What I Learned From Reading Twilight

On forbidden books and what they teach us

I recently saw the movie Twilight for the first time. Well, to be thorough in the telling I have to admit that I also, after a break of about five minutes, saw New Moon. And before that, over a period of several months, I read both of the novels by Stephanie Meyer. And now I am reading Eclipse.

Why, you ask? Really, why?

GIF from The Hilarious House of Frightenstein.

The simple answer is that I am in a book club with my childhood best friend, and we find it an absolutely rollicking time. The more complex — and truer — answer is that I am enjoying the experience on its own terms, and learning plenty about myself, cultural commentary, and vampires in the process. I’m not just reading about Edward Cullen “looking more like a Greek God than anyone had a right to” for my ride-or-die. Lest you get it twisted, nor am I reading about Jacob Black “twisting his hair in his big hands” for my bestie. And neither, for that matter, am I reading about anyone’s hair falling like “black satin curtains on either side of his broad face” for my truest gal pal. No. I’m doing all this, on some unambiguous level, for me.

In 2008, when the Twilight Saga first made the rounds in my world, I was 13 years old, and my reading habits were aspirational. I was devouring Harry Potter and whatever the Scholastic Book Fair was throwing at me, always as many grade-levels ahead as I could manage. On some level this was driven by the actual quality of the books; on another level it was driven even then by a project of self-fashioning. I didn’t merely enjoy the books — I wanted to be the kind of person who enjoyed them. In some dim, inarticulate way, I understood even then that our consumptive choices were inexorably tied to who we were.

And in this sweaty world of gym classes, green apple deodorant and Windows Live Messenger, Twilight infected us like an irresistible rumour. Gangly and pubescent, lip glossed and fixed with the latest colorful orthodontics, we were this novel’s perfect receiver — sheltered girls on the cusp of a waiting world. We lived in the suburbs, did our homework for fun. Danger was a skinned knee or a rejection to the school dance. “Vampiric” was how some of our parents described taxes. We were — sometimes horribly it seemed to us — safe. And Twilight became a kind of talisman against that safety, a promise that no matter what was to come, we would not be boring. We were to live our thrills, and kiss them too.

What is Twilight about? For those who’ve read it, the next three paragraphs will seem tedious. For those who haven’t read it — what are you doing, reading Kant? Jeez — Twilight is about a young teenage girl named Bella Swan whose sole discernible qualities are her extreme clumsiness, literary aptitude, and apparent indifference in the face of existential danger. She moves to the rainy town of Forks, Washington and falls in love with a handsome, ivory-skinned teenager — or so she thinks — named Edward Cullen. Cullen is possessed of the perfect family of four siblings and two parents, all ivory-skinned and graceful. (Spoiler alert: they are all vampires. Also, they are not really related by blood; they just pretend to be a family to be human-passing. They are in the vampire closet!) In this world, vampires kill when they drink blood, unless they merely bite a human and do not drink — in which case, the “venom” from their fangs infects the blood, and in a painful process that lasts 72 hours, a human can become a vampire. One of the central dramas of Twilight is how badly Bella wants to become a vampire.

The other central drama of Twilight: the Cullens are self-described “vampire vegetarians,” meaning they have sworn off human blood and instead live off the blood of other mammals. All the same, Edward finds the smell of Bella’s blood particularly intoxicating, and must restrain himself at all times in order to avoid killing her. Alas, this is erotic risk at its most literal: don’t kiss me too hard, I might accidentally kill you. I want to! But I love you, so I won’t.

If not killing your girlfriend was a cardinal virtue, Edward would be a saint.

Some of the other dramas of Twilight: Bella’s best friend, Jacob Black, is a beautiful Indigenous teenager who later becomes a werewolf. And poor Jacob is in love with Bella, but she is in love with Edward. Also, there is a rotating cast of “bad vampires” (vampires who willingly kill humans in order to drink) who want to kill Bella for various reasons; thus, her adopted family the Cullens must continually fight them off in order to protect their precarious peace.

