You know I adore her writing. You know I consider her to be the High Priestess of YA.

The first time I read a Meg Cabot book must have been the end of 2000 or beginning of 2001. I was sick, and I’d had to leave college right before my last semester. My dear friend Jami B. mailed me a care package including The Princess Diaries and a pink plastic tiara.

I put on the tiara and read the book in one sitting. Mia Thermopolis enchanted me. A princess who doesn’t want to be a princess??? How could it get any better?

As time passed, I collected pretty much every single thing Meg has ever had published. The woman is a powerhouse. I don’t know how she does it, but she is unbelievably prolific, and her style is very much her own. She’s big on texture, which is my favorite thing about creative writing. She consistently serves up e-mails, instant messages, text messages, journal entries, receipts, even airline tickets. I wish more authors were good at the whole artifact thing, because it’s such a joy to be reading a book and stumble upon, I don’t know, a picture of a cat drawn onto a menu in Italian.

If Gossip Girl was potato chips, Meg’s books are more like … pita chips. You still shouldn’t eat too many of them at once, but you can feel sort of good about what you’re consuming. You’re all, “This is creative! It’s a pita! And it’s a chip!”

No, seriously, though. The 2000s would have sucked much, much more had it not been for Meg. And she’s written such a variety of books. She’s got an accidental princess, an accidental witch (Jinx), a girl who saves the president’s life (All-American Girl), and most recently, a girl who gets her brain transplanted into a supermodel’s body (Airhead). The only thing Meg hasn’t written is a space western, which thankfully she has left to the likes of Joss Whedon.

And Meg is no slacker in the books-for-grownups department, either. But you all know all of this. Because you love Meg as I do. (Don’t you? Don’t you???)

See, the thing is this: The 2000s were a decade in which we all needed to escape sometimes. I think all decades are like this, but for me the 2000s were especially full of moments in which I needed to not be thinking about work, or bills, or school, or boys, or whatever else was on my plate at the moment. And Meg has helped me escape for a few hours at a time with every one of her books.

(Premise: Thrift store finds inspire writers to create works of short fiction. The objects are then sold on eBay, accompanied by the short stories. So if you place a bid and win, you get both the vase Lauren wrote about and a copy of her story.) One hundred authors contributed to this project, including Lauren and Meg Cabot.

PS. Lauren and Meg are the only YA writers whose names jumped off the page at me, so if I’ve missed someone, please feel free to post a link in the comments.