Sweet Valley High taught me all about love – except for one key detail
While I was still wearing skinny jeans and a pale pink Esprit jumper to primary school, he had graduated to grey flannel shorts, a pale grey shirt and a grey blazer with the arms pushed up. You'd think dressing entirely in grey would have dampened his look, but somehow it didn't. With golden curls and a flashing smile that I'd only witnessed from a distance, he was perfect teen magazine material. He never spoke to me directly, but his brother and I had been friends when we were little, and his mother had named her prize cow after me, a fact I found both strangely flattering and deeply embarrassing.
Around the time I developed my crush, I discovered the Sweet Dreams book series. If it was the sealed monthly Dolly Doctor column that taught me all I needed to know about sex, it was Sweet Dreams and later, Sweet Valley High that taught me all I needed to know about love. Sure, it was the sort of love that only 16-year-old American girls with flawless skin, perfect hair and eyes that sparkled ever experienced, but I was happy to pretend. And pretend I did. Writing about all the ways my crush would save me when the horse I was riding in the bush bucked me off. The fact that I didn't own a horse, or ever ride alone in the bush, didn't deter my fantasy life.
The first Sweet Dreams book was published in 1981, and I found it a year or so later in the mobile library van. Called P.S. I Love You, it's the only title in the 233-book series without a happy ending, making it my favourite. Romance was one thing, but sobbing over the impossibility of romance was even better.
The story of 16-year-old Mariah, who is dragged unwillingly to Palm Springs for the summer with her single mother and younger sister, was a heady read for a 12-year-old. Mariah is openly scathing of the rich families in Palm Springs until she meets the boy next door, who happens to be loaded, lovely and dying. This book cemented my obsession with romance, while also making me terrified that the boy of my dreams would discover a cancerous lump in his neck, too.
The Sweet Dreams books were mostly standalone romances, written by different American authors. The covers used portrait photographs of teenage girls who I wanted to look like but never did, including Courteney Cox on the cover of The Last Word. The protagonists were always beautiful, and the teenage boys they fell for equally so. And if the girls didn't start out that way, then they quickly transformed, losing any necessary weight and overcoming their shyness. These worlds excluded anyone who wasn't the right size, race or look.
By the time the Sweet Valley High series appeared two years later, I'd moved onto another crush. One who actually knew my name. We were in the same class and I used his library card when I wanted to borrow more romance books than I was allowed. We didn't really talk, but I did practise writing his name over and over again in my best bubble writing.
Written by Francine Pascal and her army of ghostwriters, the Sweet Valley High series became a sort of bible for my generation. Sure, the protagonists were 'perfect size six' identical twins with 'sun-streaked blonde hair' and 'blue-green eyes the colour of the ocean' who shared a Jeep and lived in a mansion, but we still managed to see ourselves in Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield. Jessica was the impulsive and reckless twin, who frequently made questionable choices, while Elizabeth was older (by four minutes) wiser, more reserved and born with a conscience.
Where the Sweet Dreams series was almost entirely focused on finding love, Sweet Valley High attempted something slightly different. Crushes, boys and romance were still at the centre, but the books also delved into the minutiae of high school life. And while Sweet Valley High School was nothing like my outer-suburban school, we did share many of the same concerns. We gossiped over break-ups, traded crushes, drank underage at parties, fought and made up with friends and talked about love like there was nothing else to talk about. Nothing was out of bounds for the writers of Sweet Valley High. Conceived like a soap opera, the books tackled everything from kidnapping to cults, cocaine deaths to comas, paralysis to underage drinking, and I loved it all.
Sadly, none of the boys I had crushes on while I was reading Sweet Dreams or Sweet Valley High seemed to feel the same. Or if they did, their feelings remained as buried as mine. But the books gave me company while I was trying to work out how to behave and how to feel, at a time when hormones were wreaking havoc. Remembering what reading romance books meant to me when I was 12 and 13, I decided to write my own version of a romantic comedy for younger readers. I've published many books for readers aged 11-plus, but mostly they have been stories tinged with sadness, and I wanted to write something hopeful and gentle.
For research, I reread some of the titles in both series. P.S. I Love You no longer made me cry, but the horror of Elizabeth's diary being stolen by a boy at school and used against her in The Stolen Diary did make me check my teenage diary was still hidden away.
The books haven't aged particularly well – it was the height of diet culture in the 1980s, after all. But what they did do, and what I suspect I, and millions of others responded to, was to centre the importance of taking a teenager's emotions seriously. So often we dismiss the young as having foolish crushes or feelings that aren't worthy of conversation, but I still remember how I felt about that boy in his grey school uniform and how I longed for him to see me.
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My new book is not angst-ridden like a Sweet Dream s romance, or soapie like a Sweet Valley High. It is the story of dual protagonists, Sonny and Tess, both nearly 14, who meet outside a fish and chip shop, and develop a mutual crush. It was important to me to write both perspectives, in a way to counter the absence of a boy's voice in the books that educated me as a teen.
I want my young readers to see that we all have messy and confusing feelings when love strikes, and that it's not up to a boy to rescue a girl when her horse bucks her off in the bush, but that the girl can do rescuing too.
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