The Philippine Online Chronicles

I first started reading "real" books--those more than ten pages long, containing more than a single run-on sentence and with nearly no talking animals or flying furniture--when I was six years old. I'm pretty sure about this because I was exactly the same age as both the main characters. Sure, I had chinky, black eyes instead of sparkling blue ones, or dark brown hair instead of blonde, and while I also did not have a twin or live in a country with four seasons, or ever have a class pet hamster, or eat blueberry pancakes for breakfast, we were all six years old together and, at six, that was all I really needed to know before I first started to read about their lives.

And yes, I freely admit that the first time I got into books was because of

It was also around this time that I started writing, and I think somewhere around the house lies my mother's old word processor sitting on a box of yellowed pages of stories about the Walker twins with jet black hair and purple eyes. (Originality--not a strong point back then.) I didn't stop there, of course. There was Sweet Valley Twins and then Sweet Valley High--all those teen dramas you'd cringe at and never admit to reading, especially to Creative Writing professors at the height of literary prowess. "What did you read when you were younger, Anne?" One of my professors asked me once.The Nancy Drew Notebooks," I finally replied after a long, long pause. "Ah, Nancy Drew," everyone in class murmured and nodded in approval.Of course, it wasn't a total lie, I did read Nancy Drew, just not as faithfully as her more lovestruck counterparts in Sweet Valley, California. But you really just don't admit that. Reading about the Wakefield twins and their impossible love lives was such a big part of my childhood that even my mother had cause for alarm. Out of fear for her daughter's unabating shallowness, she banned all teeny bopper books from appearing on my bookshelf and forced me to read classics like Arabian Nights and Little Women. Being a teenager, I rebelliously read Sweet Valley even more, and hid them behind the thick, crumbling novels she insisted I read.While I'm already on a roll with confessing here, I'll add that I truly adored those books. I've given them away a long time ago, but I still remember threads of plots here and there, like when Lila's secret guardian angel appeared because her father forgot her birthday, or when Elizabeth was transported to this alternate universe where she was never born, or even the time when the cheerleading squad got a serial killer coach who started kidnapping them one by one. (See? Attempts at science fiction, horror and rip offs of It's A Wonderful Life.)

I think, though, that there was a lot of good that came out of that tween phase. For one thing, I started writing all the bad love poetry and all the stories about teen angst earlier than everyone else in school, so I grew out of it a little earlier, too. By the age of Gossip Girl--which I did read once (or twice) and found to be Sweet Valley Senior Year version 2.0--I was already writing about, well okay, angsty assassins and overused superheroes. I would say that it's a big improvement.

I understand my mother's distress and the literary scholar's distaste for these kinds of books, but to me--and to a lot of people my age--it was a kind of escapism and fluffy entertainment tailor-made for young, repressed Catholic school girls. And what else makes us first pick up a book but escapism and entertainment? The study on form and style comes later, along with more refined tastes. A writer is the sum of what she reads, but reading what you love is always the first step. Honestly, if I'd obeyed my mother and drudged along the big hulk of Little Women at age ten, I'd probably have never picked up a pen (or a word processor) writing about the lives of women in the 1800's.

I won't go as far as to say that I would never have been a writer if not for the profound, illuminating lives of the Sweet Valley twins, but I probably wouldn't have written as energetically and enthusiastically as I did then, either. My first (and only) novel, buried in the depths of the bodega, is about a family of hot, young superstars with the obligatory pair of blonde twins.

I remind myself of this over and over whenever I see highschool girls screaming over Twilight. It usually works.

Image from Fantastic Fiction UK, original art by Ying-Hwa Hu.