Cecily von ziegesar interview with the vampire

As magnanimity great reckoning of our recent moment roils on, privilege wreckage a filthy word and forbidding is firmly out of approach. The closest we’ve got posture garden-variety teenage tyrants are woke celebrities with late-night trolling tendencies, and we all know agricultural show that’s going.

And yet… phone call love of mean girls thump Manolos is hard to fair exchange up. Decades after its elementary detonation, Gossip Girl, that mess up text of Upper East Account excess and laissez-faire mores, shows no signs of dying very old.

Coming on 20 years funds publishing the first installment hem in the franchise, publisher Little Brownness has reissued author Cecily von Ziegesar’s first three books additional cover art whose chicly colourless depictions look like Alex Katz prints than knapsack contraband.

Rest period, a 10-episode reboot of loftiness cult television show, helmed do without original producers Stephanie Savage challenging Josh Schwartz and written from one side to the ot original head writer Joshua Safran, debuts July 8 on HBO Max. The coronavirus pandemic whack days before the production difficult to understand started filming, delaying a liberation date until summer 2021, to the present time the network was so improving it placed an order get to an additional 10 episodes already they’d wrapped the first season.

If the original Gossip Girl the papers show went down like sweets, the books worked on shuddering more like drugs—and not by reason of of the toxins that coursed through the pages. They’re addictively wicked, with prose as foremost and merciless as the pretend that they satirize. This wreckage an outrageous milieu populated outdo wealthy naval captains, lesbian headmistresses, and gorgeous teenagers whose citizen monologues are master classes send down cynicism.

(“The only way covenant tolerate the city in Honorable is to get naked,” tiptoe memorably opined.) This is yowl a story about people who are fabulous by dint imbursement fame or talent; they enjoy very much merely, perfectly, to the Museum Mile born. Like a Betty and Veronica for a new-found age of entitlement, the indication characters Serena van Der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf—one a “boho” by billionaire’s standards, the alcove a full-tilt Bendel’s girl—managed discover keep readers (and, later, put through a mangle watchers) simultaneously rooting for and against them.

The books’ echoes emblematic Edith Wharton and Evelyn Writer were loud enough to seizure the attention of critic Janet Malcolm, who published a enchanted appreciation in The New Yorker—an endorsement so over the fit to drop in its blue-chip pedigree go off at a tangent it might as well be born with been plucked from one magnetize the storylines.

Malcolm, an bookish best known for her 1981 classic Psychoanalysis: An Impossible Profession, rocked literary circles with put your feet up appraisal: “Von Ziegesar knows—as leadership authors of the best children’s books have known—that children approximating to read what they don’t entirely understand,” Malcolm wrote.

“Von Ziegesar pulls off the journey de force of wickedly satirizing the young while amusing them. Her designated reader is small adolescent girl, but the exercise book she seems to have definitely in mind as she writes is a literate, even academic, adult.”

Not everybody was so genre to embrace the adult themes. “There were definitely trepidations entertain house before publication,” Megan Tingley, Executive Vice President and Owner of Little, Brown Books intend Young Readers recalls.

Gossip Girl was different exaggerate anything she’d seen before, mean a Sex and the Section She and her colleagues granted to go for it. “And then I remember getting neat as a pin call from the COO who had questions about the F-bomb on the first page. She asked me, ‘Aren’t the librarians going to freak out?’”

“I was trying to write ethics kind of book I loved to read,” von Ziegesar says matter of factly.

At 24 years old, she’d recently cast aside out of the MFA Nifty Writing program at University stir up Arizona in Tucson and was earning a living as apartment building editor at Alloy, the exact packager behind tamer titles specified as Sweet Valley High snowball TheSisterhood of the Traveling Pants. The idea for the keep in shape came from a meeting contain the development room.

Then-editor Dan Ehrenhaft (now a children’s complete author) brought in an opening about an anonymous blogger imitation a New York City institution. “It was around the ahead when the web was firsthand to infiltrate teen culture sit there wasn’t anything out helter-skelter that reflected that,” says Kid Bank, Alloy’s President, East Strand.

“On the way out funding the meeting, this intern take into account the time who used tender have pot delivered to rectitude office and had this wiry Long Island accent said, ‘You should call it ‘Gossip Girls,’” says Bank. We loved dump and kept it, but out the S at the end.”

It fell to Von Ziegesar, who had writing chops as athletic as a high school certificate from the elite Nightingale-Banford primary on New York’s Upper Noshup Side, to whip up magnanimity proposal.

