I was not blonde. I didn’t have petite, doll-like features. Pastels didn’t dominate my wardrobe, and I most certainly did not have boys constantly angling for my attention. Which is all to say that my adolescent years didn’t remotely mirror the ones portrayed in *Sweet Valley High*, the best-selling YA series (the books and its spin-offs have sold more than 200 million copies) by author Francine Pascal at age 92. If you came of age in the 1980s or ’90s, it didn’t matter whether you saw yourself in Elizabeth or Jessica Wakefield, whether you were an avid reader or, like me, a more reluctant one, their influence was undeniable and unavoidable.
Before Pascal, who was born Francine Paula Rubin and grew up in Queens, became a household name among tween and teen readers, she was a magazine journalist (writing for publications like *Seventeen* and *Cosmopolitan*) and a script writer for soap operas. The influence of her former career is clear on the pages of *Sweet Valley High*, which were rife with secrets and drama and plot twists. She started writing young-adult novels in the late ’70s, but it wasn’t until a friend relayed a conversation with an editor who had asked why there was no teenage version of *Dynasty* that the idea for *Sweet Valley High* took root. Pascal told *The New York Times*: “I sat down, and I wrote a [character] bible and the first 12 [SVH] stories. It went quickly because it was such a fertile idea. Bantam Books loved it. They ordered all 12.” Despite never having been to Southern California, Pascal’s books (there are 181 total in the original series, *Sweet Valley High*, *Sweet Valley Twins*, *Sweet Valley University*, and *Sweet Valley Confidential*) offered an intricate lens on the semi-charmed West Coast life of the Wakefield sisters, identical twins living in a suburb of Los Angeles. In the first, *Sweet Valley High* from 1983, the girls are introduced to readers (as they are in many of the books to follow): There was, as mentioned, melodrama. There were boys to obsess and fight over. There were schemes and secrets. And, naturally, incidents of soap-operatic proportions that were laid out in the titles (and their exclamation points) alone: *The Secret*!, *The Betrayal*!, *The Revenge*!. While the buttoned-up moral lessons about drugs and hooking up may have aged poorly, the world Pascal painted still has a nostalgic appeal. That appeal will forever be exemplified by the book’s original covers, which were all drawn by the late artist Stephen Mathewuse. (*The Baby-Sitters Club* is also his handiwork.) Mathewuse’s illustrations were the perfect visual entry point to *Sweet Valley High*: soft-focus pastel drawings of girls clad in striped polo shirts and blazers with shoulder pads and silky button-downs, their emotional peaks and valleys (jealousy, despair, lust) immortalized underneath the banner of cherry red varsity lettering.
In YA circles, Pascal is legend material. After creating her bible, Pascal handed off actual writing duties so she had time to broaden her reach. Anyone else remember the board game where you had to vie for the prom dress and the date? What about the *Sweet Valley High* television series with its own golden-haired twin Wakefield sisters? Pascal also carved a path for YA writers to follow. Would we have had Ann M. Martin’s *The Baby-Sitters Club* or Cecily Brooke von Ziegesar’s *Gossip Girl* without her? These were juggernauts of the preteen library that helped define a certain vision of girlhood in the ’90s and the aughts. I didn’t see myself in *Sweet Valley High*, but that was okay. In some ways, figuring out what you want to push against when you’re growing up is as important as figuring out what you aspire to. And culture needs things to push against as well; would there have been grunge without the saccharine scenes of cultural entities like *Sweet Valley High*? Decades later, I would feel a similar sense of otherness watching *Beverly Hills, 90210*, which reflected none of my own New York reality. The appeal, for me, was the lens into a rose-tinted world of delightful drama that was entirely unlike my own. That kind of escapist appeal was, like, totally awesome.
