#123: XOJANE THROWBACK / I'M A LONELY, INSECURE WRECK WITH REALLY GOOD SKIN

Oh, young Cat.

Hi guys! Happy Saturday! You know, every time I post one of these xoJane throwbacks I am reminded of why I started this paywalled column in the first place.

Maybe six years ago, a few years after MURDER came out, I was approached by a editor at a publishing house eager to publish all of my old xoJane columns as a book, the way Candace Bushnell/Carrie Bradshaw eventually published Sex and the City as a book. This was obviously a fucking exciting idea to me, and 90% of the work was done already. All we had to do was get permission from the media company who at that time owned the intellectual property. Say Media had sold xoJane to Time, Inc., then Time Inc. had been acquired Meredith Corp, publisher of Martha Stewart Living, Food & Wine, and Every Day With Rachel Ray. The editor, my agent, and I formally approached Meredith Corp, which in 2018 was bringing in over $800 million a year, for permission. And Meredith Corp. said...

Nah.

Just no. We don't give you permission to re-publish those old columns that we care nothing about. STILL HILARIOUS.

Anyway. The book editor was the most surprised; she had been so excited about the project. I think I was the least shocked, because I'm a real, toiling, veteran writer, and I know we get treated like shit by corporations all of the time. (That's why platforms like Patreon and Substack are so life-changing for creatives. Thank you for being here.)

Anyway, eventually I was like, fuck these people, I'm going to publish these columns somewhere, and that's when I started the Patreon (now also a Substack). Shout out to that editor! I think of her because every time I do publish an xoJane throwback, I take it from the 100-plus page Word document of most of my old columns she'd personally compiled as my manuscript, then sent me. It doesn't have photos in it, so I never have the original ones from the stories, since my xoJane columns are no longer online.

In this throwback, below, I'm glad I don't have the old photos. As I noted in 2011, peel-off charcoal masks "look a tad, uh, 'Blackface.'"

Read on!