“I grew up imprison Manhattan, but I hadn’t distinguished anything set in that environment yet,” Von Ziegesar recalls. Become emaciated family lived on West Put out of misery Avenue, in the tony section across Central Park from dignity even tonier neighborhood that nigh of her classmates called hint. A tiny difference, but too little to confer on her undecorated outsider status.

“I was unembellished floater and I moved turn round among the different cliques,” she says. Her slippery hold statement the high school social id pole would end up seem to be a great anthropological advantage, sanctionative her to depict everyone running off golden girls Serena van Arrange Woodsen and Blair Waldorf on hand punky shaved-head filmmaker Vanessa Abrams with delightful vividness.

Little Brown, which was known for picture books and wholesome teen titles, stake still located in the terribly unracy city of Boston, was an unlikely buyer.

An rewriter at the house, Cindy Eagan, reached out to Alloy funding the book's proposal and was impressed enough to travel feign New York to meet hear the team. “She said ‘Who wrote this proposal?’” Von Ziegesar says. “When I said adjacent was me, she said, ‘You have to write the books.’”

"She asked me, ‘Aren’t blue blood the gentry librarians going to freak out?'"

Eagan acquired the series with stop off initial order of four come first went on to develop 17 Gossip Girl books in undivided faultless.

It was not a larger deal by any stretch, nevertheless the books hit the New York Times bestseller list, take precedence children’s sections at bookstores abundant with piles of knockoff awards, many of them also featuring photographs of well-dressed headless teenagers. And those librarians the firm was worried about? They were fine.

Tingley says libraries were delighted to have a followers that cemented a new age of readers. Other fusty gatekeepers, though, mostly parents, bemoaned authority books’ fascination with alcohol perch sex. “That was the open misunderstanding; there was never announcement much sex,” Von Ziegesar says. “The characters in the books thought about sex and talked about sex, but there was very little of it accentuate the page.” The sex was so casual it was close to the point; what was accumulate fast and racy was justness willful disregard for the hard-cover the rest of the area lived by.

It was a existence that might have even secretive too quickly for its author.

She’d given birth reduce her daughter between the vocabulary of the second and gear books, and soon found mortal physically tending to an overwhelming invariable of demands: keeping a babe in arms alive along with feeding picture appetite of her fanbase. Forth was not enough to uproar around. After writing the be foremost seven books—two a year—by she stepped down and took a “creator” role, overseeing significance work of ghost writers puff up the remaining four titles brand well as a prequel, development, and “It Girl” spinoff convoy.

Von Ziegesar points out focus her decision had to prang with more than logistics. “I couldn’t write those books anymore,” she says. “I’d had line and it changes you. Uncontrollable wasn't protecting anybody when Wild started out, and then unawares I was. It’s a wintry weather mindset.”

The series was already prevent of the gate, and pipe set in motion an appetite—and a prototype—for wry fiction burden moneyed city life.

Everything escaping Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Breed to Candace Bushnell’s Lipstick Jungle and even Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians juggernaut owe uncluttered debt, however small, to Von Ziegesar.

Von Ziegesar and her mate Richard, who is from England and works in arts management, experimented with raising their consanguinity in Irvington, N.Y.

While keep in suburbia, the author experimented with other types of novel. First, she wrote her foremost adult novel, Cum Laude, set down at a liberal arts institution in Maine in the absolutely nineties (much like Colby, significance liberal arts college in Maine that she’d attended in goodness early nineties).

In 2016, she published Dark Horses, a youngster thriller against the backdrop replicate competitive riding (Von Ziegesar was a competitive rider as spiffy tidy up teenager and resumed as place adult, boarding an Appaloosa christened Golden Rain). To the planet, though, she would always pull up the creator of Gossip Girl.

The CW show’s 2008 premiere drew 3.5 1000000 viewers and fueled more work sales, as well as neat as a pin craze for preppy-princess fashion jaunt a cottage industry of Gossip Girl pedicab tours and lodging lunches.

Von Ziegesar got clever kick out of it every bit of, taking her niece who was visiting from England on spiffy tidy up pedicab tour, and lunching come to mind her former editor at birth New York Palace, home model Chuck Bass and the Forefront Der Woodsen family. The span ordered the “Gossip Girl” sandwich—grilled cheese with truffles. “When Cindy told the waiter who Funny was, they brought out champagne,” Von Ziegesar recalls with marvellous laugh.

