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Fame . . . What’s Your Name?

Cave Creek, Arizona, is a chamber of commerce dream. It is an artsy, antique kind of town. Big on family, a sense of community, and just far enough away from the hustle and bustle of Phoenix. The surrounding desert landscape does not so much distract as it does complement the town. It is the type of place people come to relax and get away from it all.

In the case of Stephenie Meyer, it was the kind of place to come, raise a family, embrace her faith, and to live a fulfilling, quiet, and relaxing life.

But when Stephenie Meyer returned to her home in Cave Creek in the summer of 2008, it was far from a quiet time.

You could see it on her face. Her eyes would occasionally reflect that thousand-mile stare that comes from not enough sleep. The tight little smile, which had looked so precious when her first book, Twilight, came out, was now often showing a hint of being forced. If you caught any of her television interviews or YouTube videos that were making the rounds in support of her new novel, The Host, Twilight the movie, and all her previous books, you might have caught some hints of resignation as she waited for the questions she knew were coming and mentally readied herself for the by now automatic responses.

And the endless round of reporters were not making the task easy. That the entire story, by 2008, had been told too many times to count did not stop lazy reporters from asking the "dream" question, the "how does it feel to be famous" question, and the "how did you know so much about vampires" question. It was as if everybody was satisfied with the obvious angles on Stephenie’s life and not really anxious to discover more. Which is why things that would occasionally slip out during media interviews and book-signing question-and-answers that should have been of interest rarely rated a note on the numerous Twilight and Stephenie Web sites.

To be sure, there were exceptions to the rule. A Phoenix New Times article dug deeper than most and so came away with things we did not know. And although it was all primarily surface glitz and gloss, Entertainment Weekly managed to pluck a few nuggets of new info out of the basket. But for the most part it was all the same, repeated to the nth degree. It was enough to drive this mild-mannered Mormon wife and mother turned bestselling author to . . . well, go all vampire on them. But Stephenie was the good soldier, perhaps still at a stage when the excitement of it all had not yet been trumped by the tedium, who smiled until it hurt, and did interviews until her mind turned to mush.

And then limped home . . . to do the work that needed to be done.

Looking forward to some quiet time with her husband and three children after coming off a grueling weeks-long promotional tour, Meyer was immediately thrust into a three-day marathon of fine-tuning Breaking Dawn, the final novel in her tale of human and vampire love in the isolated town of Forks, Washington. The book was primed for an August 2008 release with advance orders already clocking in at more than three million.

But despite every sign in the universe pointing to the author having made that final leap to stardom, as recently as early 2008, Stephenie was insisting to everybody who asked, including Vogue, that what she had accomplished was still small potatoes.

"It’s still a small family business," she said. "It’s just a little family thing. I couldn’t deal with it if I couldn’t keep it small."

By the time she sat down with Breaking Dawn, Stephenie had already discovered certain realities of the writing life, not the least of which was the time it was taking away from her family. Not that her husband and children were complaining. They had long since discovered the reality of Stephenie’s new life and the shorthand that indicated it was time for her to be alone to write.

Twilight had been written for herself. She has said more times than she can count that she never thought anybody would read it. New Moon was essentially finished before Twilight was even published. But by the time she sat down to write Eclipse, there were agents and publishers to consult with, interviews to do in support of her books, and perhaps most important, deadlines that were constantly in evidence that had to be met and were indicative of a career that had taken off like a comet to the tune of millions of copies sold.

Stephenie admittedly enjoyed the notoriety, but on those days when the obligations of bestselling author became too much, she longed for the days when only a few people knew her name.

"I like being normal," she told the National Post. "I like being ordinary. I like going home and just being mom and having my little circle of friends. I’m not Stephenie Meyer to them. I’m just Steph."

The rocket to stardom that now left Stephenie occasionally longing for the simple life was not a sudden invasion in her life. Well into the writing of New Moon and the earliest stages of Eclipse, Stephenie would say during a 2008 question-and-answer session in a Chicago bookstore, that she was still able to hang on to some semblance of normalcy and routine.

"I would get up, get the kids ready, and send them off to school," she recalled. "If I was being good, I would hit the elliptical machine for a half hour. Then I would flip through TiVo and answer my e-mail. Then I would sit down, slip on my headphones, and write until I heard somebody asking me what we were having for dinner."

For better or worse, as she slipped on some music by Muse and Blue October and tuned herself into editing mode, Stephenie’s world had gotten a lot bigger.

Normally Stephenie wrote at night when her family was long asleep and the chance for distractions was slim. But with the pressures and demands of the publishing world at hand, she had begun this final lap with Breaking Dawn at 6:00 A.M. and, if she was lucky, burned out, or both, would be finishing up around midnight.

Adding to the craziness was the seemingly endless round of media interviews that saw reporters, despite the fact that she had been on every possible outlet on the last tour, from the likes of Entertainment Weekly and USA Today making the pilgrimage to Cave Creek to ask the probing questions, the questions she had heard so many times before, and to find out, in many cases, what happens when a happily married Mormon woman with three children has a dream.

A dream that has turned into a worldwide literary sensation, the likes of which hasn’t caught the world’s collective imagination since a young British single mother named Joanne Rowling scribbled those initial notes about a fantasy world and a young boy with glasses named Harry Potter on a long train ride through the British countryside.

The comparison between Stephenie and J. K. Rowling was one of the first labels to stick. Stephenie was amazed and honored at the comparison but also a bit ambivalent.

"There will never be another J. K. Rowling," Meyer told USA Today long after she had heard the comparison between Rowling and herself too many times to count. "That really puts a lot of pressure on me. I’m just happy being Stephenie Meyer. That’s cool enough for me."

Meyer’s laid-back persona was partially born of an endearing shyness that has followed her from birth. The mild-mannered outsider who was never the life of the party. The consensus from those who knew her pre-Twilight was that she was adjusting fairly well to the mantle of bestselling author and that not much had changed since her days at Brigham Young University. And on the surface, Stephenie does seem to present the demeanor of "good sport" about it all. But the author conceded in a recent Paris Match interview that celebrity takes a bit of getting used to.

"I do

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Excerpted from Stephenie Meyer by Shapiro, Marc Copyright © 2010 by Shapiro, Marc. Excerpted by permission.
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