Like Gwyneth, Barbra, and the Gyllenhaals, the creator of the "Twilight" franchise is one of those bold-faced names your spellchecker loves to hate, but unlike those other four, Stephenie Meyer, author of The Host, gets the joke. "I'm named for my dad Stephen," she says with a shrug of her shoulders. "At some point, I just came to accept the fact that my name would be spelled wrong all my life." Her accountant father would have certainly had the opportunity for a more traditional namesake, as three sons followed Meyer's birth on Christmas Eve in 1973, and Meyer has three sons of her own. Spellcheck, however, is relatively new to her. She married at twenty-one and worked as a receptionist until her first son Gabe was born in 1997 and she transitioned to stay-at-home mom.
Check out photos from the movie adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s The Host here.
Six years later, domestic bliss was rent asunder by a dream Meyer had about a human girl and the vampire who loves her, but somewhat inconveniently thirsts for her blood. And though she "had a million things to do around the house," Meyer, who'd never written so much as a short story, stayed in bed to pen a draft of what would become chapter thirteen in the first of four Twilight books. "It would nice to say 'and the rest is history,'" Meyer says, "but it just gets stranger." She completed Twilight in three months, claiming she had no intention of publishing, but was rather "writing for my own enjoyment. I was going to put it in a drawer and forget about it." Her older sister Emily changed all that when she encouraged Meyer to submit the manuscript to literary agents. Meyer sums up the results of those fifteen letters with a precision that is surely another gift from her father: "nine rejections, five unanswered, and one positive response."
"Positive response" is surely understated as it resulted in a three-book deal with the highest advance her publisher had ever paid out to a new author: three quarters of a million dollars. And though she'd go on to be declared the "most popular vampire novelist since Anne Rice" and the "new J. K. Rowling," not every book in the Twilight franchise came as easy as the first. While working on the third book, Meyer found she needed an escape from her escape – and The Host was born.
This first book in her planned trilogy spent twenty-six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and is now rolling out as a film written and directed by Andrew Niccol, known previously for the high-tech minimalist chic of the film "Gattaca," making this project a marriage of director and material so perfect you want to throw rice at it. Niccol, who's paired with Meyer in the basement of Manhattan's Crosby Street Hotel, just laughs at the idea of his being the go-to guy for the neatly ordered dystopia. "I guess that’s what I’m trying to do," Niccol says. "The chaos that I actually live, I’m tidying up on screen. It’s just wishful thinking."
And the story Meyer has laid before him is more leather gauntlet than lace handkerchief. The Host tracks a very peaceful alien race called the Souls who nonetheless parasitically occupy a majority of humans and also tracks the struggle seventeen-year-old Melanie Stryder kicks up when a Soul named Wanderer is implanted in her body. It presents Niccol with the daunting task of a film whose primary dialogue takes place between Saoirse Ronan and the voice inside her head.
Ronan, perhaps best known as the teenage ninja in Joe Wright's "Hanna," is no stranger to literary adaptation with an Oscar nom already under her belt for "Atonement." She claims, however, that she doesn't always read the source material. Not so in the case of The Host, and she attributes that fact largely to Meyer. "Stephenie’s not just an author of a book who steps back," Ronan says. "She’s a producer on the film. She was with us every single day and she was very much involved in the film version as she should be."
Indeed, this newfound producer role may be why the notoriously press-shy Meyer, who lives and writes out of a guarded bunker in a dusty and remote corner of Arizona, is even in Manhattan this morning. She launched her production shingle, Fickle Fish Films, for a piece of the last two "Twilight" installments, but this is the first time her role as producer has placed her so front and center. And it's a position the all-black-clad Meyer wears well. "I'm still shocked by my success," she admits, "but I don't spend too much time thinking about it and I never take it for granted. It's not what I expect of my future, but I'm trying to have fun with it, and to do that while it lasts. I am always first and above all a mother, so everything else hasn't really changed my life all that much. I might be travelling a little bit more, but I can't wait to get home."
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