I grew up looking at America from afar. I’m American but my parents took a job overseas, so I spent most of my childhood as an expat in Saudi Arabia. This was back in the ‘90s, before internet and satellite TV, so studying my distant home country was mostly done through books, videotapes, and censored issues of Seventeen magazine. One of my favorite sources of information about America, when it came to being a teenage girl, was Sweet Valley High.
Sweet Valley High was a wildly popular young adult book series that ran through the ‘80s and ‘90s, selling more than 200 million copies worldwide. The 181 book series, created by Francine Pascal but written by ghostwriters, centered on identical sixteen year old twins Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield. Quintessential California girls, the twins lived in the idyllic coastal town of Sweet Valley and the books chronicled their middle-class suburban life - going to school, having romantic entanglements, and experiencing adolescent dilemmas.
The books were sometimes racy, sometimes cloyingly sanitized, and by today’s standards they were often wildly problematic, but the fact that they were flawed doesn’t mean they weren’t formative. While my overseas perspective may have been unusual, I wasn’t the only American girl looking to Sweet Valley High as a kind of cultural script. These books, with their frothy plots and candy-colored covers, shaped my generation’s understanding of what it meant to be a teenage girl.
And in doing so, Sweet Valley High served as an apocalypse.
Apocalypse comes from the Greek word apokalyptein, and it doesn’t actually mean catastrophic destruction, but revelation – an unveiling of what was hidden. Sweet Valley High served as a revelation of late 20th century American girlhood by exposing the cultural fantasy we had been raised to believe: that we could have it all, that the glossy surface was enough, and that the story could keep going even after the center had collapsed.
Shopping Malls, Sororities, and Stability
Coming of age as an American girl at the end of the 20th century meant living in a moment of cultural flux: while our mothers had been raised with one vision of femininity, girls my age had been given another. We were told that we could do anything but never told exactly what that anything should be. Even growing up abroad, this cultural messaging reached me, making it feel like there was no clear way to be a woman, just a million contradicting voices.
Sweet Valley High debuted in the Reagan era, when physical perfection, personal ambition, and a shrill optimism were the order of the day. Conservative family values had returned to cultural prominence after the upheaval of the “free love” era, but they often functioned more as window-dressing than a genuine return to moral coherence. Individual freedom, a defining virtue of America since its inception, remained the highest good, and tradition, faith, even family was increasingly seen by many as optional, if not outdated and oppressive. The increasing cultural emphasis on personal fulfillment didn’t just open up new lifestyle options, it gradually devalued much that had come before, cutting people loose from inherited forms of meaning and leaving many people adrift in a fragmented, atomized world.
Into this confusion, Sweet Valley High offered a comforting fantasy about what it meant to be an American girl. The Wakefield twins were a vision of girlhood that was structured, aesthetic, and knowable. Even the binary of the twins themselves was a path to self-knowledge. Each girl reading the books could locate herself on the map of girlhood if she could figure out which twin she was like: Jessica or Elizabeth, wild or good, chaos or order. Even if you didn’t fit into that binary, there was still comfort in trying. (Unless, of course, you were Enid.)
Even time itself didn’t touch Sweet Valley, there was just an eternal junior year with multiple spring breaks, Christmases, and summer holidays, that never accumulated or culminated in anything but more of the same. Even when something deranged happened it existed inside a larger story that would eventually resolve.
Looking back, I can see that the predictability that felt so reassuring, was also part of the illusion: Sweet Valley High was a world built out of surfaces – shiny and emotionally legible, but ultimately hollow. And this tells us a lot about the culture that produced it.
Perfect Size 6
Every Sweet Valley High book opened with a description of the physical perfection of the Wakefield twins, in a litany I can still recall: both girls were a willowy 5’6, a perfect size 6, with sun-streaked blonde hair, golden tans, aquamarine eyes, and dimples in their left cheek. Repetitive mentions of the Wakefield twins’ beauty and thinness is a hypnotic drumbeat running through every book in the series, revealing that in that moment of American girlhood appearance had eclipsed everything else.
Women across cultures and eras have always worked to be beautiful, but in late 20th century America the female obsession with physical perfection had become totalizing in a way that was historically unprecedented. The postwar economic boom gave women plenty of disposable income just as mass production flooded the market with more beauty products, fashion trends, and diet fads to buy than ever before. The proliferation of magazines and television saturated society with unattainable beauty standards, while second-wave feminism had given women more autonomy - which ironically increased the pressure for them to “have it all” while looking like a cover girl.
