My summer with Stephenie

During the summer after my son was born, I wore a groove into our leather couch.

My child’s daily nursing sessions went from early to late afternoon each day and afforded me luxurious free time for reading. It was a rich gift I hadn’t had since my younger years, years before college, when summer days consisted of deciding where I would go to read that day’s four-pound novel.

During those first “babymoon” months, I chose my literature well. I re-read Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, bore through Jane Eyre and tasted each delicious word of Bel Canto by Ann Patchett.

Fast-forward a year and a half. On that same couch, I sat with my baby daughter, who liked to nurse more than her brother did. My son had blossomed into a sweet, smiling toddler by then, and he leaned back in his Elmo chair to keep a keen eye glued on Cinderella or The Wiggles while my daughter got her fill.

My brain, drained after nearly two years of sleepless nights with two back-to-back babies, could hardly form single-syllable words, let alone plow through War and Peace. My book stack was knee-high with titles like What to Expect: The Toddler Years and The No-Cry Sleep Solution.

Then, the bloodsuckers saved me. Stephenie Meyer’s hulking bulk of chick-lit, the four-volume Twilight series—somewhere between Happiest Vampire on the Block and Bleak House—was just what Mom needed.

It had spookies.

It had romance.

It had the Pacific Northwest, with its velvet chill of rain that I could almost feel against my skin as I listened absentmindedly to the cicadas singing outside my Louisiana window.

I became a staunch member of Team Jacob.

On Facebook, one of my highly educated neighbors, an English teacher, wrote a status update in which she asked us, her readership of buddies, what it says about today’s youth that so many of these youngsters could possibly belong to Team Edward.

We scoffed about the girls today and their inability to find a man who really cared about them—how they’d rather stick with someone aloof and unavailable.

This was before the movies came out, so I got to develop my own vision of who and what these characters were. I loved seeing how Meyer experimented as she moved through writing the series, making bold moves with her fiction-writing techniques that made me sure these books would stick around for a few generations. They are funny, gothic, sweet and satisfying.

As a writing teacher, I tell my students to just sit down and write. I admire Meyer, because that’s what she did. Her vision for these Twilight books came to her in a dream. Her kids were toddlers at the time, so she wrote after they went to bed. She put the writing in motion, and look what happened. I saw myself in her.

The movies changed the game and cheapened Meyer’s efforts. No matter. Most likely I’ll be sitting in the theater this month for the first part of Breaking Dawn with my popcorn and my anticipation, still a proud member of Team Jacob.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1, filmed partly in Baton Rouge, arrives in theaters Nov. 18. breakingdawn-themovie.com