Omigod, you guys. Francine Pascal is working on an update of Sweet Valley High, which catches up with Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield now that they are in their 30s and living in a gated community. Stop it, you say. Get outta town. No way! Way: in an interview in Bust magazine, Pascal, who has the same feathered blonde hair-do as the twin characters in her books, promised that the new series, to be called Sweet Valley Heights, would be %26quot;outrageous%26quot;.
Back when some of us were of the age to be spending all our time thinking seriously about whether we should be getting behind Coke or Pepsi, and which member of Duran Duran was the dreamiest, our bookshelves wore the kicky pastel and citrus hues of Sweet Valley.
The books, the first of which came out in 1983, followed permanently-16-year-old twins: Elizabeth was the sensible one, who wrote for the school paper (The Oracle) and was more or less a crashing bore; Jessica was the self-absorbed, impulsive schemer, who shamelessly leveraged her position as co-captain of the cheerleading team. The twins were described, with hypnotic regularity, in the first few pages of each number: they had sun-kissed or sun-streaked or spun-silk blonde hair, blue-green or aquamarine eyes the colour of the Pacific Ocean and perfect %26quot;size six%26quot; figures. They wore matching gold lavalieres and were candy-stripers at the local hospital.
What went on at Sweet Valley High? Everything, and nothing. People had crushes and rivals. They played soccer, football and tennis. There were cookouts by the lake, surfing after school, pep rallies and dances. (The Californian idyll probably owed a great deal to Brian Wilson, since Francine Pascal grew up in Queens, New York and hadn%26#39;t actually visited Los Angeles when she dreamed the place up.) There was intermittent melodrama. Boys died in fights or car crashes. Girls died from terminal illnesses, and sometimes from drug overdoses after they%26#39;d fallen in with a bad crowd because they were hurt and angry over their parents separating, or because a boy had treated them shabbily.
Sweet Valley High books were disapproved of by stuffy librarians and interfering parents, who said they were no better than trashy romance novels. And they were right, but the books were also incessantly moralising. Often clumsily so. In Sweet Valley, you couldn%26#39;t climb onto a motorcycle without it crashing. And even the nastiest mean girls invariably wound up taking their medicine in the end.
%26quot;I was totally rapt by the pureness of the high school stereotype,%26quot; writes the keeper of one fan website. %26quot;Hunky football players, studious newspaper writers, scrawny dorks with no girl skills… this was like the mold that Saved by the Bell was cut from.%26quot;
The world of Sweet Valley High was perfect in every way. It was like nothing that exists anywhere on earth. Everyone could relate to it.
We know, because it%26#39;s on her website, that Francine Pascal%26#39;s favourite colours are beige and blue and her favourite food is Maryland crabcakes, but like Thomas Pynchon and J D Salinger, Francine Pascal is often described as both elusive and reclusive.
This is perhaps an exaggeration. While she is photographed at parties less than, say, Salman Rushdie, you can get a good sense of Pascal from an LA Times story that came out back in 1986, when she was starting to get some success. Pascal studied journalism at New York University before she had jobs making stuff up for True Confessions and Modern Screen, somewhat tawdry and old-hat magazines. It is hard not to like her because throughout, the LA Times sounds scandalised by her and Pascal makes droll, flip comments about everything:
On the soap opera The Young Marrieds, on which she and her husband (fellow journalist John Pascal) were employed as writers in the mid-1960s: %26quot;It wasn%26#39;t hard money, but the hardest part was having to watch it every day.%26quot;
On the distinction of their having churned out, in 30 days, the first book about Patty Hearst%26#39;s trial: %26quot;It was the first time that I had ever done real nonfiction.%26quot;
The story also reveals Pascal%26#39;s creative process, at home in her %26quot;gigantic%26quot; Manhattan apartment next to a Fluffy Donuts store. She gets to the typewriter by 10am, and writes four pages. %26quot;I never write three, I never write five. I don%26#39;t do rewrites. I put all the pages in a pile next to the typewriter.%26quot; She only allows herself to get up for %26quot;bodily necessities%26quot;, %26quot;but I can stop in the middle of a sentence if it happens to be at the end of the fourth page.%26quot;
Thus, she explained airily, %26quot;you just let them pile up, those four pages, and before you know it you have a book.%26quot;
Of course Pascal only wrote-wrote six of the 400-odd books in the franchise, which eventually expanded to include six more spin-off series (Sweet Valley Twins, Sweet Valley University, etc), as well as a TV show and a board game. The actual writing was farmed out to anonymous ghostwriters, who used a %26lsquo;Bible%26#39; that contained all the plot threads and character descriptions, maintained by Pascal.