This pressure on women to achieve physical perfection is often seen as a patriarchal attempt to reassert control over liberated women. Maybe there is truth to that. But I think that the massive cultural and political victories of the 20th century, like the triumph of feminism, liberalism, and individual autonomy, left women with freedom, but little in the way of metaphysical structure. An ironic consequence of the feminist movement was that in working to free women from being only wives or mothers, it stripped those roles of their value as ends in themselves. In a world drained of transcendence, where goodness and meaning is no longer clearly defined, for many women it found a new home in the body. Striving for physical perfection became a socially-sanctioned way for women to demonstrate both virtue and value.
The result was, by the ‘80s and ‘90s, American women were obsessed with beauty and thinness like never before. In Sweet Valley, even being a mother is not enough to be the telos of a woman’s life. Alice Wakefield, mother of the twins, is a wife, successful interior designer, and mother of three, yet every time she is on the page, the reader is told that she is so slim, beautiful, and youthful in appearance that she is often mistaken for the twins’ older sister. This, more than anything else, is the key takeaway about her character.
Clearly, in Sweet Valley, and for much of the generation of women raised on it, to be thin and lovely had become the utmost secular virtue, a culturally-condoned method of locating meaning in a society that had abandoned deeper coordinates.
A Liturgy of Pop Quizzes and First Dates
There is no God in Sweet Valley. The twins lose no time pondering divine purpose, they are far too busy with proms, pageants, and parties at the beach disco. The girls are not accountable to anything and yet the books are obsessed with morality – but the ethics of Sweet Valley are social, never spiritual. This makes Sweet Valley the ultimate neoliberal fantasia, a world of atomized consumerism and endless self-invention, where first dates and pop quizzes function as the only liturgy.
In Sweet Valley, everything matters so much, but nothing really means anything. This is what happens when the husk of moral culture is retained but drained of its metaphysical content. This mirrors a broader cultural shift in late 20th century America, where religion was increasingly privatized or displaced altogether by consumerism and pop psychology. The Sweet Valley books emerged alongside a generation of girls coming of age in the full bloom of the liberal vision of life, where tradition, family, and community were still present, but only valuable insofar as they served the individual. Duty and obligation were replaced by the language of choice and fulfillment, and the goal of girlhood had been redefined as empowerment through the accumulation of status and beauty.
Sweet Valley High reflected the last moment of supreme American confidence, when it was still possible to believe that we were going to be the first country held together by nothing more than a headlong rush into the future, toward more products, more lifestyles, more choices than ever before. Sweet Valley High taught readers to seek self-actualization through romance and status rather than higher belief, and for a time there was enough taffeta and lipstick to distract us from asking questions like, can a society really survive the death of its metaphysical core?
Now, I can’t help but think that the books reveal just how hard the culture was working to hold the shape of something that had already come undone.
Scripture of Neoliberal Imagination
Sweet Valley Confidential, the long-awaited follow-up to the original series, came out in 2011 and picked up ten years after the twins graduate high-school. The Wakefield twins as adults are both unseemly and underwhelming; all the aspirational promise of their teenage years feels like it has amounted to nothing. The gloss and vigor is gone, replaced by a plodding introspection and inconsistent characterization. The series was panned and while we can blame bad writing, I think the books are a surprisingly accurate reflection of the American cultural trajectory.
The course of the Sweet Valley series maps eerily well onto the arc of modern America, beginning in the glossy optimism of the 1980s only to end in 2011 when the myth of having it all could no longer be sustained. In this, Sweet Valley High is an apocalypse that reveals the inner logic of the neoliberal dream, where freedom is the highest virtue and identity is just another product to consume. It gave us a shiny world built precariously atop the promise that personal empowerment could replace all the things that used to offer us meaning. What we’re left with is more than a frothy story about teenage twins in California, it’s ultimately a portrait of a culture trying to stay pretty while falling apart.
I still love Sweet Valley High and look back on it like a fever dream of ‘80s fashion, big hair, and teenage earnestness. Despite my critical read here, the series had good qualities, like taking the concerns of young girls seriously. And I don’t think us readers who devoured the books were fools, I think we were perceptive. We sensed that the world didn’t offer us a coherent vision of what it meant to be a woman anymore, so we latched onto a glossy narrative. The series wasn’t ill-intentioned; it was trying – in a mass-market way – to give form to our disorientation.
Sweet Valley High isn’t just a relic of Reagan-era consumerism or a fantasy of flawless girlhood, it’s ultimate revelation shows us just how deeply we hunger for structure and meaning. As girls, we read these books like a catechism, memorizing the rituals of teenage life and clinging to their bright symmetry as the world around us frayed. Our adolescent devotion was a sign that even in a culture stripped of transcendence, we still longed for something more than the empty freedom of endless choice. If we look closely now, that longing of ours is still there, just waiting for a story big enough to hold it.