Bookworm

- by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer

Sassy was a teen magazine mainly for girls which existed from 1987 - 1994, when I was 14 - 21. It was different from the other US teen magazines and would discuss controversial subjects like sex, gays, suicide. Also it would talk to it's readers in their own language and meet them where they were, and introduce different values from just getting married, doing home decoration and being a good girl.

Being an outsider, I would have been pretty much the target group - except I didn't know it existed. I lived in a small Danish village and I have no idea if I could have come across a copy by chance in the neighborhood, probably not. Instead I listened to Bruce Springsteen and found a sort of inclusion in the surviving-day-to-day-while-the-real-world-crushes-any-illusions-you-ever-had attitude.

I heard about Sassy for the first time on Tavi's blog

http://www.thestylerookie.com/2010/04/are-you-tired-of-sassy-yet-answer-is-no.html

and I recently got around to buying the last copy of "How Sassy Changed my Life" on the UK Amazon. This is the story of a teenage girl magazine that hit the exact right spot at the right time for a lot of girls, in a way so they really feel it changed their lives, made them feel included instead of left out, gave them courage to go and do cool things and a self confidence that shaped their future. However it is also a story of these same teenage girl values clashing hard with the evil grown-up world called reality when the magazine had to shut down, after having a lot of trouble with advertisers and the general "family value" attitude in the US.

The book tells the story of Sassy with a lot of honesty about the magazine's good and bad sides and the people behind it, written by two now grown-up readers who loved Sassy and have later tried to understand what happened back then.

When reading this book I cannot help wondering if Sassy would have changed my life if I had come across it? I am not sure it would. I get this wonderful feeling of "girl power" and inspiration and that I would have enjoyed reading it and loved it far too much. The again, Sassy defined a new type of cool, but in the end it was still exclusive and spiteful to those who were not in the group. I wouldn't have been cool or interesting or punk enough. Also, in Denmark, we did not have the same level of taboo about some of the subjects which some US grown-ups found so controversial in Sassy - so our need was probably not so great.

So why do I feel that I missed out on something important?