How Sassy Changed My Life A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time

introduction "Why would you write a book about a teen magazine?" We've lost count of how many times we've been asked some version of that question since this project began. Luckily, the floods of emails we got from people saying they couldn't wait until its publication and asking how they could help served as an excellent emotional buffer from the blank stares. Smart, cool women who grew up reading and loving Sassy offered to be interviewed; staff members and interns assured us they would let us know what really went on in the magazine's offices; celebrities who had special relationships with the publicationlike Spike Jonze and Michael Stipewanted to pay their respects. Because more than a decade after the publication's untimely and much-lamented demise, Sassy matters as much as it did when it was in print. Though Sassy was never able to match the advertising or circulation of the other teen magazine giants of its day, the magazine more than made up for this lack in terms of reader devotion. Even now, it continues to incite cultlike dedication among its fans. Copies on eBay inspire heated bidding wars. ("Fifteen years later, a weird kind of muscle memory takes over when I finally get my vintage Sassy," said Rebecca L. Fox in a paper called "Sassy All Over Again" for NYU journalism school. "To my surprise, I read Sassy now the same way I read it in my teensvoraciously.") Magazines feature sentimental stories mourning it: "We Still Love Sassy" was the bittersweet title of an article that ran in The New York Review of Magazines. On the Internet, message boards and open love letters to the Sassy staff abound: "You gave us thirteen-year-old girls stuck in rural Wisconsin a glimmer of hope, a pinky-swear promise that the world could be a funny, smart, and even sexy place," wrote one Harvard student in the Crimson. "I loved Sassy so much, and needed it so much, and it was there for me," a Swarthmore student said on her Web site. A 1997 article in Spin magazine's Girl Issue noted: "When the best teen magazine ever, Sassy, was sold to the owners of Teen magazine in 1994and the entire New Yorkbased staff was put out to pasturereaders went into revolt. Teen magazine exemplified everything that was wrong with America's youth, and Sassy was its antith-esis. Distraught teenagers tracked down staff members at home, calling with a simple question: Why?" "Why?" is just one of the questions that this book will answer. How Sassy Changed My Life is the inside story of how and why the magazine came to be, what happened during its six short years of life, and the real reasons behind its demise. More important, it is a tribute to a monumentally significant cultural artifact that has been given short shrift. Understanding Sassy's importance begins with a chronicle of the early days of the magazine and how it distinguished itself. Sassy's story is intricately tied to the societal transformations that occurred in the late eighties and early nineties. As teen-pregnancy rates soared, AIDS became a very real threat, and debates over what kids should be taught about sex in school raged, the magazine heralded a new way of thinking about girls and sexuality; we will discuss how this led to a battle with the religious rightthen just becoming a force to be reckoned withthat almost put the magazine out of business. To best explain the scope of Sassy's impact, and the major themes that characterized the magazine's middle years, it's key to bearJesella, Kara is the author of 'How Sassy Changed My Life A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time', published 2007 under ISBN 9780571211852 and ISBN 0571211852.