Let's make this the "Squee about Sassy" open thread
How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time by Kara Jessella and Marisa Meltzer
A celebration of the magazine which influenced a generation of liberal, activist young women
The central thesis of How Sassy Changed My Life is that the one-of-a-kind teen magazine created a club of kindred spirits during its short 6-year tenure, and that it has had a lasting effect on a generation (or two) of American women. Authors Jesella and Meltzer write "Upon meeting a fellow Sassy fan, we feel like we understand something essential about that person: their life philosophy, what their politics might be like, what their artistic preferences are, what they were like in high school, what kind of person they wanted to grow up to be. (By contrast, we find non-fans of a certain age slightly suspect.)"
Since this title is about how Sassy changed our lives, it is necessary for me to reflect on my own Sassy readership. I picked it up for the first time at age eleven, when the magazine was just two years old. My best friend and I were immediate converts, and even created our own short-lived dozen-wide-circulation `zine in the Sassy tradition. I have all my Sassy back issues. When the magazine was sold to the owners of Teen magazine in 1994, the editorial staff was fired, and the name was repackaged as standard bubblegum fare, I never knew why my magazine died such a horrible death. I cancelled my subscription to the "Stepford Sassy" and every time I got a renewal notice, I would write an angry letter about my disgust with the new magazine (my boyfriend at the time could never understand why I had such passionate distaste for renewal notices).
Finally, the story of the rise and untimely death of Sassy is told, in this fine collection with chapters about the conception of the magazine, its rise, its relationship to the competitors, the lives of the staffers, the feminism of the publication, and its catastrophic fall from grace.