Lisa Hansen, a 35-year-old mother of two from Long Island, is obsessed with Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight Saga,” the wildly popular young adult series about the romance between Bella, a high school student, and a chivalrous vampire named Edward.
But as one of the founders of TwilightMoms.com, which now boasts some 28,000 members, Hansen knows she’s not alone. And the fact that adult women like her are smitten helps to explain why the series has sold over 42 million copies worldwide and held four of the top five slots on USA Today’s Best-Selling Books List for 2008.
Though Meyer has said she wrote the series without a demographic in mind, her publisher positioned the books to appeal to the traditional young adult audience, kids aged between 12 and 18.
By the time it became a blockbuster film, grossing $380 million in worldwide box office sales, the Twilight series turned into a pop culture phenomenon, and adult readers who hadn’t already pilfered their daughters’ dog-eared copies of the book decided to see what all the fuss was about.
” ‘Twilight’ has pretty much consumed my whole life,” admits Hansen. Last fall, she helped organize a trip for more than a hundred adult fans of the books to Fork, Washington, where the stories are set, for the town’s official “Stephenie Meyer Day.” It’s part nostalgia and part fantasy, she says. “You never forget those teenage experiences. The angst, the drama, your first love. We’ve got so many horrible things happening in the world and our own problems in life. It’s just an escape.”
Grown up readers are an increasing segment of the young adult audience, and publishers are taking notice. “While we don’t have hard demographic data,” says Elizabeth Eulberg, Director of Global Publicity for Stephenie Meyer at Little, Brown and Company, “at our most recent events the adults outnumbered the teens. We’ve even had some ‘Twilight’ grandmothers come on the road.”
Since parents first began borrowing their children’s “Harry Potter” books, taking Cecily von Zeigesar’s “Gossip Girl” saga to the beach, or secretly getting weepy over Ann Brashares’ “Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants” series, adults have made bolder forays into the teen section of the bookstore. While publishers don’t have hard numbers on their readers, many of them are pushing books that have crossover potential, eager to see their young adult books reach older readers (and their pocketbooks).
Writer Cassandra Clare, who lives in Brooklyn and pens the “Mortal Instruments” books, a young adult series peopled with vampires and werewolves, jokes that she gets fan mail from women who say, guiltily, ” ‘I’m probably your oldest fan.’ I write them back and tell them, ‘Really you’re not.’ ” She’s had women well into their 70s say they’ve borrowed the books from their granddaughters and been hooked.
Elise Howard, who helms Harper Teen, which publishes Anna Godbersen’s “Luxe” series about privileged teens living in Gilded Age New York, says her company purposefully cross-markets the books in adult publications like The New York Times Book Review or Romantic Times. She puts the adult interest in teen fiction down to the books’ more sophisticated subject matter. “I think publishers and booksellers have become more savvy about what teens can handle. Teens are on the Internet, watching cable TV 24-hours-a-day. They’re certainly not as naive as the generation shocked by ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.’ “
David Levithan, the Editorial Director at Scholastic, which published the “Harry Potter” juggernaut, says there’s no longer a sense that so-called teen fiction is just about “teenage problems.”
“Teenagers don’t want to think they are getting the watered down version of anything. These books really delve into very dark places and they do it in a fearless, honest way that has an appeal to people well over the age of 18.”
Scholastic also publishes Suzanne Collins’ book “The Hunger Games,” which tells the tale of an imagined future society where teens are forced to kill one another to ensure their survival. The cover of the book is black and sleek.
“We are very conscious in our cover design that you shouldn’t be able to tell the difference between young adult and contemporary fiction,” says Levithan. “A book cannot become an all-out phenomenon without an adult buy-in, purely on a numbers game. If you crossover to adults, you just explode.”
Lisa Hansen, meanwhile, hopes the “Twilight” series is not yet over. The Twilight Moms, she says, are gunning for a fifth book, told from Edward’s point of view. Some of the moms, Hansen says, “are really demanding. They are like, give us another book. It’s ours!”