I am a moth to his flame, and he never hesitates to burn me. My life before him was so simple and decided, now after him…It’s just…After. So why is she trying so hard to overcome her own hurt pride and Hardin’s prejudice about nice girls like her? He pushes her away again and again, yet every time she pushes back, he only pulls her in deeper. Despite the reckless way he treats her, Tessa is compelled to dig deeper and find the real Hardin beneath all his lies. He’ll call her beautiful, then insist he isn’t the one for her and disappear again and again. Something about his dark mood grabs her, and when they kiss it ignites within her a passion she’s never known before. And she does-until she finds herself alone with him in his room. For all his attitude, Tessa should hate Hardin.

With his tousled brown hair, cocky British accent, and tattoos, Hardin is cute and different from what she’s used to.īut he’s also rude-to the point of cruelty, even. She’s got direction, ambition, and a mother who’s intent on keeping her that way.īut she’s barely moved into her freshman dorm when she runs into Hardin. Tessa is a good girl with a sweet, reliable boyfriend back home. Her Instagram account has nearly 300,000.Audiobook Length: 16 hours and 30 minutes Todd’s Twitter account has 200,000 followers. By July of last year, After had drawn more than a million “reads.” Today, according to Wattpad, it has more than a billion, making After Wattpad’s most popular story. Todd gave Tessa’s love interest the name Harry Styles, after a much-beloved member of One Direction.īecause she wrote many of her early entries on her phone, they were full of typos. Eventually, she decided to try her hand at being a Wattpad author, and in early 2013 started writing After, a work of fan fiction, inspired by the boy band One Direction, about Tessa, a college student who falls for a hard-drinking lout. She was particularly taken with Wattpad, a social platform bursting with “fan fiction”-stories inspired by celebrities, films, TV shows, or other books.

And like most millennials, she did much of her reading on her phone. I just kept bouncing back and forth.”īut one thing she knew about herself was that she loved to read. “I tried nursing, I tried science, I tried English.

“I had no clue what I wanted to do,” she says over a honey-cream latte at Dominican Joe’s, a coffee shop near her new home in South Austin. Two years ago, Anna Todd was a 23-year-old Army wife living at Fort Hood, attempting to be a college student.

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