Welcome
my Lovely Readers! You are in for a very very special column today. I
put a lot of love into this one, and I hope it shows.
Let me
take us all back to October 2005. I was a newly-wed and completely
oblivious. I was hard-core into Harry Potter-land. With the release of
Half-Blood Prince (on my wedding day) I couldn't have asked for more. I
didn't know that a new god had been born to my pantheon.
Fast
forward a few years and my hubby had joined a horror book club that
offered him 3 hardcovers at ninety-nine cents apiece. Now, I had become aware of
this phenomenon going on the book world that had teenage girls and their
mothers screaming at book releases the same way they would for a
Generic Boy Band concert (no shame, just facts) and I felt I wasn't
allowed to join them. So I ignored it. But then, Hubby, with this book
club... y'all he didn't get anything for himself. He got the htree
Twilight books that had been published at that point.
I love me
some vampire stories from Anne Rice to Laurell K. Hamilton, but these
weren't meant for me. I was certain i wouldn't be able to relate at
all. So I put Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse in a closet and did my
best to forget about them. That is where they would stay for the next
couple of years.
Now, I know y'all are gonna say I'm insane,
and maybe I am, but I swear from time to time i heard them whisper to
me from the darkness of that closet, "Read Me!" I was doomed. I caved
sometime in 2008.
I'm not trying to say that Stephanie Meyer is
the best author ever, but this book holds a special place in my heart.
Reading it in 2022 brought back such a feeling of nostalgia and so very
much Dopamine.
I am not going to use this space to try to
convert you from a hater to a Twihard,Ii am going to talk about what I
love about this first book and why it resonated with me. Why it still
resonates with me today. And what i saw differently this time around.
If you're a Twilight hater, a Stephanie Meyer hater, or you just don't
want to go there, please feel free to skip the rest, I'm sure I'll catch
you next time ☺️☺️
In the event you've spent the last decade
and a half under a rock, I'm going to give you a short synopsis. Bella
Swan moves to Forks, Washington to live with her father so that her
"flighty, harebrained mother" can go on the road with her second
husband, a minor league baseball player. Her dad is chief of police
Charlie Swan. Bella rekindles a friendship with the youngest child of
Charlie's Bff, Jacob Black. Jacob is a Quillute and a resident of the
nearby reservation.
In the Forks High School, Bella makes surface
level friends with a group of teens. She is constantly rebuffing the
advances of her male classmates, except Edward Cullen who seems reviled
by her to an exaggerated extent. According to Meyer, this is a
retelling of Pride and Prejudice, spiced up with her version of vampire
lore.
This was something that really hooked me as a long-time
vampire reader. Meyer's vampire lore pulled out of thin air is unlike
any other. I think it really rejuvenated the interest in the sub-genre.
And by accident (maybe) Meyers made the toughest, hardest to kill
vampires known to literature. These vampires walk in the daylight, are
able to carry religious items, cross running water, are impervious to
wooden stakes with skin like stone. They can be broken into pieces and
burned, but then like a medieval european witch, the ashes must be
scattered. You must admit its a novelty.
In addition to the
novelty factor, I see a lot of myself in Bella. You see, she, too was
a parentified child. We see evidence of this very early in the book:
How
could I leave my loving, erratic, harebrained mother to fend for
herself? Of course she had Phil now, so the bills would get paid, there
would be food in the refrigerator, gas in her car, and someone to call
when she got lost, but still...
We get another example of this when
Bella takes over Charlie's housekeeping:
So I requested
that I be assigned kitchen detail for the duration of my stay... I also
found out that he had no food in the house.
All of this makes
total sense later when Bella is asked her age. Her reply:
My mom
always says I was born thirty-five years old and that i get more middle aged
every year.
The nail in the coffin of this is Bella's follow-up
statement, further down the page, that "Someone had to be the adult."
Far
from the helpless, hapless heroine many of the haters have made her out
to be, Bella is loyal, super courageous and cool under pressure in a
way some of us recognize from our childhoods. Really. She's just clumsy!
Bella and I also happen to be devout readers as well as people-pleasers. Our mothers were too young to know the harm they were causing,
our fathers are emotionally distant, but do their best to be loving
and supportive. Doesn't everyone know by now that Charlie Doesn't Hover?
Of
course when I initially read this book, I don't know that I picked up
on a lot of that, I just know that it tickled my brain. Somehow, I had
found another safe place within the pages of a book.
Nearly twenty years later, I found myself overwhelmed not only by nostalgia for
the story itself, but the time in my life it represented. As for what
I see differently now, Mike is creepy A. F. Right from go. And the
fact that a boy Bella has repeatedly told no shows up to her house to
pick her up for the dance she's already at is just cringe.
I
admit that outside the context of this story Edward is a total stalker
creeper dude, but he isn't the one that makes my skin crawl with his
insistence. That award goes to Mike Newton. His whole thing just gets
worse over the course of the series. We'll go more into that another
time.
Through this story, I am able to have the fantasy of a
semi-functioning relationship with my own mother. And it transports me
back to a time before my biggest personal losses.
Thanks to this book, I have found so many people I truly vibe with.
Twilight can do what I need fiction to do the most: gives me hope. And Dopamine.
Thanks
so much for hanging out with me, if you stayed. I really hope you
enjoyed this piece. And if you skipped Twilight for whatever reason
back in the day, maybe it's time you gave it a go.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5
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