%26quot;The same way that some people can play the piano,%26quot; she told Bust, %26quot;I can do plots! They just come!%26quot; She would hold meetings, she explained, where the writers %26quot;would take notes and everything%26quot;. They would then draft an outline and, once Pascal had approved it, they would get cracking, presumably at a speedier rate than four pages a day.
Lizzie Skurnick, one such former ghostwriter, is now a blogger and a well-regarded poet. Another, Eileen Goudge, struck it rich writing adult romance novels. Her Trail of Secrets sounds a hoot: it%26#39;s set between the uppercrust equestrian set and the blue-collar world of New York%26#39;s mounted police. Amongst the other ghost-writers is an editor at Random House, a motivational speaker, and a writer of history books for young adults - all occupations that speak to the schoolmarmish heart that, in retrospect, was beating beneath so many of the Sweet Valley books.
The last ever Sweet Valley High book was written by a man who appears to be anonymously selling religious icons on a website which gives, as its sales pitch, an account of life as a depressed, overweight, despairing 37-year-old, living in a cramped Manhattan apartment and eating junk food all the time, just for the sugar high. His work (presumably churning out young adult fiction) was frantically busy, %26quot;but not challenging or interesting%26quot;.
%26quot;After work, either I drank myself into oblivion, or got high on marijuana and vegetated in front of the TV, or I found meaningless sexual encounters online.%26quot; Eventually, nudged out of a Scotch-induced slumber by his cats one night, Jesus appeared to him and instructed him to take special pictures of him (Jesus), which he now sells for $US3.99 a pop, payment via Paypal.
In the end, over 20 increasingly thin years, we also tired of the franchise. And we got older. We put away our Sweet Valley High books and pretty soon we had forgotten all about Elizabeth and Jessica, about class clown Winston Egbert and snobby Lila Fowler, about poor Regina Morrow, born deaf (because her mother, a model, had been taking diet pills during the pregnancy), but nevertheless beautiful enough to model in Ingenue magazine and kind enough to melt the icy heart of dashing arrogant tennis star Bruce Patman, but who was ultimately to cark it when she tried one line (just one line!) of cocaine at a party and dropped dead from a heart murmur. We would forget all about Sweet Valley%26#39;s hot-sounding band, The Droids, and the machinations amongst the bitchier members of its sorority, Pi Beta Alpha.
But until Harry Potter came along, Sweet Valley High was the biggest selling teen series in history. And since it%26#39;s arguable whether Harry Potter is really a teen series (some would class it as fantasy), perhaps it still is. Sixty million copies sold and Pascal, who Forbes estimates made $15 million from Sweet Valley, now lives between Manhattan and Cannes.
Last year Alloy Entertainment, the marketing firm that packages Sweet Valley High books, confirmed that the promised Sweet Valley Heights series was in progress, but had changed its title to Sweet Valley Confidential.
Intriguingly, the first few numbers of the Sweet Valley High series (Double Love; Secrets; Playing With Fire; Power Play and All Night Long) were re-released in the UK last year and are to trickle out in the States from next month. They have not been given the conservational treatment such hallowed works deserve: they have been updated to include cellphones, emails and blogs and presumably many of the original details that gave the series its hyper-1980s lustre will have been flattened out or painted over: %26quot;I can%26#39;t stop thinking about the past and trying to figure out how it all snowballed so quickly,%26quot; writes reformed bad-boy George Warren to former squeeze-turned-dweeb Enid Rollins in Secrets (#2). %26quot;It%26#39;s like the time we took all those bennies, and before we knew it we were cooking along in the GTO doing eighty or ninety…%26quot;
The publisher cannot confirm whether this brush-up is in advance of Pascal%26#39;s hot new %26lsquo;reboot%26#39;, but surely, something is afoot.
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