The Sweet Valley High author who sold over 200 million books died last week. Emily Simpson remembers the impact of her books in the 1980s and talks to Melissa Stokes, Miriama Kamo and Mandy Te about what her books meant to them.
In 1984, when the first two Sweet Valley High books landed in the Hereford St branch of Whitcoulls, Christchurch, I couldn’t slam down my pocket money fast enough.
I was just another 12-year-old struggler with a mouth full of metal, and a head waiting to be stuffed full of Southern California and the lives of Jessica and Elizabeth, the 16-year-old Wakefield twins, with their sun-streaked blonde hair and Porsche-driving boyfriends.
I was the first – if far from last – girl in my class to own those two classics (Double Love and Secrets) and for that reason I always felt a misplaced sense of connection to Francine Pascal and her teen fantasy franchise, which would grow to 181 books with multiple spinoffs, culminating in over 200 million sales. I dropped off after book number five and yet, 40 years later, snippets of the series remain carved into my brain. Especially the twins’ blue-green eyes which were invariably described as being “the colour of the Pacific ocean”.
Not that Pascal would have been overly familiar with the Pacific. The writer, who died last week, lived in New York her entire life and reportedly didn’t visit Southern California once in her 92 years. But the woman knew what was she was doing. Already in her 50s with a well-established career as a TV soap writer when she started the Sweet Valley series, Pascal was peddling an imaginary world to a vulnerable demographic and it needed to be as predictable as it was inauthentic.
The ghost writers who churned out the later Sweet Valley books under Pascal’s direction abided by strict rules, one being that readers would be reminded of the twins’ identical physiques within the first couple of pages: there was that sun-streaked blonde hair, a dimple in their respective left cheeks, their eyes the colour of said ocean and of course their 5ft6 “perfect size six” frames.
“I loved being in their world,” says Melissa Stokes – a 1News presenter and former Sweet Valley reader. Her own world at the time was Ōtūmoetai Intermediate in Tauranga, where she was a sporty and "pretty average" tween who wanted to wear surf labels, instead of the "fashion-forward and intricate dresses" that her talented seamstress mother wanted to make for her. She had a friend –another Melissa – who lived in the same cul-de-sac and together they liked to imagine they were twins, like Jessica and Elizabeth.
"Those two years were interesting," says Stokes of intermediate school. "I vividly remember being in love with these boys who didn’t know I was alive. Now, having boys of my own, I realise that (oblivion) is a real boy thing – it must be something in girls’ brains at that age, to have these unrequited crushes while the boys are still wanting to play sports and ignore you.”
This was not a problem the Wakefield twins endured. The pair had living Ken dolls scattered at their feet, although they were all fairly forgettable, (apart from Scott, the dangerous older college boy who in hindsight resembled a porn star and needed to get some friends his own age).
“I don’t remember the male characters at all really,” agrees Stokes. “Even though they had boyfriends – it was very girl-led.”
But, in keeping with the era, far from diverse. Apparently in later books, Pascal made some moves towards inclusivity but at its inception everyone in Sweet Valley was white, there were no gay people, cookie-cutter beauty standards were rigidly upheld and the culture’s good girl/bad girl” dichotomy was embodied in studious Elizabeth and vixenish Jessica, begging the question of readers – which limiting cliché am I?
Which one did you want to be? I asked Stokes. “I think in your heart of hearts you first want to be a Jessica,” she says. “But looking back I think she was slightly unhinged.”
Journalist, presenter, author and te reo student Miriama Kamo describes herself as having been a “curious, earnest militant Māori teen... which is why I let few know that I read Sweet Valley High, she says. “I was like lots of other teens in the 80s who patrolled the library shelves for the latest edition to be available, and who never admitted to reading the books until I was an adult."
Cut to the 21st Century when a young Mandy Te (now Re news editor) and her sister would go to book fairs and buy the faded Sweet Valley paperbacks for 20 cents. By then the books were decades old and mildly ridiculous but they still held a certain power. "I was a tween so I remember the allure of these mature high school students and the sense of freedom it appeared they had," says Te. "They’re 16 and they have cars!"
"I was taking the bus to school, wearing a uniform – they didn’t have school uniforms. And the outrageousness of the stories, there was one where Jessica was having a secret relationship with Todd, her twin sister’s boyfriend. It was so salacious and dramatic. I don’t like to be involved in drama, but it is nice to observe.”
Te says by the time she got to the series it had taken on the innocuousness of the retro. “I was reading it in 2007 and 2008, so it did feel very dated to me. That was part of the fun of it, that beachy vibe. I don’t think I took it too seriously. You enjoy them because it takes you into a different world. It wasn’t something I aspired to or thought was real, it was just fun to go along for the ride."
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