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Blonde cheerleaders with aquamarine eyes, cherry lips and California tans. White sand beaches and rolling hills. Varsity letters and teenage drama.
Francine Pascal, who has died at age 92, built this world of idealised Americana into a juggernaut literary empire that defined the childhoods of a generation of girls in the 1980s and 1990s.
A former journalist and soap opera scriptwriter, Pascal did not publish her first novel until well into her forties. At 51 she struck gold with Sweet Valley High. Writing young adult fiction was an “accident”, she said, after she struggled to sell a soap opera about teenagers to television networks. Instead, she wrote it up in book form, honing soap opera devices into addictive novels about the interior worlds of teenage girls. Each one would end on a cliffhanger to bring the reader back for the sequel.
“She had this steadfast vision,” says Amy Berkower, Pascal’s longtime agent who bought into her idea in the early 1980s, quickly selling the first 12 books to publisher Bantam.
Pascal was born and raised in New York City, where she spent most of her life. She wrote for the high school newspaper and then studied journalism at New York University, afterwards writing for women’s magazines such as Cosmopolitan.
She had three daughters with her first husband, Jerome Offenberg, whom she married in 1958 and divorced in 1963. The following year, she married John Pascal, also a journalist. The couple found jobs as writers on an ABC soap opera, The Young Marrieds. In 1977 Pascal published her first novel, Hangin’ Out With Cici.
But a few years later, tragedy struck: Pascal’s husband died of cancer. In 1983, now the single mother of three teenage girls, she published the first of the Sweet Valley High books. They took off up the charts and in 1985, Sweet Valley’s Perfect Summer became the first young adult book to make the New York Times paperback bestseller list.
Sweet Valley centred around two identical twins, Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, in a fictional Los Angeles suburb. The twins share “spectacular, all-American good looks” but while Jessica is sneaky and flirtatious, Elizabeth is the studious good girl. The pair represented Jekyll and Hyde, the good and bad sides of an emerging individual.
Each Sweet Valley High cover featured dreamy pastel illustrations of the blonde teens, stamped with tabloid-worthy headlines. “What Jessica wants, Jessica gets — even if someone gets hurt!” reads the cover of Secrets, the second book in the series.
“There was nothing like this at the time. There were romance books, but this was different . . . these books were girl-driven,” Pascal told The New York Times in 2011. “I felt that I was putting life in the hands of girls . . . these girls ran the ship. They ran the action.”
Pascal’s Sweet Valley universe is rooted in fantasy — including her own. She had not been to Los Angeles before writing about it. She created, by her estimate, 35 books focused on the high school prom, but never attended one herself. The focus on California teenagers was a formula that would be repeated in pop culture in the ensuing decades with hits such as the TV series Gossip Girl and the film Clueless.
Pascal churned out books on nearly a monthly basis, relying on a team of ghostwriters who were commanded to adhere to her “bible”, a detailed guide to the characters and world of Sweet Valley. Friends describe her as disciplined, tough and fun. Each day, she sat down at her typewriter at 10am, and wrote exactly four pages.
There are hundreds of books, including spin-offs, spin-offs of spin-offs — more than 200mn copies have been sold — a TV show, dolls and board games. And while the books are now relics of another era, the brand lives on — perhaps through nostalgia among women of a certain age. As recently as 2020, a film was in the works with Paramount.
Sweet Valley High has at times been derided as the equivalent of literary junk food. “For years when I was selling 100mn and more, The New York Times pretended I didn’t exist,” Pascal told The Guardian in 2012.
It wasn’t until later in life that she began to appreciate the significance of the franchise, which she told the Chicago Tribune in 1991 brought a love of reading to a generation of girls who “hadn’t even picked up a book [before]”. “Everybody likes to think they are making a difference in this world. When I get a letter from a child saying that Sweet Valley has made her enjoy reading, I know I’ve done something important. And that is truly a wonderful feeling.”
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