How Sassy Changed My Life by Kara Jesella

Author:Kara Jesella
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2012-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

girl power

“Girls are still understood more clearly as victims of culture and sexuality than as cultural and sexual creators,” Naomi Wolf said in The Beauty Myth. But Sassy reported with a vengeance on creative women who were making a living representing the female experience. The October 1993 issue, for example, includes book reviews of some of the coolest, most pro-girl books of the nineties, all of which would become part of the essential girl-culture canon, including cult hero Francesca Lia Block’s Missing Angel Juan; Susanna Kaysen’s memoir of teen madness, Girl, Interrupted (later turned into a movie starring Sassy heroine Winona Ryder, who appeared in the magazine long before the other teen mags caught on); Joyce Carol Oates’s Foxfire (about a girl gang); and the much-maligned Katie Roiphe anti-girl diatribe The Morning After, which receives a single star and is referenced with venom in subsequent issues. A record review for Liz Phair’s subversive, now classic Exile in Guyville exudes, “Orgasmic is not too strong a word to use here.”

Blake Nelson, for one, was impressed. In 1990, he was living in Portland, Oregon, when he picked up his girlfriend’s copy of Sassy. “I remember having this deep feeling like, ‘Oh my God, teenage girls are exactly the right thing to be at this exact moment,’” says Nelson. “Like Sassy. I had never seen anything so dead-on.”

Nelson was working on a novel called Girl. “When I named Girl, I did it because you weren’t even allowed to say girl,” he says. “And that was the thing that made Sassy so great. It was time for girls to just take it away from the super-theoretical and sometimes over-serious and energize it with youth, just have fun with it, and totally be it instead of think it. In a weird way, that was the crowning achievement of all the feminism that had gone before it, none of which ever really got the people involved and never made anyone comfortable. And then Sassy comes along and it’s just all these girls who are totally cool and will do anything they want.”

Nelson was so impressed with the magazine in general and with Christina in particular that he sent her his manuscript. She immediately wrote to him and said she wanted to run an excerpt. In fact, she ran three. Nelson was having trouble getting the book published, until the day when Christina sent him a pile of letters that had arrived at Sassy, all from teenage girls, asking where they could buy the novel. “So I immediately ran over to my prospective publisher, dropped them on the desk, and said, ‘This is who is going to buy it.’” (Since the book was published in 1995, Nelson has gone on to become a successful young-adult fiction author whose books have been adapted into films by the likes of Gus van Sant.)

“When I was writing Girl, the person I was writing it for was Kim Gordon,” says Nelson. “I just remember this triumvirate: Kathleen Hanna, Christina Kelly, Kim Gordon—people that were sort of gods of the cultural moment.

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