If you haven't heard of Rookie by now, I'm not sure you're doing the Internet right. The magazine launched at the beginning of creator Tavi Gevinson's sophomore year in high school, which also just so happened to be my sophomore year of high school. It's basically a virtual cool older sister, complete with riot grrrl fanfare, horoscopes, and no shortage of very excellent advice (they even answered one of my questions once and I screamed and showed it to my mom and still do every once in a while). Rookie is host to approximately a million rad contributors and editors, Amy Rose Spiegel being one of them. She's been with Rookie since day one, and her beauty advice column will forever have me calling her "ARS" in my head.
Amy is releasing a book this year and I am very excited about it. Action: A Book about Sex is set to come out this May, and you know I have that baby on pre-order. I called Amy up a few weeks ago to ask her about getting in the right headspace for writing Action, wearing false lashes, and watching Rookie take over the internet.
Tangential fact about Amy that I still consider very important: she did this video with Racked that I watch probably at least once a month so I can pretend that I also casually greet my cat with a film noir-voiced "Hey, dude" while roller skating around my apartment.
I was talking with someone the other day, and we were trying to describe what the Internet was like before people talked about feminism. We realized that the term for that is “pre-Rookie," and that the post-Rookie Internet is a place where feminism is discussed pretty openly. What has it been like to be part of something that has become that big?
Wow that’s, first and foremost, really cool that you guys think about it that way! I love Rookie. The best part of working with Rookie in terms of watching people talk about that is the conversations that happen among Rookie's teenage readers. Watching them talk about some of these topics, or just hearing them talk about their lives openly without trepidation, has been a really wonderful experience. I feel like I was so resistant to cop to being a woman in public and all when I was a teenager. I didn’t want to talk about feminism. I didn’t want to make my experiences gendered because I thought that would diminish me. I didn’t realize at the time that it didn’t have to be that way and that I didn’t have to obscure my gender in order to be taken seriously or make good work.
Yeah definitely. I feel that way a lot when I go to write a personal essay and I'm like, “Oh is this a lady thing to do? Should I ––“
You should do it!
Yeah! I mean, that’s the answer almost always, isn't it? You should never not do something because you're worried that involving some aspects of being a woman would make it less professional or less important. I think Rookie really created a space where that can happen.
And, you know, there are as many definitions of womanhood or femininity as there are women. That's what I think about when I ask, “Is this the female thing to do?” Because yeah, if I'm doing it then it is. If a woman is doing it, then yes, it is like the "woman" thing to do.
There is this quote from an interview that you did a while back that just, like, makes my heart sing: “I wanted to be writing and editing stuff that I thought should be in the world really hard.” I think that's what we all want to do. How do you do that? Like how do you make your way as a writer while still making sure that the stuff you make is something that you really really care about?
Be sure you’re writing things where, if you came across them, you would be fucking delighted. You would be like, Who wrote this? This is my brain. You know what feels good and you know when you're shying away from something in order to toe a party line or carry on a conversation about a topic that you think will get you traction. And you also know when you're doing things that feel like you are reaching down your own your own throat and putting your heart on the table after pulling it out of your mouth. I don’t think that’s how anatomy actually works, but we'll just go with it.
As for editing, you just have to surround yourself with people who you love and trust and think have really great ideas. And you have to tell them that. Show them that you want to grow something together.
I got some of my best writing done when I worked at a Coach store part-time and was just able to go there and do work that did not seed upon the part of my brain that I needed to write. I used all my other time — and oftentimes the job too because I was kind of a bad employee — to work on my own thing. With writing jobs, I think that it's good to woodshed at different places. It could be a little bit, like, soul vacuuming up to do, but people do it. I've worked at many different places doing many different things, writing listicles being one of them. That was horrible, but that was also good because it incited me to really go after the things I did want to be doing. And I learned how to use the places that were giving me a platform to write things that I really did care about. Wherever you are, if someone is giving you a leg up or giving you a place to publish, your voice is going to come through if you love it. Even when I was at BuzzFeed writing things like "Reasons Why Fake Eyelashes Are The Best Thing In The World." There is a part of me that does believe that — a very big part — and you can put your writing in those things.
I actually wanted to ask you about eyelashes.
YES.
I can remember when Rookie first started and seeing you and just being like, 'the eyelashes.' They're amazing. How do you do it? How many sets do you use?
Oh my gosh, thank you for this question. I realized the other day that, after my 25th birthday, I'll have been wearing fake eyelashes every day for nearly a decade. I started wearing them when I was 16. I don't remember what gave me the idea. I think I just saw them in the drugstore and thought, Yeah, my eye lashes are more or less invisible and I would like to change that and look like some kind of Italian motorcycle sex goddess instead. It was difficult for me at first because I was like, "This is really complicated. I can’t." But then I stopped telling myself that and just tweezed eyelashes onto my eye, which is not that complex a maneuver. It started coming more naturally. I think everyone should try it out.
I've never worn false lashes but I'm pumped now. I feel inspired.
I wanted to talk about your new book and about that process. Writing can be pretty lonely, especially with a long-term project like a book. How do you get out of your head when so much of your job is living inside of it?
You know what? I don’t recommend always getting out of your head when you're working on something long, like a book or an essay or a short story or a novel. I think that you have to go really far inside yourself and really just cultivate and grow the most idiosyncratic parts of you and see where they come out. I really need to be completely alone when I'm writing. To the point that, for a part of this book — and this is going to sound really indulgent because it is — I would go to different motels and I would check in for a night or two because I couldn't even be in my apartment. I needed nothing around me but me. And you get a little antsy. You get a little impossible to be around other people, but that's OK. I think that you should go really deeply and seriously into what your brain does when it is all by itself when you're writing. That's what I do.
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Image credit: Racked
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