Written by: Joleen Gramlich
About sixteen years after it was published, I finally picked up Twilight. And although I had seen the movie when I was little, I had no idea why this book had middle aged women and teenage girls in a chokehold back in 2008. I mean, this book inspired women to defile cardboard cutouts of Robert Pattinson. It pitted team Edward girlies against the team Jacob ones that triggered a Twilight civil-war that lasted well beyond the years it took Stephanie Meyer to complete her tetralogy. For years I never really understood the craze.
And then I read it.
Now, this book isn’t great. In fact, it’s excruciatingly mid. The plot idea is far from new, the writing content itself is repetitive and almost too digestible, and Bella might be the most infuriating main character ever written. But damn, it sucked me right in.
Perhaps in the same way people watch reality TV like the bachelor, Twilight satiates that need for a slow-burn romance, and, on top of that, Bella’s love interest happens to be a vampire. It’s juicy, forbidden, secretive, dangerous, and so fun to lap up.
At the time I read it, my best friend Erica was also reading it and our whole world became Twilight. It was a rainy June in Portland, Maine, which was the perfect environment for fueling our Twilight-rotted brains with delusion.
That being said, we completely took on the personality of Bella.What a lame sentence, but it’s very true. It’s all we talked about, our “for you” pages were littered with Robert Pattinson edits and the Twilight intro song “Full Moon” by The Black Ghosts was on repeat. The more Twilight-media I consumed the more my social media algorithm grew increasingly more Forks-inspired.
I wondered: what would it look like if Bella created her own Pinterest mood board? And so I created one:
Image created by Gramlich
Of course the classic Twilight rainy blue tint was a must-needed filter on the mood board as a whole. Also included is an aesthetically pleasing array of photos including her and Edward’s bedrooms, the scenic forests of Forks, nature elements including a deer (that her boyfriend loves to feast on (because he’s a vampire)),Bella’s hand-me down orange truck that Jacob’s father gave her, her bestie Alice (Edward’s sister), Romeo and Juliet to satisfy Bella’s intellectual literary knowledge that she so proudly brings up many times throughout the book, and finally the dictionary definition of “vampire” which comes from Bella’s eureka moment following her intense digging around for answers on why her crush has color-changing eyes, pale skin that sparkles in the sun, super-human strength and speed, as well as a tendency to disappear for days on end.
My obsession with Twilight has since cooled off since I read it for the first time last summer, but to anyone, especially to girls fifteen and younger, who have yet to delve into the world of Twilight: be warned. You may become obsessed.
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