When news broke that Francine Pascal, creator of the “Sweet Valley High” universe, died last weekend at the age of 92, appreciations began rolling across the internet like a certain red Spider through a high school parking lot. “Wildly popular,” “staple of my girlhood,” “G.O.A.T. of publishing,” readers proclaimed. Nostalgic and bereaved, I drove to the library to check out a few, only to discover they had been removed from the catalog.
“Yes, I knew they were terrible,” one patron confessed in a review. “But I loved them.”
This backhanded praise would have been familiar to Ms. Pascal, whose literary talents were either sneered at or dismissed for decades. Even as her franchise blanketed best-seller lists — 200 million books and counting, thanks to teenage readers like me — she, and they, received astonishingly little media coverage.
For those affected by the blackout, the Sweet Valley universe comprises hundreds of novels and numerous spinoffs, all set in the eponymous Southern California town and starring Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, identical twins with blue-green eyes, shining blond hair and sky-high ambitions — Elizabeth’s literary, Jessica’s social. Observing their adventures, a 2012 article in The Guardian struck a typical tone when it declared that “the story lines are, often, ridiculous.”
Which is a ridiculous insult, not to mention a misreading, for to come to Sweet Valley for the story lines is to subscribe to Playboy for the articles. Criticizing the narrative arc of the books misses and, tellingly, demeans what for me was the entire point of the series: a rare portal through which we girls growing up in the 1980s and ’90s could explore our erotic potential.
I don’t mean erotic in the pornographic sense — although, OK, sometimes the books pointed mildly in that direction — but as Audre Lorde defined it, the meeting place of “our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”
In 1983, the year both “Double Love” (Sweet Valley No. 1) and I were born, girls needed that meeting place. Back then, female desire was as terrifying as full-fat yogurt. Raised under the tyranny of Christian virtue, thanks to a minister father and prudish mother, I took solace in Sweet Valley, absconding to my room for days at a time with a tote full of library paperbacks that my mother, thank God, never skimmed for quality control. At age 10, I was free to read and reread as many PG-13 scenes as I liked, including this passage from “Playing With Fire” (Sweet Valley No. 3), where Jessica embarks on a dangerous affair with the Porsche-driving Bruce Patman:
“He responded by turning his face to hers and kissing her hard, his arms crushing her against him, his mouth demanding what his body wanted to take.”
The line precedes a sultry encounter that, like Proust’s madeleine, has had such staying power in my consciousness that for years I’ve joked it makes up the bulk of my sexual identity. As I’ve relayed it to friends, often in an attempt to explain my weakness for forbidden romance, Jessica puts on a tiny red bikini to swim in a lake with Bruce, who kisses her while sneakily untying the strings. Topless, Jessica is both scared and turned on, and Bruce is rough and amused. They hook up in the bushes until her twin, Elizabeth, interrupts them, horrified that her sister might take things too far.
The other night, curious how far, if at all, my memory veered from the text, I downloaded the e-book and was pleased to discover not only that my memory was impeccable but also that the scene was still hot. In fact, the writing reminded me of something I’d read in my 20s, so I ran downstairs, grabbed my copy of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and, lo and behold, found this:
“His body was urgent against her, and she didn’t have the heart anymore to fight … a strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way.”
If you squint — you don’t even have to squint hard — D.H. Lawrence’s imagery is indistinguishable from Ms. Pascal’s. Like her, Lawrence was ridiculed for writing about female sexuality. Unlike her, Lawrence was a man, and his efforts to put words to desire were, eventually, touted as genius. Unlike her, Lawrence was never an author I cottoned to. I found his prose stifling, like being trapped in an overheated room with a close talker.
But Ms. Pascal keeps her sultry scenes frank and short, and in the encounter above, she toggles back and forth between the twins’ point of view. She said in many interviews that Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield could be understood as one person, the good and bad in each of us, which meant that for half of each novel, we were encouraged to identify with Jessica, our inner baddie. In “Double Love” alone, Jessica goes barhopping with an older guy, gets picked up by the police, lies to the police, identifies herself as Elizabeth and steals Elizabeth’s crush for the school dance. Throughout the series, Jessica knows what she wants — boys, popularity, besting her sister — and pursues it with a near-sociopathic zeal. Because the two girls are twins, neither perspective dominates. There is no main character. There is complexity.
Until I encountered Jessica Wakefield, I had no idea that a girl could not only have such desires but also act them out to their natural conclusion (sex, mayhem). Ms. Pascal, in an introduction to her e-books, wrote, “Unlike the Sleeping Beauty version of romance novels, where the heroine has to wait for the wake-up kiss, in my series the girls would drive the action.” This remains a radical choice. Even in the beloved “Baby-Sitters Club” universe, Sweet Valley High’s chaste younger sibling, heroines may endure hardship — the death of a parent, diabetes, racism — but they never create it. Their desires are sweet and clean — to be a prima ballerina, for example — and cause no havoc for others.
Jessica was all havoc, Elizabeth protected her from it, Bruce Patman loved it, and secreted away in my childhood bedroom, my eyes flicking over the page, I got to try out the idea of being each of them. My experience correlates with research done by Marta Meana at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and her colleagues, who found that when looking at erotic and nonerotic images of heterosexual couples, straight women’s eyes lingered on both sexes evenly. We want to desire, and we want to be the object of desire. For the first time, the chaste minister’s daughter within me met her dream boy and her sexually adventurous alter ego, and there, curled up on my corduroy papasan chair, all three of us belonged.
“I don’t know that they’re all going to go on to ‘War and Peace,’” Ms. Pascal modestly told People magazine in 1988, speaking of her readers, “but we have created readers out of nonreaders.” As a reader who did go on to “War and Peace,” I can say confidently that Ms. Pascal understood my desires more than Tolstoy ever did. Tolstoy punished female desire with suicide and “rewarded” the beautiful, virginal Natasha with a brood of children and a sexless, tanklike competence at the end of his Great Book. By the end of “Sweet Valley Confidential,” Ms. Pascal’s reboot, Jessica marries Elizabeth’s ex-fiancé Todd, with whom she had had a torrid affair, and Elizabeth ends up with the one and only Bruce Patman. (Interestingly, Jessica is also trying to read “War and Peace.”) I’m not saying it’s a Great Book, but I am saying that greatness resides in many places that critics miss, and even Great Books, especially ones written by men, have plenty of limitations. Tolstoy wrote so readers could understand the world, but Ms. Pascal wrote so girls could understand themselves. Which was not only great for a girl like me but also, dare I say, an act of genius.
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