re: bella's new moon grief...didn't stephenie meyer say somewhere she based it on imagining losing a child? i can't find the source anywhere but i swear to god i remember learning that
I think I found it. It's on the Lexicon. I seems to be a summary of some Q&A so it's written from the third person POV and they are paraphrasing SM's answers:
Q: Why did Bella respond the way she did when Edward left? A: First of all, Bella’s love for Edward isn’t just a high school romance. It is true love. So you wouldn’t just “get over it” in a month like you do a high school boyfriend. Stephenie said that she based Bella’s intense pain on how she would feel if she lost a child. You don’t forget the pain—it doesn’t just go away.
This doesn't seem to be the exact quote I was thinking of, though. I thought the other one was something more along the lines of SM saying she's never had a heartbreak like that, so she imagined what it would be like to lose a child. Slightly different but similar idea.
And I mean . . . that's . . . interesting, I guess? I've never suffered such a dramatic heartbreak and I don't have kids, but to me it seems like those would be two very different kinds of loss? Like, the child is dead. There is no future for them. This being you created is no more. But with the break-up, even with your 'true love,' that person you love is still alive. Not with you, but out there somewhere. With a future. Not to mention that romantic love and parental love are different.
But I suspect SM is mostly talking about the intensity of feeling here rather than making a 1 for 1 swap.
I remember reading somewhere that she had a miscarriage scare during her first pregnancy. I always thought that when she was writing New Moon, she was imagining Bella experiencing the same grief that she felt when she thought she had lost the pregnancy.
