Sassy was not just a book for girls, ya know

We turn now to a quirky piece in the Huffington Post, where Toronto writer Mike Attenborough reviews a book about the late Sassy Magazine (folded in 1996) and talks about how he used to read it avidly when he was an editor at the Gazette, the student newspaper of the University of Western Ontario. (Of course there was the obligatory shot about Mike writing from his "igloo" in Canada!)

The book in question is How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter To The Greatest Teen Magazine Of All Time by Kara Jesella and Marissa Meltzer. (See earlier item about this book.)

There was a group of us nerdy, covetous, detail-oriented music addicts at the school paper ... who would pass around the office copy every month. We — me, anyway — were pretty much hooked by the time the rest of the office figured out that Canadian acts like Sloan and Eric's Trip...got more space in Sassy than they did in most Canadian publications.

Attenborough points out that the magazine had no business being successful and, ultimately, wasn't.

It's instructive from a publishing trade point of view, too, how individual pieces of the magazine melted down under the pressure of its success: Editor in Chief Jane Pratt getting caught up in not one but two directionless TV shows; the revolt of the riot grrrl movement against the magazine that had helped give it exposure — for that very reason; how the writers, having became characters in each issue, were expected to keep churning out more and more exaggerated and outsized print versions of themselves. The line between sly, in-crowd reference and self-aggrandizement can be blurry indeed; so, too, can the line between way-cool outsider and too-cool insider. It didn't stand a chance.