How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time
by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer
Faber and Faber, 128 pp., $18
I admit trying one of the “at home” hair-dye recipes in Sassy one boring summer vacation circa 1992. The idea was to use Kool-Aid, which seemed nice and easy enough, until my pillowcase became stained and my mom yelled at me for an hour because it had attracted ants. Whatever! But in the early Nineties, for women and girls looking for an alternative to waxy, vanilla-scented teen mags, there was really only one choice.Not surprisingly, there hasn’t been a magazine quite like it since. With that in mind, freelance writers/obsessive fans Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer offer an oral history of the late teen mag, drawing from fans and the staff. There’s the drama and backstabbing, the resentment of Editor in Chief Jane Pratt at the magazine’s folding and revamped relaunching, the power struggles, and the faithful readership that developed around it all. Sassy‘s pro-choice, pro-safe-sex stance naturally made advertisers nervous and conservatives flummoxed, even as stories about masturbation, eating disorders, and feminism came to embody the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” era.
The authors talk with almost every person who had anything to do with the magazine, and we get a mental picture of the cultural island that was the female experience then. As journalist Ann Powers relates, “Sassy was to 1991 what Playboy was to its moment”: a gathering place for “15-year-old girls” and “28-year-old men.” Ah, who could forget when Kurt and Courtney appeared on the cover of the April 1992 issue or when Pavement was featured in a “Cute Band Alert”? Jesella and Meltzer give us instant nostalgia.
Like all things revolutionary and opinionated, it had to die young. (“Its singular voice was in many ways its downfall,” says some professor who knows about these things.) The “love letter” is literal here, but, thankfully, the gushing only goes on for a hundred pages or so. Magazines like Bitch, Bust, and Venus have spawned in the last decade, but they’ll never be Sassy. At last we have a timeline not just for a teen rag, but for a generational sisterhood. Great magazine or the greatest magazine? Sassy, my hair forgives you.
This article appears in July 6 • 2007.