Now, put yourself in the shoes of a teenage girl, circa 2008. Do you feel the appeal yet? To suburban teenage girls, Twilight is an idealization of everything that lies beyond the diligently guarded walls of their communities, and their bodies. It is about the many different kinds of danger that the world has to offer: physical danger (“My boyfriend wants to kill me! Also, other vampires!”); emotional danger (“When my boyfriend broke up with me I became depressed and dissociative!”); existential danger (“I could lose my entire humanity! But oh, how I want to!”) And all of these forms of danger are, of course, tied up in the erotic (“My boyfriend wants my body!”) If the threat of puberty is the threat of losing one’s self as one has so far known it, Twilight is puberty dramatized — and its cast of mythological heroes and villains revolves around the central question of who Bella will become as a matter of destiny: friend or foe, ally or victim, outcast or it girl, mortal or immortal.

I’m changing. But who am I changing into?

Twilight is also — in classic Young Adult fiction style — a book about being special, being set apart in some way from all the other boring, trivial people you know: your friend who talks too much, your father who is overprotective, your mother who is ditzy and childish and needs constant supervision. It is a promise that the apparently poisonous rhetoric of our 90’s childhoods — the idea that we are each in some way a priceless special snowflake, destined to be the main character of our own blockbuster — might somehow, in some way, bear out.

Am I… better than everyone?

There is much to reject in the Twilight Saga, do not get me wrong. Notions of consent and power imbalance in relationships go out the window; Bella is kissed unwillingly by her best friend and when she punches him in response, he laughs it off and so does her father. When Edward doesn’t want Bella to visit her other friends, he literally rips out the engine of her car so that she is not able to drive away. In Twilight, “love” so often means control, and violent male protectiveness is regularly idealized as devotion. Indeed, Edward Cullen may be the world’s most emotionally immature centenarian. And Bella is not innocent of blame either, as she willingly submits to being treated like a possession in exchange for attention and affection.

For these and many other reasons, I’m accepting of the fact that I did not read Twilight at the height of our collective cultural obsession with it. All the same, there’s a part of me now that sees that time, and the vampire fervour that accompanied it, as the final instantiation of something — perhaps a sense of togetherness — we may never get back.

So why did I not read Twilight when everyone was reading it?

The Female Book by Wen Fang.

In the same way that for years, I avoided the color pink, I avoided Twilight. It wasn’t so much that I had given the book an honest appraisal and decided that I didn’t like it; it was rather that I was afraid I would like it, and would therefore have to face some part of myself that too closely resembled my assumed opposite. Twilight was for the girls who were already vocally obsessed with boys: for the attractive, the popular, the ingenue. Twilight girls wore fruity body spray in the halls and carried their lunches in hard acrylic containers that, at the close of the lunch period, clicked shut with haughty finality. Beach-waved hair and painted nails. Celebrity crushes and bubblegum notebooks. And, let’s be real: Twilight was for those girls whose family culture allowed for female expressions of lust! Looking back, I think I was both embarrassed and afraid, and I held myself apart from the book as though holding myself apart from my own sexual aspect.

What’s more, Twilight was notorious for being “poorly written,” whatever that meant. I had at that point built a story for myself that I was bookish, intelligent, sophisticated; I couldn’t risk enjoying a “poorly written” book, because goodness, what would that say about myself?

No, it was better to stick to the novels I was then combing through, sometimes with fascination, other times with barely repressed boredom. Books were my feast and my consolation, but it’s undeniable that at certain times, I made myself read things I didn’t want to in order to forcibly acquaint myself with the canon. I didn’t like Jane Austen, but it didn’t matter: I was going to read Pride and Prejudice, dammit. My desire to shape myself according to my own ends took precedence over my curiosity, and sometimes, even my pleasure.

Some of my middle school classmates approached the problem of Twilight with an even greater ingenuity: they read it, then ridiculed it. Had Goodreads been available then, these readers would have been the ones uploading wordy one-star reviews, replete with diligently sourced quotes to prove the book’s objective inferiority. Of course, underneath all that performative bite, who was to say they weren’t secretly enjoying it? 500,000 words — the word count of the entire Saga, roughly ten times that of The Great Gatsby — is a lot to read out of spite, after all.

At the time, only the rarest of us could deign to read Twilight and openly love it — not from a place of feminine identity signalling, but as a peaceful, factual stance. My best friend — the one who is reading it with me now — was one of those people. Sunnily disposed and mostly unbothered, these people floated through life bravely declaring what they liked, correctly recognizing that when we like something, we bestow upon it and the world a kind of enchantment that enriches our lives. I like this. This makes me happy.

