Stephenie Meyer awoke early on June 2, 2003, from a persistent dream. Two people conversing in a forest meadow, one of them a vampire trying to avoid killing the girl he loved, is not a dramatic, cinematic vision. She had swim lessons to attend, children to dress, and diapers to change. Rather, she took a seat at her computer and began to type. She finished her book three months later. She signed a three-book deal worth $750,000 eighteen months later. It’s the kind of origin story that seems too tidy to be true, but every detail makes sense.
Born on Christmas Eve, 1973, in Hartford, Connecticut, Stephenie Meyer grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, a hot and dusty place that was very different from the rainy town of Forks, Washington, where her story would eventually take place. She went to Brigham Young University, graduated in 1997 with a degree in English literature, got married young, and was a stay-at-home mom for a while. She had only worked as a receptionist prior to Twilight. At one point, she had considered going to law school. She didn’t think writing was a viable career path, at least not for herself.
The Twilight story is remarkable not only because of the dream that began it, but also because of how quickly everything progressed after that. Meyer only shared chapters of the draft with her older sister Emily while writing it in secret. Meyer started looking into the process after Emily read it and urged her to try publishing, but she almost gave up when she realized how difficult it was. With no expectations, she wrote fifteen letters of inquiry. Nine were returned as rejections. One turned out to be something completely different: an inquiry from Writers House, the very organization she had ranked as the least likely to reply on her wish list. Meyer may or may not have realized how strange that was, but she was aware enough to scream.
After reading the manuscript on a cross-country flight, Little, Brown and Company returned with a preemptive offer. By the end of that conversation, Meyer had a deal that at first seemed like a cruel joke: an insignificant hausfrau, as she called herself, was suddenly paid a substantial sum of money for a story that she had mostly written after bed and during naps. 75,000 copies of Twilight were printed before it was released in 2005. It appeared on the New York Times bestseller list in less than a month. The four-book series spent a total of more than 235 weeks on that list in just a few years.
There’s a feeling that Twilight entered a cultural moment that was remarkably open to what Meyer had to offer. In the mid-2000s, fan communities could develop naturally around a story without waiting for mainstream media approval, and the internet was just starting to provide authors with a direct line to their readers. At the time, Meyer’s interactions with her fan base felt intimate and uncommon. Since then, the series has been referred to as “the first social networking bestseller,” a moniker that likely simplifies a more complex work but isn’t wholly incorrect either.
Beginning in 2008, the films transformed a popular book series into something truly enormous. The five-film franchise made over $3.3 billion worldwide despite having a combined budget of about $373 million. Taylor Lautner, Kristen Stewart, and Robert Pattinson became staples of the tabloid. Meyer selected the small Washington town of Forks because, according to a Google search, it was among the wettest places in the country. The town started commemorating “Stephenie Meyer Day.” It’s difficult to ignore how far that specific detail has come from its source—a writer looking up rainfall data at her kitchen table.
When it did come, the criticism was severe and occasionally intimate. Stephen King stated unequivocally that Meyer “can’t write worth a darn.” The writing was described by the New York Times as “overearnest” and “amateurish.” Bella’s reliance on Edward caught the attention of academic critics who pointed out what they perceived as regressive gender dynamics. Meyer has reacted to the majority of this with a patience that verges on philosophy, pointing out that her definition of feminism is centered on a woman’s freedom of choice and that Bella’s decisions, despite being unusual, are still her own. The validity of that argument is still up for debate.
The scale of what she constructed is less controversial. Meyer made more than $50 million a year by 2009. The only author on the list of the highest-paid women in Hollywood that year, she was listed on Forbes’ Celebrity 100. After an early draft leak effectively halted the project, fans had been waiting years for the Edward-perspective retelling of the original novel, Midnight Sun, which finally came out in August 2020 and sold over a million copies in its first few weeks. Meyer has also hinted at other concepts, such as a time travel book, a ghost story, or a mermaid story. It’s still unclear if any of those will come to pass.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing about Stephenie Meyer is that, at the age of 29, she began writing in spare time between kids and housework. She had no prior professional experience and no clear plan. A generation of readers’ perceptions of what a love story could be were altered by the thing she created, which was defective, peculiar, and wholly original.
Alyssa Bennett as editor at vclib.org, oversees editorial coverage of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political commentary. Alyssa brings rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an approachable editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant. Her career spans the intersection of literary journalism, political writing, and educational publishing.