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| Stephenie Meyer - a squeaky-clean vampire queen New Moon's chaste tale of the undead will fill the world's cinemas with teenage girls this week, yet the woman behind a publishing phenomenon to rival JK Rowling and Dan Brown has never even seen an R-rated movieIf you have even the most fleeting acquaintance with a prepubescent girl, the chances are you've gathered that the film of New Moon, the second in Stephenie Meyer's bestselling quartet of vampire novels, is released on Friday.At a "stars meet the fans" event in London's Battersea Park last week, the hysteria that has greeted each publication day quickened into a bacchanalian frenzy. It came complete with nubile tweens with "Bite me" scrawled across their foreheads, thanks largely to the pallid charms of Robert Pattinson, the young British actor who graduated from a bit part in a Harry Potter film to playing the glitteringly beautiful 107-year-old vampire Edward Cullen.Edward Cullen, for those who haven't been exposed to a hot blast of tween fervour, is not your average bloodsucker. For a start, he's renounced the part about suckling virgins' necks. Instead, he's part of a posse of "vegetarian" vampires who have foresworn the hard stuff – your actual humans – in favour of hunting game in the woods.Second, he's attending high school (vampires don't age and Edward is stuck forever in the simulacrum of a devastatingly attractive 17-year-old boy) in Forks, a small town in Washington State, where he's unwillingly fallen in love with Bella Swan, Meyer's human heroine.This thrusts him into the quandary that drives the entire series, namely that if he goes beyond first base with Bella he will end up destroying her with his unleashed vampiric lust. Bella's best friend, incidentally, happens to be a werewolf, and for much of the quartet she's caught in a big old supernatural tug of love between the two.As the shrieking fans suggest, Stephenie Meyer is big business these days, heir apparent to JK Rowling's crown. Though her novels throb with all the emotion and eroticism that the vampire genre demands, penetration – of either sort – is endlessly delayed, making them ideal for an audience who have outgrown the charms of the bespectacled wizard without necessarily having reached the age of consent.Since the publication of her first novel, Twilight, in 2004, Meyer has sold more than 70 million books and is credited with singlehandedly shoring up young-adult publishing, plugging the gap in bookshops after sales of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows began to die down.Her last book, Breaking Dawn, sold a breathtaking 1.3 million copies in 24 hours. To put this into perspective, Dan Brown only managed to shift a million copies of The Lost Symbol on the day of publication. This year, Meyer was ranked by Forbes as the 26th most powerful celebrity in the world, not bad for a woman who once claimed that when her eldest son was born: "I just wanted to be his mom."The origin story of Twilight is almost as fantastic as its contents. Stephenie Meyer is famously a Mormon, living in Arizona with her husband, Christian, known as Pancho, a former accountant who is now a full-time father to their three sons.Though she majored in English literature at the Mormon Brigham Young University in Utah (where she was apparently much sought after by "the Y-chromosomes, if you know what I mean"), becoming a novelist was not something she consciously intended, and the only job she had previously held was as a receptionist. The story, which in its repetitions has gained the patina of myth without losing its gawky confessional quality, also possesses a supernatural element.As Meyer explains: "I never planned to write a book. I wasn't planning on a career in writing, I wasn't thinking about stories I wanted to write down. But I had a dream." Literature inspired by dreams is not uncommon, particularly among horror writers. Mary Shelley first encountered Frankenstein and his terrible creation in a waking nightmare; Robert Louis Stevenson dreamt two scenes of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; and Coleridge composed "Kubla Khan" in an opium-induced reverie, though much of it was dislodged from his mind by the person from Porlock, who interrupted him before he'd had a chance to jot it down.In this, if nothing else, Meyer trumps Coleridge. On 2 June 2003 ("I know when I started writing because I had it marked on my calendar. That was the day I started my summer diet…"), she had a dream about a girl and a sparkling young vampire who were talking in a meadow.In between changing nappies and providing breakfasts for three children under five, she managed to sketch out a plot in her head and over the next few months typed Twilight one-handed with her baby on her lap. After her sister suggested publication, she researched agents on the internet, received a stack of rejection letters and was eventually accepted by an intern who'd dug her manuscript out of the slush pile. Within a matter of months, she'd signed a three-book deal with Little, Brown for $750,000, quickly followed by film rights.The fairy-tale quality of Meyer's ascent inevitably recalls JK Rowling, who conjured up her boy wizard from a cafe in Edinburgh while struggling with single parenthood and depression. Both Meyer and Rowling have created worlds so thoroughly imagined, so intricately assembled and lovingly decorated, that a reader can simply set up house within them; both, in consequence, inspire idolatry from their fans.Forget queuing outside bookshops wearing a pointy hat: Meyer's fans like attending stadium events known as Twilight proms, where they can