Seeing that, “I was like, ‘Holy shit,’ ” Todd once recalled. Readers composed sequels starring After’s characters, uploaded video homages to the book, and-finally convincing Todd that she might have something big on her hands-chatted as Tessa and Harry on Twitter role-playing accounts. Multiple literary agents reached out to her, but she dismissed them as “crazy people,” figuring no legitimate professional would seek out One Direction fan fiction. (Aside from his accent, After’s Harry bears little resemblance to the British singer.)īy the time Todd wrote Chapter 90-of an eventual 295 chapters-her novel-in-progress had been read more than 1 million times. It follows her torrid, tortured romance with the brooding sophomore Harry Styles-named after the One Direction heartthrob-as he initiates her into heavy drinking, heavy makeup, and heavy petting. (Readers can chat with writers and discuss books with one another by leaving comments alongside the text as they read.) After, generously sprinkled with Pride and Prejudice allusions and oral sex, opens on Tessa Young, an innocent bookworm beginning her first day of college. Without pausing to proofread, Todd uploaded a chapter a day to Wattpad, a free site that has earned a reputation as the YouTube of ebooks for its success in giving prose the social-media treatment. “My husband just thought I had a phone addiction or something,” she has said. She used a pseudonym ( imaginator1D) and hid her alter ego from family and friends. She called it After and wrote on her smartphone whenever she could steal a moment-while shopping for groceries, waiting to get her teeth cleaned, riding in friends’ cars. After blazing through all that she could find online and then tiring of waiting for updates from erratic authors (many of them teens juggling writing and school), Todd decided to attempt her own series. Since the previous fall, she’d also indulged an addiction to One Direction fan fiction-stories featuring the boy band in imagined scenarios. ![]() Wuthering Heights, Twilight, The Things They Carried. ![]() While caring for her son and taking online community-college courses, she helped support the family by babysitting for a neighbor and working the beauty counter at Ulta. Todd was 24 years old and living near Fort Hood, Texas, with her husband, a soldier she had married a month after graduating high school, and their newborn, who suffered daily seizures. Then she propped her elbows on her shopping cart and began to type. One afternoon in the summer of 2013, Anna Todd was in the checkout line at Target when, as most of us do, she pulled out her phone.
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