MEG CABOT

“I am the living proof that it is possible to profit from being a high school freak.”
Sporting a bright pink sweater trimmed with fake osprey feathers, a glittering tiara on her dark locks and a huge grin on her pretty, pointed face, Meg Cabot does not look remotely like a freak. The author of the famous Princess Diaries series in fact resembles her heroine Princess Mia’s big sister, as played by Anne Hathaway in the second Disney film to be released later this month. Yet Cabot, who began her career as an impoverished illustrator, earning her bed and board as a lowly assistant manager of an undergraduate dormitory in New York University, is now one of the most popular modern authors in the world. Her sales regularly overtake those of JK Rowling, she has just had queues round the block at Harrods for a special Princess Day, and with two more Disney films of her novels in the pipeline, you can bet that the diamond studs in her ears are real.

For parents and children as yet unaware of the Princess Diaries, their popularity may come as a surprise. Wrapped up in the pink and glitter is a surprisingly tough, old-fashioned message to adolescent girls about keeping your sense of your own self-worth, being loyal to your friends and resolutely independent of the images of youth promulgated by pop-stars.

“A lot of girls do want to grow up too fast,” Cabot says. “It’s tough because they get a lot of mixed messages, especially from pop-stars. I really admire Christina Aguillera and Britney Spears, but they do dress very sluttily. Girls know that’s part of the game, the façade, but I think there could be a point at which you need a parent or a school to step in. It drives me crazy the way a lot of parents are afraid to say No. My mom was so strict I couldn’t get my ears pierced at 16; any boy who wanted to ask me out had to come home and meet my dad, and you know, it saved me dating a lot of scumbags.”

Funny, slick and wise, Cabot has replaced Judy Blume as the friend, mentor and guide of the young teenaged girl. Her gift for catching the rhythms and slang of the 11-16 year old is such that it is no longer possible to discern whether life is copying fiction or vice versa. It was Cabot, not ‘Friends’ who started the vogue for saying “Hello?” not as a response but as a comment on your audience’s stupidity. Her heroines are smart as paint, even when they look like the geek Cabot claims to have been herself. Yet as well as having a seemingly inexhaustible hot-line into the modern adolescent’s mind, her message is a surprisingly traditional one. Cabot’s heroines are ordinary girls who discover they are a princess, or a psychic, or an “All-American Girl” who happens to save the President’s life, and who then have to deal with very commonplace problems of envy, ostracism, loneliness and confusion.

“It’s that whole being true to yourself thing, learning to stand up for yourself and also for others who are weaker than you,” says Cabot.

It is this kind of talk which gets her web-site (www.megcabot.com) 200 hits a day, especially from girls begging her to solve their problems. Cabot is amazed they aren’t asking their own mothers, (and in fact has roped in her own mother to help with some of the questions, which range from, “What is the best way to become a writer?” to “What can I do about being fat and friendless?”) Her common-sense and kindliness, combined with an inexorable flow of shrewd jokes, makes it easy to see why she has become more than just another author. She keeps an up-to-the minute weblog diary, which is virtually indistinguishable in tone from those of her heroines, and is such a prolific writer that despite her happy marriage she has no plans to have any children of her own.

“Like Mia, I’d be the world’s most neurotic Mom,” she says. “I’d drive any kid of my own crazy with anxiety and advice. But I have a baby niece who I’m hoping won’t grow up to be too into sport.”

Princess Mia’s story, in both film and novels, is that of Cinderella with a twist. The frumpy daughter of a single mother, her life is transformed by the bossy, snobbish Grandmere (played by Julie Andrews), Queen of Genovia, a country shamelessly modelled on Monaco, who is training her up to rule in her stead. Taught how to sit, stand, dress, wave and blow-dry her bushy hair, Mia’s diary is an irresistible combination of fantasy cool teen makeover and principled resistance to the kind of behaviour that drives parents of young girls into a frenzy of anxiety. At sweet sixteen in Sixational, she has only been kissed, and is disturbed to find her older boyfriend Michael getting interested in sex. Cabot laughs when I ask how she is going to address the inevitable once Mia turns eighteen. She has done some wonderfully funny (and tasteful) sex-scenes in her novels for older girls, such as Girl Meets Boy, but is very aware of the fine line she must tread between shocking younger readers and satisfying older ones.

The parental reluctance to exert discipline is, she thinks, due to people having children later in life.
“ They are so excited to have a child, they give it everything they want, and that does them a disservice. If you have kids young, like my parents, you’re too busy to put up with bad behaviour! Kids like rules, even if they don’t admit it. If you say they can’t go to certain parties or have to be home by 11pm, that’s a sign your parents care. On the other hand, this huge abstinence movement in the US, which means they don’t even teach sex-ed, doesn’t help in any way. Of course you’re going to experiment, and eventually not going to say no”

Cabot is as bright as they come. She slips in pointers to authors such as the Brontes and Jane Austen, as well as pop-culture and up-to-the minute royal gossip, as many mothers lace their kids’ food with vitamin drops, and her readers respond by writing exicitedly that “Mia is so right about Heathcliff – total hottie!”. Such is her lightness of touch, she even gets away with a “Princess Mia” etiquette book filled with the kind of advice about politeness which it’s clear she herself practises.

Cabot herself grew up in the backwater of America. She jokes about becoming a reader because “I spent my childhood in pursuit of air conditioning and found it at the public library of Bloomington, Indiana”, but her mother illustrated the Planned Parenthood brochures to teach largely illiterate people about contraception. “I was surprised when I went into other people’s homes and there weren’t IUDs hanging around,” she says mischievously. The origins of her surname are lost in family myth: one version goes that her grandfather was a member of the posh East Coast family who was rejected by them because he wanted to play the sax; another, that he changed his name because he was wanted by the Mafia. There was not,at any rate, a lot of money around, and she did her degree in fine art at the local university. Anyone who has seen the film Breaking Away, set in Cabot’s home town, will have a pretty good idea of how class-conscious such a town is, and how difficult its high school mores. To this day, Cabot tours such schools and suggests to loners and oddballs in her audience that they “become a writer, not a mass-murderer”, because it is that kind of world she and her heroines, despite their glamorous citified pubescence, know all too well. “I hope girls will realise they are not alone in feeling a great big freak in high school,” she says. “Also, that normal is not what they see on TV. Being true to yourself and to your friends is more important than being part of the “in” crowd.”

A fanatical lover of all things pink and glittery, Cabot may look an unlikely feminist, but her heroines are sisters under the skin. Married to a former Wall St. financial adviser turned chef (“he had a bad 9/11 experience,” she says, “and having supported me while I was struggling, it’s my turn now) they have just moved into a fabulous house on Key West in the extreme south of Florida, thanks to her earnings. The success of the first Disney film of The Princess Diaries, she says, “took the executives there totally by surprise,” and triggered other girl-orientated films such as Freaky Friday, Mean Girls and the forthcoming Ella Enchanted (also starring Anne Hathaway.) The appeal of her gentle romantic comedies crosses genders.

“I feel kids today have enough pressures and are sad enough already,” she says.

The Sunday Times, October 2004