Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer, former writers from Sassy Magazine, are publishing a book called How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time. Apparently, the book will discuss Sassy’s rise and fall from 1988 to 1994.

I was in high school during the end of Sassy’s heyday–1991-1995. A friend introduced me to the magazine and I quickly became a subscriber. I loved it. For one thing, the magazine was spot-on when it came to pop culture. They had Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love on the cover, they had advice columns written by Billy Corgan, and they printed hilariously sarcastic interviews like this one with Tiffani Amber-Theissen from Saved By the Bell, which basically implies that she’s an idiot. An excerpt:

I ask if she [Tiffani] wants to attend a real, actual college. “Yeah. I’d like to major in English literature,” she says enthusiastically. I ask who her favorite English writer is. “Oh, Maya Angelou!” she bellows. “She is great,” I say, nodding my head, “but she’s from St. Louis.” Tiffani is silent. “I know, but I’m just trying to think of somebody,” she sniffs. I press on. She says she likes a lot of Shakespeare’s lesser-known works. Like what? “Like Hamlet,” she proclaims excitedly. Oh, I hadn’t heard of that one.

Beyond all that, Sassy was informative. One article I read explained how to drink alcohol. See, Sassy didn’t bother trying to convince kids not to drink. Instead, they explained how to drink responsibly by taking you through how you feel when you have a few alcoholic beverages and how to know when to stop. I didn’t drink at that age and I wasn’t going to start by reading an article–kids are not that dumb, people–but it was fascinating to be told the truth about how alcohol affects you.

Sassy was full of stuff like that. Another article went over the ins-and-outs of kissing, which was extremely useful at the time, believe me. And that’s why the magazine was so cool: It didn’t patronize or lie to me. And although somtimes I was annoyed by the insider stuff, like how the writers would interrupt each others’ columns and use their first names like I was supposed to know who they were, I can’t deny that I wanted to work for Sassy. In fact, I bet most Sassy readers wanted to work there. After all, what teenage girl wouldn’t want a job that requires living in New York and writing about pop culture and celebrities the way we all want to write about them–raving about the good stuff, snarking about the bad?

Most of all, Sassy prized individualism. They put girls in the magazine simply because they were interesting; girls of all different colors and shapes who had their own style and defined interests. The message was do your own thing, be strong, be interesting, use your brain and your talent and explore who you are as an individual. Lots of magazines try to give teenage girls that message, but Sassy actually communicated it to their audience. And that was inspirational.

Then the magazine was shut down. It’s no wonder, really, with articles like, “My Brother’s Gay. Big Whoop” and “One American President’s Lame Drug War.” It was sold to someone else and one day, I picked up an issue of Sassy and found that it was like any other teen magazine out there–generic, dull, and vapid. I quickly lost interest.

To this day, Sassy remains one of my all-time favorite magazines. And all those articles I read still pop up every now and then. The other day I was putting my hair up, and I realized it looked like a Sassy cover shot from a prom issue. On it, a girl’s hair was pulled up in a sloppy grungy way, and then covered with white rosebuds. As a 16-year-old, it seemed downright radical to have sloppy hair for prom, but I also thought it looked pretty cool. As an adult, looking at a similar style (sans rosebuds) in the mirror, I thought my hair looked really sloppy–but I also thought it looked pretty cool.