Quotes of the Day

If there is any greater pleasure than watching your child vanish into a book, it is following her there to see what she sees. This is how it comes to pass in my household that my almost 14-year-old daughter and I are AWOL for long stretches these days. Her obsession with Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novels made me curious. She's a constant reader of novels, from Harry Potter to The Secret Life of Bees, but not typically a fangirl: never got into Gossip Girl, never bought boy-band T shirts or posters. But now, as the release of the movie version of Twilight approaches, she and her friends have lost their minds. They call it OTD: Obsessive Twilight Disorder. My daughter was mobbed when she brought a movie magazine to school. When Robert Pattinson, who plays the vampire hero Edward, was scheduled to sign autographs at a San Francisco mall, police expected about 300 people: they got 10 times that many, including some who had flown in from Hawaii. Fans got trampled; one reportedly had her nose broken. While I realize this all counts as typical teen behavior, I couldn't help wondering, and worrying a bit, about the stories that inspired it. (See TIME's 10 Questions with Stephenie Meyer.)

When I was 13 it was Barbara Cartland (who was, as it happens, Princess Di's stepgrandmother). She produced a new novel roughly every 10 days — by the '90s she'd sold more than a billion books — so I could buy four and disappear for the weekend (homework was minimal back in the Dark Ages) and never run out. They were all essentially the same. Dark, mysterious, wealthy hero is too damaged to love deeply. Smart, passionate, innocent heroine finds herself in harm's way. Hero rescues; villains are vanquished; vows are exchanged. And a chaste kiss at the happily ever after. Repeat.

Between my childhood and my daughter's, we've had various revolutions, feminist, sexual, technological. Sex became dangerous again: you may be less likely to get pregnant but more likely to get an STD. When I was in school, it was a major breakthrough when we were permitted to wear pants to class in the winter. I now see girls heading to school who appear to have forgotten to get dressed at all that morning. We were told if we worked really hard, we could accomplish anything boys could; now it would never occur to girls to think otherwise.

Yet some themes, it appears, are eternal. We curled up together this weekend, my daughter and I, as I read Twilight for the first time, she for the third. It's not 19th century London, but the modern Pacific Northwest is appropriately misty. Here we meet the bright, chaste, passionate heroine Bella and the dark, mysterious and certainly dangerous hero Edward, son of a vampire family that has sworn off human blood but still struggles with the temptation. He has a way of appearing when she's in danger, scooping her into his unnaturally strong arms and carrying her to safety. Suffice it to say, it's like nothing I've read since I was 14.

Yes, the writing is often cloying and the plotting uneven. But that is so completely not the point. At a time when characters on the hit teen TV shows can be ostracized for wearing last season's designer shoes, we have no idea what Bella wears besides blue jeans and T shirts. We barely know what she looks like beyond her fair skin, though we know every detail of Edward's luminous looks. She is brave and loyal but not rich or cool, and yet she is the object of passionate devotion by the hottest boy in school — who, as it happens, must exercise constant self-restraint around her.

Much has been made of these stories as abstinence parables for a new age; Edward would like nothing more than to sweep Bella off her feet, and she'd love to be swept, but anything beyond first base could cost her her life, if not her immortal soul. So he climbs into her window at night and holds her as she falls asleep, and protects her from the various other fiends who for reasons not worth explaining are looking to kill her. It's possible, as many commentators have suggested, that the chivalrous Edward is a teenage girl's dream date: not just sophisticated and powerful but tender and soulful, he's the 100-Year-Old Virgin, able to wait a century till he finds his soulmate, his conscience a constant chaperone that keeps things from getting out of hand. As my colleague Lev Grossman put it, "It's never quite clear whether Edward wants to sleep with Bella or rip her throat out or both, but he wants something, and he wants it bad, and you feel it all the more because he never gets it. That's the power of the Twilight books: they're squeaky, geeky clean on the surface, but right below it, they are absolutely, deliciously filthy."

But I suspect it takes more than that to account for OTD. I was reminded as I read that as you move through adolescence, your life gets so much bigger so fast; not just your hands and feet but your thoughts, temper, moods, doubts, and so all your relationships are vastly more complicated than in the days of playground tag. Melodrama comes so naturally: friendships dissolve into feuds, rivalries ripen, parents are useless, nothing goes according to plan, temptation is everywhere. These stories throw all that normal teenage drama into such high relief that the picture is suddenly clearer. The stakes in Edward and Bella's world really are life or death; if things go wrong, your heart could get broken — or your veins opened. Loyalty may require risking your life; betrayal could cost it. Self-restraint takes superhuman control. It's exhausting but cathartic to take one's own first experience of love or jealousy or loss and blow it up wide-screen, cue the music, roll the thunder.

I'll concede that there are times I wish Bella were a bit more Buffy, slaying vampires and not just falling for them. Edward's gallantry is noble, but you wish Bella didn't need to be saved all the time, that she were less clumsy or prone to fainting. But in these days of supergirls, when our daughters seem to be confident and competent in ways I couldn't have fathomed at 14, I'm not so worried about some embedded antifeminist message. I watched way more TV growing up than my kids do and read more junk and seem to have survived. Instead I'm grateful for any book that has girls so captivated that it will keep us talking late into the night, about relationships and their consequences, about roles and rights and trade-offs. About how you decide when there seem to be no good choices. About desire and discipline and where your values come from. There's plenty to argue over here, and they never get tired of talking about it.

• Nancy Gibbs
• What got her teenage daughter so into the 'Twilight' novels? Nancy Gibbs picked one up to find out