Girl talk

A selection of Sassy magazine covers from the early 1990s. (Matilda Publications/Lang Communications//Petersen Publishing)

How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time
Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer
Douglas & McIntyre
122 pages, $22.95

Sassy, a shiny, happy American magazine aimed at teenage girls, had a brief run. It published from 1988 to 1994 — purists don’t count the ’95-’96 issues, which followed a corporate takeover and a masthead purge — but in its afterlife it has become iconic.

For women who relied on its “cool big sister” advice to get them through high school hell, this new book by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer will feel like the long-delayed arrival of the final issue. An unabashed love note to all things Sassy, it has the same zippy, pro-girl tone, the same mix of hard information and juicy insider gossip, the same, well, sassiness.

Editorial meetings at Sassy sometimes started with arguments over “who’s better-looking, Dweezil Zappa or Sting,” but ultimately, the conflicts at the teen mag were much bigger than that. Along with the dishing on office sex and personal feuds, Jesella and Meltzer — both New York-based journalists who work in the magazine trade — keep pointing to deeper issues: the tricky line between mass appeal and indie credibility, the queasy bargains struck between media and celebrity culture, and the danger of bean-counting business interests second-guessing editorial content.

Sassy, inspired by an Aussie magazine called Dolly, set out to reject Seventeen magazine and its compliant mix of marketing and marriageable, middle-class values. Here were no dieting tips, no makeovers, no worrying about what boys or parents might think. Sassy was offbeat and assertive, constantly reminding girls that there was a whole wide world out there beyond the high school prom.

During the period that Sassy staffers shared bathrooms with the serious thinkers from Ms., the mag helped set the media template for Third Wave feminism, with a catchy, non-judgmental mix of serious social issues and DIY-style self-expression. Whether the mag was profiling “Shannen Doherty, pathetic loser,” or offering an ironic take on “Dating a rock star” (turns out it’s boring), the tone was fresh, funny, sometimes abrasive. Articles about abortion rights mixed it up with the monthly “Cute band alert.” Fashion and beauty coverage (“Why your breasts aren’t as weird as you think”) was offbeat. Coverage of trashy mainstream culture nudged up against reviews of obscure, shoe-gazing indie bands.

Jesella and Meltzer are probably happiest following Sassy’s early days, when everyone was guileless and green. (The average age of the New York startup crew was 24.) Editor Jane Pratt, also 24, had an instinctive sense of how to make the star system work for her. Her three main writers — Christina Kelly, Catherine Gysin and Karen Catchpole — were all known by their first-name bylines, as was resident “Sassy Boy” Neill McCutcheon, the magazine’s first art director. Readers soon knew all about the writers’ quirks and crushes, their likes and dislikes, especially those of the wildly opinionated Christina, who often comes off as the meanest — but funniest — girl in your Grade 12 class.

(Douglas & McIntyre)

There was a slumber party atmosphere at the office. R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe dropped in, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon took Christina second-hand shopping, Beck took a turn answering readers’ questions in the “Dear Boy” column. Meltzer and Jesella recall a 1992 interview with Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain, still crazy in love. (Getting a jump on the current trend for celebrity-couple monikers, Sassy referred to the pair as “Kurtney.”)

But the magazine was already under threat, the first knock to Sassy’s sense of wide-open possibility being a 1989 boycott by the religious right, which objected to the mag’s frank sex talk in articles like “Condom update” and “Getting turned on.” Sassy downplayed its sexual content after that, heading toward a dangerous form of self-censorship, but it never lost its bad-girl rep. (This despite the fact that YM, under the hungry tenure of the young Bonnie Fuller, was a much sluttier mag.)

Sassy was also beset by internal conflicts. Any magazine that lives by hipness risks dying by hipness, and Meltzer and Jesella suggest that Sassy’s stance of nonconformity eventually threatened to become a new kind of uniformity. “At some point the typical Sassy girl became a smugly superior alterna-chick,” complains a former reader. Some fans, who looked to the mag for unconditional acceptance, felt left behind.

Other readers, taking an indier-than-thou attitude, thought that the Sassy gang had gone too mainstream, becoming sell-outs who co-opted cool indie culture. (The mag spoofed its uncertain status in December ’92 with a spine line that read “Corporate Zine.”)

The magazine’s position was particularly awkward in the matter of celebrity culture. Jane parlayed her own image into a disastrous stint as a Fox and then Lifetime TV talk-show host, playing on the Sassy mystique as she came perilously close to wrecking it. (Meltzer and Jesella suggest that Jane became “the Liz Phair of the publishing world” — a quintessentially Sassy sort of jibe, with its insider reference to Phair, a onetime edgy indie musician who was bedazzled by fame and money.)

Meanwhile, the Sassy writers treated other celebrities with snarky irony, particular scorn being reserved for the twinkies on Beverly Hills, 90210 and the members of manufactured boy bands. Of course, even as they despised these celebrities, they used their newsstand cachet. While Jesella and Meltzer loyally view this as a kind of “postmodern critique,” it could also be seen as a cop-out. (If you really despise celebrity culture, why not ignore it completely?)

But Jesella and Meltzer aren’t pretending to be objective. (This is a love letter after all.) Their prose often mirrors Sassy’s own, in its “grown-up teenager” tone. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the authors’ contagious hatred for Sassy’s (mostly) clueless competitors. Looking at the cutthroat world of teen magazines, the pair is merciless about the, like, total lameness of Seventeen, and they’re clearly not fond of Jane, the project that Jane Pratt started to work on as Sassy imploded. But Jesella and Meltzer save their nastiest high school lunchroom insults for the “faux-Sassy” that published in 1995 and 1996, after Petersen Publishing purchased the mag, purged the original staff and (subtly, sneakily) changed the mandate. The authors can’t resist a bit of adolescent cattiness when they report that Jane’s replacement was pictured on the Editor’s Note page wearing a sporty scrunchie!

There’s a profound sense of outrage here, something that goes beyond mourning the death of one little teen mag. Meltzer and Jesella’s chronicle is also about that particular moment when confidence and certainty start giving way to the compromises of adult life. That’s why How Sassy Changed My Life is comic, tragic and — for anyone involved in media — full of cautionary tales.

Alison Gillmor is a Winnipeg writer.

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