Sweet Valley Diaries

Q: What happens when you’ve just published a book about impending girlfriend death and every fiber of your writerly being says, “Can we go darker?”

A: “KIDNAPPED!”

Marissa is joined by accomplished podcast producer Mischa Stanton (in Mischa's recording booth!) and together they try and explain what the hell happened here.

Check out some of Mischa’s other shows:

The Far Meridian — New Season Premieres August 27th!

Sci-fi road trip sitcom StarTripper!! 

LeVar Burton Reads

Read Marissa’s original hot take on Kidnapped!

Katie LaDue joins Marissa once again, this time to examine WHEN LOVE DIES (and a few of the Sweet Valley boys therein) through a new lens. All I can say is SPOILERS SPOILERS SWEET VALLEY CONFIDENTIAL SPOILERS! BEWARE!

Marissa's Initial Take on SVC (from back in 2011)

This is what it sounds like...when love dies.

Sweet Valley High goes full soap opera and Marissa talks through the pain with teen television drama aficionado Katie LaDue. Oh, and file this one under "Very Special Episodes" because the topic of facing one's own mortality made us accidentally get a little real. Oops!

Are modern day teens woke enough to laugh at Suzanne Devlin? Were 12-year-old readers in the '80s indoctrinated into the grand tradition of victim-blaming and rape culture? Does Jessica Wakefield know what sex is? Marissa and guests William J. Stribling and Sinead Persaud answer none of these hard-hitting questions in this bonus episode. Instead, we stand in awe of the highly problematic, highly entertaining volume that is SVH #11.

It's the premiere of Season 2 of Sweet Valley Diaries! Let's celebrate by shipping Jessica to New York and getting beloved teacher Roger Collins fired for unspecified sex crimes!

Don't panic, everyone. Marissa and her guests, William J. Stribling and Sinead Persaud (of Shipwrecked Comedy!) are here to hold your hand until this nightmare blows over.

Welcome back to Sweet Valley.

Technically summer doesn't start until next week, but here at the Diaries, summer break is in full effect...and it's PERFECT. In this special between-seasons episode Marissa and guest-friend Alex Bishop dig into the series' first SPECIAL EDITION novel. Are you ready to bike a major chunk of the California Coast with nothing more than a couple of saddle bags and a heap of moxie? No? Well, neither were the Wakefield Twins et al, but they did it anyway, and lived to tell the tale (but just bear-ly). 

In this final episode of Season One, Marissa uses the power of the internet to call guest Mary Parker in Boston, and they BOTH use the power of imagination to invent several possible stage adaptations of the comitragic saga of Annie Whitman and Jessica Wakefield.

THANKS FOR LISTENING and helping to make this first season so much fun! Get in touch! Leave a comment on sweetvalleydiaries.net, email [email protected], follow on Twitter @sweetvalley, and on Instagram @sweetvalleydiaries!  

It's the final main episode of Season 1, and we've come full circle. This is the tale of a wannabe cheerleader with a bad reputation that started Marissa's obsession with Sweet Valley High lo, those many years ago. Mary Parker was there to see that obsession take root. Now Mary and Marissa take a closer look at "Easy" Annie Whitman, diagnose Elizabeth Wakefield with Stockholm Syndrome, and fantasize about wrecking Bruce Patman's Porsche. Oh, and that pesky Rick Andover is back.

Marissa is joined once again by her dad, Don Flaxbart, and she's steering him straight down Memory Lane. Was high school in the 1960s Southwestern US anything like that Sweet Valley High life?

So you love Ned Wakefield's dad jokes? We'll do you one better: a real life dad! Marissa's own actual father, the wise and weird Don Flaxbart, joins shares his thoughts and insights on this, the first "teenage romance of any kind" that he's ever read. Will the lanky boy get the imperious-looking girl he's sweet on? Marissa discusses this absurd question, and even more absurd book, with – cannot stress this enough – her very own father.