Who cares what it says about me?

Looking back on the media storm and cultural pushback to Twilight’s popularity, on our collective fever to denounce it for its cringe, I can’t help but feel we missed the proper significance of that moment in history. Twilight was supposed to signal the death of good writing. Instead, it represented one of the last times that any kind of writing mattered in popular culture. The point wasn’t whether Stephanie Meyer’s work was good or bad, the point was that we cared. That we went to the trouble of declaring what team we were on, as though Edward and Jacob’s pursuit of Bella were our personal Wimbledon. That we argued. Formed camps at school. Ended friendships! Twilight mattered — it mattered in a way that had social consequences. Has any book done that since?

Now, at 27, I’ll gladly say I’m enjoying the Twilight Saga. Not because I find Meyer’s writing particularly charming, nor because I am seriously rooting for any of the characters, though it’s true I hope Bella gets what she wants. In fact, it occurs to me that the type of enjoyment I am experiencing is distinct from the ways we are taught to enjoy books. I am enjoying Twilight socially — and I don’t think that’s despite Stephanie Meyer’s ability to spin a fine yarn, but rather because of her genius. Twilight is kind of lame to read alone and a total riot with your friends — and maybe that’s the point. It was never meant to be read in romantic solitude. It was meant to be torn apart over lunch.¹

I am enjoying Twilight, then, because of my best friend. I’m enjoying sending her gifs of Taylor Lautner shirtless in the rain, of Robert Pattison grimacing as he glitters in a meadow. When something bad happens, I send her the scream emoji. When something good happens, I celebrate with her. I rooted for Jacob Black until he became an asshole; now, I just want to know that he makes it out alive. Breathless and laughing, shocked and unbelieving, I ride the inconceivable turns of Meyer’s novels in order to process them with someone I love. In this context, narrative inconsistency is a gift; shock is just more shared stimulation. It’s bad, but we like it... and when we like it together, something makes it good.²

The utopian socialist Charles Fourier had a really fascinating idea that I think about often, and it fell along these lines: all humans are made with a set of various desires, and these desires are called the passions. The passions range from the sensorial to the affective to the spiritual: they encompass the desire for food as well as the desire to conspire with a close group of friends against a greater evil (the “cabbalistic passion”). Different cultures have different claims about which passions are “good” and which are “bad” — to take an example that will likely resonate with many, the desire to have friends is good, but the desire to be promiscuous is bad. Fourier didn’t believe that any desires had an immoral valence, though; instead, he felt that human beings were meant to live in harmony with all of our passions, as we were made by God to have them, and that a utopian society could help us express and enjoy them all. In fact, he even went so far as to argue that it was civilization’s selective repression of certain passions that led to many of our collective ills.

Regardless of what you think about this challenging idea, one of my favourite consequences of Fourierist thinking is the idea that we should learn to recognize, and celebrate, a diverse range of passions. In the case of reading books, there is not simply the passion of curling up alone on a rainy day beside a window, there is also the passion I experience with my Twilight reading buddy, of texting feverishly with a mixture of disbelief and delight. Of wanting to slam a book down into a desk because you are simultaneously invested and continually betrayed by its excesses. I desire to read Twilight, but not the way I’m supposed to desire a book.

Illustration by Lou Benesch.

Maybe I’m particularly sensitive to the “allowable passions” of reading because I studied Comparative Literature in college, and the academy has long had a complex relationship with the feelings of the scholars who populate it. Passionate or no, scholarship is often meant to strip a text bare in order to reveal its hidden structure — and in this project, too much enjoyment makes your scholarship suspect.³ Pleasure is the academy's open secret though, because of course, who would spend their life reading and writing books, often being chronically underpaid to do so, unless on some level it felt really, really good?

A brief litany of basic thoughts, to be read in a Muppet voice:

Maybe it’s not bad to feel good. Maybe if bad things make us feel good, we ought to question whether they are truly bad. Maybe feeling good in different ways makes us more complex, more real. Or maybe I just want to keep reading Twilight with my best friend.