dress up as Bella, swig blood-coloured punch and scream until their ears bleed.Not all their attention is positive. After the publication of Breaking Dawn, a group of former fans started a campaign on Amazon called "Don't Burn it, Return it", in the hope that Meyer would pick up on their dismay and change the ending.Cannily, or perhaps gamely, Meyer has put a good deal of effort into engaging with these impassioned readers. Until recently, she went on endless, gruelling book tours and her official website links to hundreds of fansites with names such as Glittery Boyfriend and Bloody Craving. Many are filled with obsessive stories based on the Twilight characters, something she has mixed feelings about: "I don't like them wasting their time on something they can never claim as their own."This concern for her readers' morals is a recurrent preoccupation. When, in 2008, a partial draft of her unfinished new novel, Midnight Sun, was leaked online, her response was to abandon the book and put the draft – "messy and flawed and full of mistakes" – up on her own website, so that her fans "don't have to feel they have to make a sacrifice to stay honest".You wouldn't catch Bram Stoker fretting over his readers like that. But then Meyer is not your typical queen of the night. She hates horror, is a teetotaller, has never seen an R-rated film and confesses to not even having read Dracula (one imagines the sexy, savage True Blood is also out).While Anne Rice, the bestselling author of Interview With the Vampire, once staged her own funeral in New Orleans and liked to arrive at readings carried in a coffin, the closest Meyer comes to gothic is a faintly barbaric necklace and a temporary black rinse.It is this desire to keep things pretty that makes Meyer so palatable to her readers (and perhaps explains why her first novel for adults, The Host, a blended sci-fi romance, did not match Twilight's sales). She's drained the blood from the vampire genre and replaced it with sugared water; it's no wonder teenage girls flock around her like hummingbirds.Critics, on the other hand, are inclined to accuse her of peddling an agenda of abstinence by dressing it up as a more romantic choice than sex, while her celebration of female passivity has incensed feminists, who see the vulnerable and hapless Bella as a dangerous role model for an impressionable audience.As is the case with Rowling, the quality of her prose has also been attacked. Certainly no one would describe her as a stylist. Her novels are melting marshmallows; to say they are poorly written is to miss the addictively febrile sweetness on which they run."Delicious," Oprah Winfrey proclaimed lip-smackingly in an interview on Friday, before congratulating Meyer for having "ignited a love of reading for children and adults alike" and introducing her to a school where there was a waiting list of 1,000 for the library copy of New Moon.Oprah was Meyer's only interview this year and there are signs she's withdrawing from the circus she's created. She's called a halt to the book tours and returned home to her marble desk and her kids, claiming: "I'm a little burned out on vampires now. I need to clean my palate."A film of The Host is in production, and she's begun work on a new fantasy series, set in a realm that she has already intricately mapped out. Her publishers must be rubbing their hands in glee. Her books might be escapist, but Stephenie Meyer has the knack of building worlds in which everyone wants to hide.The Meyer lowdownBorn: Stephenie Morgan, 24 December 1973, in Hartford, Connecticut, to Stephen and Candy. Educated at Chaparral high school, Arizona, and Brigham Young University, Utah, where she read English. She now lives in Arizona and is married to Christian Meyer. They have three sons.Best of times: In 2008, Meyer was the biggest-selling author of the year and her first novel, Twilight, was also the biggest-selling book. Her annual earnings exceeded $50m, propelling her on to the Forbes list of the most powerful celebrities, while the film of Twilight grossed $35.7m on its first day.Worst of times: Meyer admits her teenage years weren't happy. Growing up in Arizona, she was intensely pale and needed to have therapy after other kids bullied her by calling her "ghost".She says: "What I like about science fiction is the same thing I like about Shakespeare. You take people, put them in a situation that can't possibly happen, and they act the way you would act. It's about being human."They say: "Meyer's [writing] seethes with the archetypal tumult of star-crossed passions, in which the supernatural element serves as heady spice. The audience falls under the spell of a love that is not only undying, but undead." Liesl Schillinger, the New York TimesStephenie MeyerHorrorChildren and teenagersRomanceFilm adaptationsUnited StatesOlivia Laingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Orhan Pamuk puts Tanpinar's tale of two continents back on the map Sixty years after it was first published, the "Turkish Ulysses" finally gets its due, thanks to a literary festival and museum set up in its honourOrhan Pamuk, the 2006 Nobel literature laureate, is preparing to open a Museum of Innocence in Istanbul next summer, and the city has already seen a ripple effect from his prize. I sailed up a storm-hit Bosphorus with writers from 30 countries during the inaugural Istanbul Tanpinar literary festival in November. Run by Nermin Mollaoglu of the dynamic literary agency Kalem, and coinciding with Istanbul's book fair, this is the city's first international writers' festival, and aims to feed a growing interest abroad in writing from Turkey. It is named after a dead Turkish novelist and poet whose resuscitated reputation owes much to Pamuk's praise.Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar described this as the "city of two continents" in his modernist masterpiece A Mind at Peace. Published 60 years ago - and only last year in an English translation from Erdag Goknar by Archipelago Books - the novel unfolds over 24 hours on the eve of the second world war, and has been tagged as the "Turkish Ulysses". Pamuk, himself no mean chronicler of his home town, regards it as the "greatest novel ever written about Istanbul".So why is Tanpinar, who died in 1962, so little known? The short story writer Ciler Ilhan told me he was "despised for years by writers who believed only in the Turkish republic. He was seen as old-fashioned – but he's groundbreaking." Born in 1901 and steeped in the Ottoman culture on which Kemal Ataturk's republic of 1923 turned its back, Tanpinar wrote a satire, The Time Regulation Institute (1961), about a man striving to adapt to westward-looking "modernisation". He ignored the 1928 drive to purge Turkish of Arabic and Persian - some two-thirds of the Ottoman dictionary. Another writer, Ayfer Tunc, believes this richness of style has contributed to an "ironic and deplorable" ignorance of his genius among young Turkish readers.The new annual festival may help change that. Largely reliant on private sponsorship, it was launched in style in the Ciragan Palace, once home to the Ottoman sultans, and now part of a luxury hotel on the Bosphorus. Cosier venues ranged from bookshops and cafes along the main shopping drag of Istiklal Caddesi, to the subterranean Byzantine Basilica Cistern, near the great cathedral-turned-mosque of Aghia Sophia. The festival was also a terminus for Word Express, an ambitious project in south-east Europe backed by the Wales-based Literature Across Frontiers. This brought 23 young writers on train journeys through the Balkans from Ljubljana, Bucharest and Sarajevo, in a move to relink areas sundered by politics and bloodshed.Turkish writers are among those with a keen eye on history. A recent novel by Can Eryumlu, Teardrops of Chios, looks back to Ottoman massacres against Greeks on the Aegean island of Chios in the 1820s. "Turks are amnesiac", says Eryumlu, who feels they were also encouraged to forget that "we all have different ancestors", in order to forge a unified state from a defeated empire after the first world war. He spent time on the Greek island to research the novel, and sees it as important to tackle topics that remain raw: "If Greeks say it, Turks say it's a lie. The only way is for a Turk to say it."Some writers sense an opening up of the past. "It's becoming easier to talk about history," says Yigit Bengi, a young fiction writer for whom Turkish nationalism is "officially created, and does not have deep roots". His stories draw on a more ancient and layered history, including Roman and Byzantine, and he is writing a novel about the role of Turks in the Crusades, when they were "used as slave soldiers on both sides - Christian and Muslim". Bengi was among 200 Turkish writers and academics who issued an internet apology a year ago for the mass killings of Ottoman Armenians in 1915.Fethiye Cetin's 2004 memoir My Grandmother (translated by Maureen Freely in 2008), about her discovery that her beloved grandmother was an Armenian Christian but had been adopted by a Turkish military officer after the massacres and forced to deny her origins, was a bestseller in Turkey. She was the lawyer of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrank Dink, assassinated in 2007. For Cetin, whom I met last year, the "only way to overcome the trauma of the past is to talk; being silent destroys everybody". Her new book, Grandchildren, consists of interviews with 25 other people who have also discovered an Armenian grandparent, and whose family experience challenges an official culture of denial.Tanpinar's Notebooks furnish an epigraph for Pamuk's first novel since his Nobel, The Museum of Innocence, which will be out in the UK in January in Maureen Freely's superb translation. It contains a locator map for his museum, and a free entrance ticket. The actual museum, in an Ottoman-style house along a stretch of antique shops in hilly Cukurcuma, will hold Istanbul ephemera that Pamuk gathered for inspiration while writing his Proustian (or Tanpinesque) epic of lost love. I had a preview of the collection when the novel came out in Turkish, in Pamuk's nearby office apartment overlooking Cihangir mosque and the stretch of water where the Golden Horn inlet meets the Bosphorus. He told me his "museum of the everyday", which holds everything from ferry tickets and women's hair clips to a quince grinder, would have a display for each of the novel's 83 chapters. In a conceit that might have pleased Tanpinar - as well as writers gathered in his name – the mundane memorabilia are "vessels of a lost past".IstanbulOrhan PamukMaya Jaggiguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Cute One: Paul McCartney This biography aims to present Paul McCartney as more artistically and intellectually complex than the sweet and bubbly caricature we have known. feeds.nytimes.com |
Eat, Pray, Marry Picking up pretty much where “Eat, Pray, Love” left off, Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir describes how her boyfriend’s unforeseen visa problems enticed her into a most dreaded institution: marriage. feeds.nytimes.com |
Slap Shot: Remembering Two Storytellers From the N.H.L. The hockey world lost two of its most respected communicators last week: John Halligan, a hockey historian, and Paul Quarrington, an award-winning Canadian novelist. feeds.nytimes.com |