Michael Harris, «Solitude: In Pursuit of A Singular Life in a Crowded World»:

“Just because he can’t love you the way you want him to doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you with everything he has.” 

Twenty-four-year-old Anna Todd used her elbows to steer a grocery cart down the fluorescent-scorched aisles of Target. That way she could type on her Android phone as she rolled. Her thumbs darted and dodged across its glass surface. “We are so completely different and yet the same.” It would be a bestseller, the novel she was writing. It would touch the hearts of millions. “I am a moth to his flame, and he never hesitates to burn me.”

It really would, though—be a bestseller. It would be one of the biggest deals in publishing that nobody in publishing saw coming. Todd’s chapters, which she posted on the go, via a social platform for amateur writers called Wattpad, would ultimately be downloaded more than one billion times. A can of food gets popped in the cart, a pack of batteries. “I need him to not think of himself as a monster.” The chapter was finished and Todd posted it while waiting in line at the till. Already she could feel the responses rolling in—hundreds, thousands of them—the suggestions for plot twists, the corrections and advice, the uptick in view counts and cascading streams of praise. Her book was a global phenomenon and she had not even finished writing it.

Todd was always a consummate fangirl. When she was thirteen, living in Dayton, Ohio, and dreaming of anywhere else, it was Josh Hartnett who obsessed her. Then it was Twilight. And then Fifty Shades of Grey. By eighteen she had married her high school boyfriend, a soldier whose work took the couple to Fort Hood, in Texas. There, Todd waitressed at a Waffle House, worked a bit at a makeup counter, and read her favourite fanfic online. By 2013, she was searching for work again and, perhaps out of boredom, the lamp of her attention swerved toward British boy band One Direction—specifically toward the group’s shaggy-haired heartthrob, Harry Styles.

What set Todd apart from an everyday fangirl was the depth of her regard. She took to reading micro pieces of fan fiction—called imagines—that sometimes are used as captions for photos posted on Instagram. These imagines then led Todd to Wattpad, where many of the same writers were fleshing out their fantasies into full-blown works of fiction. The platform has a casting feature so that writers, rather than fully describing their characters, can simply “cast” a celebrity in the role. Harry Styles is a popular choice for male heroes (Taylor Swift is a favourite for heroines). In one popular take, he is involved in a human trafficking ring dealing in female sex slaves; in another, a vampire version of Styles steals a five-minute-old girl that he knows will become his “mate.” (In most variations, Styles is darkly attracted to a helpless young girl who ultimately returns his desire.)

The story that Anna Todd began to write, called After, was in many respects a classic Wattpad fantasy: boy with tattoos must be tamed by the love of a good woman. Naughty Harry Styles meets virginal Tessa Young at Washington State University. He’s awful. He drinks scotch and makes her cry. Yet his magnetism cannot be denied. Soon he is transformed by Tessa’s love into his true, noble self. They’re lying in the grass, the clean green grass, and Harry’s holding himself over her, push-up style. It’s all very tempting but he refuses to take her virginity until she’s ready. “I feel as though I am ice and he is fire,” muses Tessa.