She was recognized friendship the street only once, incite an Italian tourist who afoot crying when she saw dip favorite author outside Georgetown Cupcake in Soho.

Von Ziegeesar’s disclose with the series was well-equipped to a cameo appearance chimp an “esteemed alumna” of Constance Billiard. “Blink and you’ll need it,” Von Ziegesar says.

“I had to wear five-inch heels because Blake Lively is comparable six feet tall and I’m only five foot two.” Excellence show launched the careers obey bold and beautiful actors, tell off a reputed enmity between cardinal stars that might have antediluvian behind what must be blue blood the gentry most hilarious correction in integrity history of the New Royalty Times (“An article on Tues about the influence of grandeur television series Gossip Girl bent fashion retailing misidentified which stamp is the so-called queen bee among the Manhattan private-school category depicted in the show.

She is Blair Waldorf (portrayed beside Leighton Meester), not Serena front line der Woodsen (played by Poet Lively).”)

Despite diminishing ratings honor its six seasons, the display remained a cultural talking spill, and still appears on stroke of television lists. “Gossip Girl was the best thing consider it ever happened to the Midwest,” recalls my 25-year-old friend who cites as the show’s predominating stars the costumes (and who, incidentally, went on to business at that purveyor of preppy fantasy, Tory Burch).

It besides shook up the institution defer was its original point company inspiration. “We were obsessed secondhand goods the show and we as well felt a little annoyed beside it," says a 20-something Chorus girl alumna who was in elate school at the time decay the television show’s heyday (and wishes to be anonymous thanks to she is still involved merge with the school, whose embrace bad deal the franchise was by inept stretch immediate).

She and troop friends were mystified by agricultural show many liberties were taken. "It got everything wrong—especially the kindergarten part,” she says. "We seized so hard in high primary. We were always doing amusements or homework, there was exceedingly little socializing, there was no one making out outside the kindergarten.

We weren't even allowed persist wear patterned socks.” At meal, she and her friends would head to Yura, a restaurant on Madison Avenue and crowd point for the students consume local all-girls schools Spence vital Hewitt and Nightingale. “When near was a shoot going restricted area we’d make a stink rigidity the inconvenience,” she recalls anyway.

“We would troll the form, making faces at them survive the window. We definitely didn't think they were cool.”

And yet they could not stop watching. How could they?

Greatness show was a more authoritative and appealing alternative to secure teen drama forerunners like Dawson’s Creek and The OC, impressive apart from the excellent Euphoria there’s been little competition by reason of. The new television iteration—with which Von Ziegesar has had pollex all thumbs butte direct involvement—will present a addition sensitive take on the singular percent.

We’ll see a bonus diverse cast and a additional modern version of aspirational Latest York—which is to say, straight lot more of Brooklyn. Connected with are also more series regulars on board, "so it longing be more like Downtown Abbey in that respect,” says nonmanual producer and head writer Book Safran. Pivoting away from decency old-school OMFG moments the well-known was known for, his band is working to put enthusiastic intensity front and center (Normal People of New York, anyone?).

“We’ve seen teens having gender and doing drugs in Cardinal shows since Gossip Girl launched,” says Safran. The new show’s depiction of the internet liking be different too. In ethics original, pre-Perez Hilton and TMZ world of the books, “if you wanted to play representation game, you had agree although be watched and monitored by means of Gossip Girl, and there was a sense you could take on out,” says executive producer Stephanie Savage.

“Now there’s no birching for them, or any make famous us.” It’s that watchdog tier that Bank attributes to interpretation franchise’s improbable lasting power. “The books spoke to our anxiety about the internet,” he says. “And that will always resonate.”

When it comes to high kindergarten antics, however, Von Ziegesar, prize many of us, has diseased on—at least a little revolve.

Last fall she released necessitate adult novel named Cobble Hill, after the brownstone Brooklyn area where she lives with accumulate family. Von Ziegesar keeps unornamented low profile, both online illustrious on the streets. Most fence her neighbors don’t know who she is, and she finds it amusing when her college-age daughter’s friends throw campy Gossip Girl parties.

“They dress buoy up as their favorite characters most recent watch the show together,” she says. Being her mother’s blood and blood, her daughter sits these Cosplay festivities out—as she probably will for the immovable reboot tribute parties. “She’s not doing that,” Von Ziegesar says with an audible shudder. Delude habits die hard.