Opinion | The Radical Message of ‘Sweet Valley High’

When news broke that Francine Pascal, creator of the “Sweet Valley High” universe, died last weekend at the age of 92, appreciations began rolling across the internet like a certain red Spider through a high school parking lot. “Wildly popular,” “staple of my girlhood,” “G.O.A.T. of publishing,” readers proclaimed. Nostalgic and bereaved, I drove to the library to check out a few, only to discover they had been removed from the catalog.

“Yes, I knew they were terrible,” one patron confessed in a review. “But I loved them.”

This backhanded praise would have been familiar to Ms. Pascal, whose literary talents were either sneered at or dismissed for decades. Even as her franchise blanketed best-seller lists — 200 million books and counting, thanks to teenage readers like me — she, and they, received astonishingly little media coverage.

For those affected by the blackout, the Sweet Valley universe comprises hundreds of novels and numerous spinoffs, all set in the eponymous Southern California town and starring Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, identical twins with blue-green eyes, shining blond hair and sky-high ambitions — Elizabeth’s literary, Jessica’s social. Observing their adventures, a 2012 article in The Guardian struck a typical tone when it declared that “the story lines are, often, ridiculous.”

Which is a ridiculous insult, not to mention a misreading, for to come to Sweet Valley for the story lines is to subscribe to Playboy for the articles. Criticizing the narrative arc of the books misses and, tellingly, demeans what for me was the entire point of the series: a rare portal through which we girls growing up in the 1980s and ’90s could explore our erotic potential.

I don’t mean erotic in the pornographic sense — although, OK, sometimes the books pointed mildly in that direction — but as Audre Lorde defined it, the meeting place of “our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”

In 1983, the year both “Double Love” (Sweet Valley No. 1) and I were born, girls needed that meeting place. Back then, female desire was as terrifying as full-fat yogurt. Raised under the tyranny of Christian virtue, thanks to a minister father and prudish mother, I took solace in Sweet Valley, absconding to my room for days at a time with a tote full of library paperbacks that my mother, thank God, never skimmed for quality control. At age 10, I was free to read and reread as many PG-13 scenes as I liked, including this passage from “Playing With Fire” (Sweet Valley No. 3), where Jessica embarks on a dangerous affair with the Porsche-driving Bruce Patman:

“He responded by turning his face to hers and kissing her hard, his arms crushing her against him, his mouth demanding what his body wanted to take.”