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The Age
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Sweet Valley High taught me all about love – except for one key detail
Before I discovered teen romance novels in the early 1980s, I wrote my own version of unrequited love in my red vinyl-covered diary about an older boy who went to the private school up the road. 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. Loading 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.
Sydney Morning Herald
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The books I loved as a teen have dated, but they got one thing right
Before I discovered teen romance novels in the early 1980s, I wrote my own version of unrequited love in my red vinyl-covered diary about an older boy who went to the private school up the road. 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. Loading 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.
The Age
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
The books I loved as a teen have dated, but they got one thing right
Before I discovered teen romance novels in the early 1980s, I wrote my own version of unrequited love in my red vinyl-covered diary about an older boy who went to the private school up the road. 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. Loading 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.
New York Times
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
They Were Identical ‘Twinnies' Who Charmed Orwell, Camus and More
Move over, Véra. See ya, Zelda. Make way for Celia and Mamaine. The dazzling Paget sisters, as they've been rebranded by the U.S. edition of a book published in the United Kingdom as 'The Quality of Love,' were identical twins, that category of perpetual aesthetic and scientific fascination. Born in 1916, orphaned at 12 and educated unconventionally, they grew up to be vivid but fragile poppies among tall waving wheat stalks of midcentury intellectualism: George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Bertrand Russell, Edmund Wilson, André Malraux, Benjamin Britten, etc. Though the sisters did not have public bylines, they wrote prolifically and vividly in private. Celia edited a selection of Mamaine's letters to Koestler, the Austro-Hungarian polymath who was her longtime and somewhat bitter sweetheart, which was published in 1985. (True, when the general onslaught of correspondence proved overwhelming, Mamaine complained to Celia: 'It is a stinking bore.') Forty years later, Celia's daughter, Ariane Bankes, having inherited a 'capacious and sooty black' tin trunk stuffed with envelopes and folders, has produced an enchanting double-helix biography of her mother and aunt. Without undermining the scholarly significance and rigor of 'The Dazzling Paget Sisters,' let me note that this relatively slender book contains enough mad capers, heaving proposals and dramatic death throes to be a veritable Harlequin romance for the literary set, with a dash of Sweet Valley High. ('Even Sartre was hoodwinked by Celia pretending to be Mamaine on a later trip to Paris.') From the beginning, these twins seemed to toggle with particular agility between the planes of Trivial and Tragic that Koestler theorized govern human existence. Their mother, Georgina, suffered complications giving birth and perished a week afterward. Their early childhood in rural Suffolk was idyllic — books, birdsong, bulrushes — but socially isolated. When they were 7, their doting father, Eric, whom they called Mr. Sardine, was diagnosed with an incurable disease of the nervous system. They learned of his death in boarding school, and were subsequently entrusted to the care of a rich but stingy and eccentric uncle: 'a conservative of the deepest dye' who believed in astrology and reincarnation, and his French wife, Germaine, nicknamed Ging-Ging and enamored of enormous garden parties. Chronic asthma led Celia and Mamaine to finishing school, and a dawning cosmopolitanism, in the Swiss Alps. They loved music and languages and hoped to attend university (one of their final joint undertakings was the study of ancient Greek) but instead, cursed with good looks, were pressed to come out for two seasons as debutantes in taffeta gowns. There they met a fellow society skeptic, Jessica Mitford, as well as Dick Wyndham, a 20-years-older dashing character at the center of the Bright Young People who fell madly in love with Mamaine. The press also fell madly in love with the Pagets. A weekly called The Sketch featured the ''twinnies' and their twin apartments.' They modeled, traveled, practiced nursing in the same ward during the Blitz (figuring they'd rather be killed together) and were, long before Facebook, highly 'friendable,' as Celia put it. She would work for a series of journals whose titles rang with the ideological excitement of the era: Horizon, Occident, Polemic. Mamaine, meanwhile, became the devoted amanuensis, boon companion and eventually wife to Koestler, who called her Mermaid, refused her children and would have periodic sulks about her indifferent housekeeping as well as the roiling state of the world and politics, adroitly glossed here. The couple were among the first visitors to the new state of Israel, where she warded off robbers by shouting 'Thieves in the Night,' the title of his Zionist novel, at them in Hebrew. Wilson, the portly critic and Mary McCarthy's soon-to-be ex, was smitten with her as well — 'unfortunately it is a bad book so my immortality is not assured,' she wrote of his 'Europe Without Baedaker.' And after Koestler threw a piece of bread at her at the Scheherazade, a Paris nightclub, resulting in a black eye, she swooned for Camus. Their stolen week exploring the Provençal landscape is travelogue of a lost Eden, illustrated with hitherto unpublished snapshots from the trunk. 'She warned that he would forget her. 'Of course, one forgets everything,'' Camus replied. (Nothing like an absurdist French lover!) 'He would simply not want to live in a world in which he had forgotten her.' As for Celia, after a brief first marriage, she was courted by Orwell, who shortly before he published '1984' and succumbed to tuberculosis would send her a list of crypto-communists and 'fellow travelers,' people he believed sympathetic to Stalinism. Filled with foreboding about 'the graveyards of individual freedoms,' 'The Dazzling Paget Sisters' nonetheless does plenty of whistling past those graveyards. It's lacy and necessary filigree between the sober straight lines of history.