I know there’s a healthy argument against this, and it has something to do with Great Books, and the acquiring of taste, and the passing on of tradition, literary standards and the very fruits of civilization itself. Perhaps one proponent of this way of thinking might even be Franz Kafka, who apparently said, “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.” You know, for our edification.

But I think edification is complex, just as being wounded and stabbed by a book is complex: there is the wounding we feel when we read a book that challenges us directly, because its subject matter is dark or twisted or harrowing. But then there is the wounding that happens when a book challenges our conception of who we are, because we never thought we would enjoy such a book, or agree with it. In this latter case, the pain often comes not from the book itself, but from the recognition of the pleasure we feel under its power. And in this kind of wounding, is there not some glee, however small, however inadmissible? There is a sweetness to the danger, isn’t there, of encountering a psychological threat that is in the final analysis a form of growth.

Perhaps the pleasure of being wounded, then, is really the pleasure of seeing a problematic part of ourselves injured — so much so that in the aftermath, it must fall and leave our tenderness unguarded. As in: the part of me that held myself above “low-culture” books, which had stood sentry for so long over my taste. As in: the parts in each of us that tell us what we shouldn’t like, lest we become a threat to our own success.

What happens when these parts go down?⁴ What kind of self comes to stand in their place? A better one? Or at the very least: a new self, somehow transformed by the recognition of its own enjoyment?

I’m not sure. I just know that these days, I’m often eager to find out, even to enter the realm where my own enjoyment blurs my sense of who I am, what I like, and what I stand for. Never has the idea of being less certain of myself seemed more satisfying. And as for the books I never thought I would read, I find myself with a new mantra: Here is my wrist. Here is my neck.

Bite me.

GIF from The Muppet Show.

---

Discussion Questions

I’m experimenting with these this week because a close friend told me she was in the habit of making her own discussion questions after reading my essays. (I’m also just a teacher and can’t resist.)

Feel free to reflect by yourself, with loved ones, or with other readers in the comments.

1. What are your guilty pleasures? What makes them guilty?

2. Do you ever consume media performatively, i.e. watch or read something in order to be the type of person who would watch or read that thing? What are the good things that have come from that, and what are the bad things?

3. What is something that you enjoy that you still feel embarrassed about? What would happen if you accepted the part of yourself that enjoys it? How, if at all, would you have to revise your sense of self?

---

If you liked this post, you might like this essay on Dorian Electra’s screwball cover of Ariana Grande or this essay on Taylor Swift’s white woman privilege. As always, here is the complete archive of past essays.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Gwen Hovey, the aforementioned wise best friend who has occasioned not just this latest foray into the realm of forbidden literary delights, but so many other dips into the joys that life has to offer. Our sisterhood has never failed to grow me.

See you at Christmas for Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, girl. Get ready. 🍎

1. There is a similarity I am sensing here, to the ways in which some people watch shitty films for enjoyment. There is a key difference though: in shit-watching, the films are enjoyable because they are bad, and the pleasure is in trashing them. In reading Twilight, the pleasure is not in that it’s bad; the pleasure is in indulging the parts of ourselves that are trashy but genuine. We actually enjoy Twilight, and we know it’s kind of bad to enjoy it. And then the fact that it’s kind of bad… is what makes it fun.

2. Of course, even enjoyable like this, Twilight isn’t “good” the same way The Waves by Virginia Woolf is “good.” But I think that’s fine!

3. Plenty has also been said to critique this, and we have surface reading, affect theory, reparative reading, all modes of scholarship that take feeling and impression as central to the critical project. So yes, the academy is hard at work making room for feelings!

4. I’m heavily informed here by the central ideas of Internal Family Systems therapy, or IFS, which hold that we each have inside of us a collection of different “parts” with different motivations. The system of IFS has a name for a part that is judgemental of pleasure, and that is a “Protector.”

Often Protectors exist in order to shape a person’s behaviour in an unsafe environment, e.g. a household in which direct expressions of pleasure are punished. The trouble is that Protectors (and other parts) stay around long after one becomes an adult, or finds a context in which expressing pleasure — for example — is not only tolerated, but necessary for a balanced life.

A recent book in this vein that I enjoyed was You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For by Richard C. Schwartz. If you pick it up and want to talk about it, please email me!