Bestselling YA Author Dead at 66
New York Times Best-Selling author L.J. Smith, who is best known for writing The Vampire Diaries book series, has died. She was 66 years old.
As The New York Times reports, Smith—who was born Lisa Jane Smith, but used L.J. Smith as her professional name—passed away on Saturday, March 8 in Walnut Creek, California. The author’s death came following a decade-long battle with a rare (but unnamed) autoimmune disease.
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Smith, who specialized in young adult fiction, had a fascinating professional career. Though she started out as an elementary school teacher, she abandoned that path in 1989 in order to focus on her passion for writing. Smith was already a published author by that time, but wanted to be able to focus on her books full-time.
In 1990, Smith was hired to begin writing the first book of what would become The Vampire Diaries series, which follows the exploits of Virginia teen Elena Gilbert and her relationship with vampire brothers Stefan and Damon Salvatore. Smith also penned the first of her bestselling Night World series, another supernatural YA series, in 1996.
In 1998, Smith was forced to take an extended hiatus from writing so that she could help to take care of her sister’s children as their father battled metastatic melanoma. During her 10-year break, she also lost her mother to lung cancer.
Though Smith created the world of The Vampire Diaries, she did not own the rights. So she had virtually no say in what happened with them, especially after the books saw an enormous boost in popularity following their adaptation into a CW series starring Nina Dobrev, Paul Wesley, and Ian Somerhalder.
After writing the first eight books, Smith was fired from the series in 2011 and replaced with a ghostwriter. (Both Smith and the publisher would later explain that “creative differences” were what led to the author’s unceremonious break-up with her publisher.)
Rather than sit idly by and watch other authors decide what would happen to the characters she created, and with her name still prominently featured on new Vampire Diaries books, Smith did what would have been unthinkable to most authors: she began writing online Vampire Diaries fan fiction in order to maintain some sense of control of her creation. In a 2014 feature in The Wall Street Journal, the paper celebrated the unorthodox move, writing: “In one of the strangest comebacks in literary history, L.J. Smith is using fan fiction to reclaim her own series.”
Smith is survived by her longtime partner, Julie Divola.
Divola, a tax lawyer, told The New York Times that Smith’s decision to pen fan fiction came as a result of the author feeling “very hurt and indignant” at being fired.
“When you’re a writer, you feel like your characters and your worlds, those are yours,” said Divola. “You’ve given birth to them; they’re like your children. I would put it akin to a custody battle.”