but she doesn't seem to see it.
"As I was writing The Host,
one of the things that made it really interesting was the idea of looking at
being human from the perspective of someone who hasn't been human their whole
life," she says, referring to the Wanda character.
"You know, you
usually wake up in the morning and think: 'Ugh, I look horrible, I hate myself,
I don't want to walk out the door like this.' And it's nice sometimes just to
stop and think, I can walk out the door and see everything outside of it, and
that's amazing."
Meyer was brought up in Phoenix, Arizona, by a mother,
Candy, who stayed at home to look after the six children, and a father, Stephen,
who worked as a financial officer. (She was named after him, hence the quirky
spelling of Stephenie.) She was the second child, and soon became "the
book girl. I spent my entire childhood reading, and I think I was a bit
annoying because I was always living in a fantasy world."
On going to the
Mormon university, Brigham Young, to study English, her modesty and respect for
great writers stopped her attending creative writing classes. "When I was
growing up, authors were amazing angel people who had gifted me these other
worlds I got to live in, and I would never put myself on that level," she
says.
"You know, I was an English student, and there were people there who
said they wanted to be writers, and I completely scoffed. Like, first of all,
you can't make a living doing that. Secondly, who are you to presume you can
write novels?"
While still at university, aged 21, Meyer married her
husband, Christian, an accountant; they had met at church when she was four,
and started dating nine months before their wedding.
The family is religious,
she doesn't drink or smoke, and she is glad the profile of Mormonism has risen
a little recently, so there aren't so many embarrassing questions or misguided
stereotypes. For instance, the first time she went to meet her agent, "we
were on a train, and she said: [her voice drops to a whisper] 'So, how many
wives can you husband have?' And I was like, 'Well, just one, if he wants to
keep the one he already has.'"
She worked briefly as a receptionist, then had her three sons,
Gabe, Seth and Eli. For all that they're wonderful boys, she says, their early
years were one of the roughest patches of her life. "They didn't sleep,
they all had colic and ear infections endlessly, and so I just didn't sleep for
six years. I was always tired, and I always had a crying baby on me somewhere.
My whole life was about basic survival. About keeping them breathing and
fed."
Then came the vampire dream, and the compulsion to record
it. She finished the novel in three months, her older sister encouraged her to
send it out, an agent snapped it up, and within a few weeks she had a book deal
from Little, Brown worth $750,000 (about £500,000). She knew the book was
successful when it reached the New York Times bestseller list; she knew the series
was a phenomenon when the first film was in production and fans bombarded the
film-makers with emails, and kept sneaking on to the set.
The criticism also kicked in, growing stronger with each
book. In person, Meyer's demeanour makes you want to defend her; while what she
says often sounds prim on the page, she's actually a lot of fun, direct and
friendly, with a winning line in bigging up those she works with, especially
women who aren't necessarily at the top of the tree. Unfortunately, the books
are tough to defend.
There's no doubt, for instance, that Bella is a remarkably
droopy, drippy character, and while her blankness could be justified as a
device, enabling readers to identify with her (which has obviously happened to
an extraordinary degree), she also has a weird clumsiness, a haplessness that
means her vampire boyfriend has to rescue her regularly. He warns her
constantly that he could hurt her, while his moods swing wildly.
traits
only thrill her more. The oddness of their romance led some readers to point
out that it exhibits many of the classic signs of an abusive relationship.
Meyer's editor asked her to include pre-marital sex scenes,
but she declined. Did she set out to promote an abstinence message? "You
know, it's so funny," she says. "I never decide to put a message in
anything.
I decide on a story that I think is exciting, and I entertain myself,
and then some of it obviously reflects my personal experience … What I think
says true love is different than what a lot of other people do, so it's just
what my subconscious puts out there.
To me, true love is that you would hurt
yourself before you would hurt your partner, you would do anything to make them
happy, even at your own expense, there's nothing selfish about true love. It's not
about what you want. It's about what makes them happy."
Ironically, the criticism only intensified when the couple
finally had sex in the last book, Breaking Dawn, after getting married. The
scene takes place off the page, and the next morning, Bella looks at herself
naked in the mirror: "There was a faint shadow across one of my
cheekbones, and my lips were a little swollen, but other than that, my face was
fine.
The rest of me was decorated with patches of blue and purple. I
concentrated on the bruises that would be the hardest to hide – my arms and my
shoulders." Despite these injuries, she is desperate to have sex again.
When their relationship leads to a pregnancy that looks likely to kill her, she
refuses an abortion, only to have her bones snap during the birth.
Was Meyer worried about how Bella's post-coital injuries
might be seen? "To me, it was this really obvious situation," she
says. "He is 100 times stronger than her.
He's been telling her, for three
books, that this is a bad idea. It would have felt really false to me if: 'Oh,
whoops, there was no problem at all!'" I ask whether she's anti-abortion,
and she says: "You know what? I never talk about politics, because that is
one of my pet peeves, when people with any measure of celebrity get on their
soapbox and say: 'You should vote this way.' First of all, celebrities don't
know anything about real life. They live in an ivory tower … I lived in the
real world for 30 years, enough to know I'm not in it now."
She says the way Bella responded to her pregnancy related to
her experience of carrying her first child, Gabe. "I was told that I was
having a miscarriage, and that was one of the darkest times of my life. And so,
for me, I knew I could relate to her.
Bella had been OK with the idea of being
childless, but [when the character became pregnant] I was back in that time of
my life when someone told me that that was going to be taken away from me …
That was something I'd been through that really affected my life, and it was
not a commentary on anything political." Thankfully, her son was fine, "but
I have had friends who have lost children, and I know the hole that creates
when you really want that child."
The truth is there must be tens of thousands of romance
novels containing similar themes and biases to Meyer's series: weak heroines,
strong heroes, submission and surrender, a central plot involving obsessive
love.
Had the Twilight books sold 5,000 copies, it's doubtful anyone would have
complained. The most interesting question is not why she wrote it as she did,
but why girls responded so wildly. Is there something particularly powerful, in
this cultural moment, about a dangerous, potentially violent romantic hero?
In
a world where porn is ubiquitous, where there do seem new sexual pressures on
young women – demands for them from boys to take naked pictures, for example –
is a chaste but adoring partner especially appealing? Do young women still
yearn for a dominant man? Do they identify, more than ever, with an awkward,
unconfident female protagonist? Bubbling away in a generation's subconscious
are some troubling answers.
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