If you’ve been following my reading roundup posts for the last few months, you know I’ve been working my way through the Harry Potter books again. This started as a combination of my annual reread and a deep need for some literary comfort food at the start of quarantine, and rereading the first three books were great. Then She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named revealed that she is a terrible person, and that really slowed down my reading of the fourth book as I worked through my feelings about this and what I wanted to do with those feelings. The fifth book was another story. The ministry’s denial of Voldemort’s return, coupled with Harry’s feelings of isolation, made it very bad quarantine reading. Which leads me to the actual point of this blog post.
At some point in the past few months, a friend in my writing group said that rereading Twilight was a good quarantine decision. Her recommendation, along with the announcement that Midnight Sun is finally coming out in August, pushed me to reread the Twilight books in July. And it was quite an experience. As often as I was cringing through the books, I have to admit that I enjoyed the books, and now that I’ve read them again, I judge myself a little less for how much I liked them in high school.
All through my sophomore and junior years of high school, I read and reread and reread the Twilight books. It was all I talked about, much to the annoyance of everyone around me who wasn’t a high school girl. I even had Twilight T-shirts and a poster of Edward on my bedroom wall. Then Breaking Dawn came out the summer before my senior year, and it was so bad and such a disappointing end to the series that by the middle of senior year, I was the one cringing at the freshmen and sophomores in my Spanish class who couldn’t talk about anything else.
I have spent the intervening ten years either vehemently denying that I was a Twilight fan in high school or else admitting, grudgingly, that I read them but then ranting about how utterly terrible they are. So much so that when I picked them up again, I found I barely remembered the books themselves, and I was shocked by how not terrible they were.
Don’t get me wrong, the Twilight books aren’t great. They aren’t great for a number of reasons, and so many people have talked about those reasons in depth. I’m not here to rehash that. There were definitely a lot of moments where I cringed on this reread. There’s a lot of casual racism and sexism and I was horrified that once apon a time I found the scene where Jacob kisses Bella against her will and her dad takes Jacob’s side, even though Bella actually got hurt defending herself, to be a funny scene. But I will say that in my opinion, the biggest flaw of the series is that it taught a generation of teenage girls that the gold standard for romance is an abusive relationship. I came to my senses by the end of high school, and I know many of my friends did too, but I’m sure not everyone did, and the damage this series might have caused is really problematic.
But after rereading the books last month, I have to admit that in a lot of ways, they aren’t as bad as I’ve been giving them credit for. Honestly, I was a little alarmed by how quickly I was sucked into the books and how unwilling I was to put them down. I felt like I was reliving all those times I read the books in high school, all the lunchtime arguments and fangirling in the back of my precalculus class and smuggling my original iPod shuffle into my confirmation retreat so I could listen to the end of New Moon. I’d honestly forgotten a lot of the books (especially New Moon, because I’m pretty sure after the first time through I only read the beginning and then skipped to the part where Alice comes back). There’s a point at the end of Eclipse when Jacob tells Bella that Edward is like a drug for her, and I felt, both back in high school and this month, that this applied to me and these books too. I needed to be reading them all the time, at the expense of everything else, including sleep. When I did sleep, my dreams were very much Twilight themed. And again, it wasn’t until I got to Breaking Dawn that I managed to snap out of it.
But revisiting all these memories is a lot of the reason I feel a little more kindly toward the Twilight books now, because rereading them reminded me not just of how much I liked them but of how much I actually gained from them.
I had a hard time socially in high school. I had a few close friends but often felt like I didn’t fit in any one group. But the time when we were all reading Twilight, sitting around crowded lunch tables after band and arguing about whether we were Team Edward or Team Jacob, or fangirling about Edward and his silver volvo all the way through algebra 2 and precalculus are honestly some of my happiest high school memories. Even the shared disappointment at the way Breaking Dawn went.
I’m also pretty sure Twilight is the reason I first picked up Pride and Prejudice in high school, though I admit I didn’t really appreciate it until I was in college and had put Twilight behind me.
Finally, the Twilight series really impacted how I write, and I’d forgotten how much until I reread them just now. No, the writing in the Twilight books is not a masterpiece of literary genius. But it does what it is meant to do: it is clear and engaging and it moves the plot along, and that’s totally fine. Of course, I do hope I write better than Stephenie Meyer, but I have to say, Twilight is the reason I first tried writing in first person, which is a style I really enjoy and use quite a lot. I also spent hours on Stephenie Meyer’s website—at one point it was my homepage—and her writing advice is also why I first tried writing scenes from other characters’ points of view to really get into their heads, and why I still make playlists of songs that speak to my ideas for each project. All these things have really helped my writing, and I have to give credit where credit is due.
So is Twilight a great series? No. Would I recommend it to anyone? Absolutely not. But did I enjoy it? Yes. Will I reread it again some time? Maybe. Will I buy Midnight Sun when it comes out tomorrow and read it obsessively for the rest of the week? You bet. And I’m okay with that now.
To quote another friend from my writing group, Twilight is like the equivalent of eating raw cookie dough. I’m totally aware of how it’s unhealthy, but once in a while… Yeah it’s good stuff.