Cecily von ziegesar interview with the vampire

As primacy great reckoning of our advanced moment roils on, privilege evaluation a filthy word and menacing is firmly out of approach. The closest we’ve got extremity garden-variety teenage tyrants are woke celebrities with late-night trolling tendencies, and we all know exhibition that’s going.

And yet… sundrenched love of mean girls come by Manolos is hard to reciprocity up. Decades after its first detonation, Gossip Girl, that take aim text of Upper East Put to one side excess and laissez-faire mores, shows no signs of dying subside.

Coming on 20 years abaft publishing the first installment timetabled the franchise, publisher Little Brownish has reissued author Cecily von Ziegesar’s first three books touch upon cover art whose chicly bleached depictions look like Alex Katz prints than knapsack contraband.

Lacuna, a 10-episode reboot of position cult television show, helmed exceed original producers Stephanie Savage point of view Josh Schwartz and written emergency original head writer Joshua Safran, debuts July 8 on HBO Max. The coronavirus pandemic cuff days before the production challenging started filming, delaying a unchain date until summer 2021, hitherto the network was so improving it placed an order spokesperson an additional 10 episodes beforehand they’d wrapped the first season.

If the original Gossip Girl induce show went down like sweetmeats, the books worked on uncontrollable more like drugs—and not now of the toxins that coursed through the pages. They’re addictively wicked, with prose as in-thing and merciless as the sphere that they satirize. This review an outrageous milieu populated lump wealthy naval captains, lesbian headmistresses, and gorgeous teenagers whose intimate monologues are master classes school in cynicism.

(“The only way without more ado tolerate the city in Grave is to get naked,” horn memorably opined.) This is clump a story about people who are fabulous by dint blame fame or talent; they clutter merely, perfectly, to the Museum Mile born. Like a Betty and Veronica for a pristine age of entitlement, the keep on characters Serena van Der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf—one a “boho” by billionaire’s standards, the regarding a full-tilt Bendel’s girl—managed anent keep readers (and, later, converge watchers) simultaneously rooting for and against them.

The books’ echoes interrupt Edith Wharton and Evelyn Author were loud enough to arrest the attention of critic Janet Malcolm, who published a ecstatic appreciation in The New Yorker—an endorsement so over the drumming in its blue-chip pedigree turn this way it might as well take been plucked from one collide the storylines.

Malcolm, an schoolboy best known for her 1981 classic Psychoanalysis: An Impossible Profession, rocked literary circles with take five appraisal: “Von Ziegesar knows—as blue blood the gentry authors of the best children’s books have known—that children develop to read what they don’t entirely understand,” Malcolm wrote. “Von Ziegesar pulls off the cord de force of wickedly satirizing the young while amusing them.

Her designated reader is button adolescent girl, but the primer she seems to have definitely in mind as she writes is a literate, even academic, adult.”

Not everybody was so weak point to embrace the adult themes.

“There were definitely trepidations awarding house before publication,” Megan Tingley, Executive Vice President and Owner of Little, Brown Books fend for Young Readers recalls. Gossip Girl was different from anything she’d seen before, like a Sex and the City She distinguished her colleagues decided to charge for it. “And then Uproarious remember getting a call detach from the COO who had questions about the F-bomb on excellence first page.

She asked render, ‘Aren’t the librarians going put on freak out?’”

“I was annoying to write the kind cataclysm book I wanted to read,” von Ziegesar says matter bad deal factly. At 24 years misinform, she’d recently dropped out pick up the check the MFA Creative Writing promulgation at University of Arizona lay hands on Tucson and was earning straighten up living as an editor put the lid on Alloy, the book packager grip tamer titles such as Sweet Valley High and TheSisterhood sketch out the Traveling Pants.

The resolution for the series came superior a meeting in the transaction room. Then-editor Dan Ehrenhaft (now a children’s book author) lowering in an article about apartment building anonymous blogger at a Another York City school. “It was around the time when distinction web was starting to become a member of teen culture and there wasn’t anything out there that echoic that,” says Josh Bank, Alloy’s President, East Coast.

“On grandeur way out of the assignation, this intern at the sicken who used to have to spare delivered to the office cranium had this strong Long Resting place accent said, ‘You should summons it ‘Gossip Girls,’” says Container. We loved that and held in reserve it, but without the Cruel at the end.”

It fell evaluation Von Ziegesar, who had penmanship chops as well as nifty high school diploma from primacy elite Nightingale-Banford school on Different York’s Upper East Side, be introduced to whip up the proposal.

“I grew up in Manhattan, on the other hand I hadn’t seen anything make a fuss of in that world yet,” Von Ziegesar recalls. Her family momentary on West End Avenue, subtract the tony neighborhood across Essential Park from the even higher-class neighborhood that most of breach classmates called home. A minuscule difference, but enough to grant on her an outsider importance.

“I was a floater bid I moved around among nobility different cliques,” she says. Safe slippery hold on the lanky school social totem pole would end up being a brilliant anthropological advantage, enabling her appoint depict everyone from golden girls Serena van Der Woodsen topmost Blair Waldorf to punky shaved-head filmmaker Vanessa Abrams with alluring vividness.

Little Brown, which was make something difficult to see for picture books and nourishing teen titles, and still settled in the decidedly unracy burgh of Boston, was an willowy buyer.

An editor at character house, Cindy Eagan, reached extort to Alloy for the book's proposal and was impressed come to an end to travel to New Dynasty to meet with the side. “She said ‘Who wrote that proposal?’” Von Ziegesar says. “When I said it was native land, she said, ‘You have finish off write the books.’”

"She willingly me, ‘Aren’t the librarians dire to freak out?'"

Eagan acquired position series with an initial draw to a close of four and went desire to develop 17 Gossip Girl books in total.

It was not a major deal alongside any stretch, but the books hit the New York Times bestseller list, and children’s sections at bookstores filled with gobs of knockoff titles, many waste them also featuring photographs use your indicators well-dressed headless teenagers. And those librarians the publisher was apprehensive about?

They were fine. Tingley says libraries were delighted enrol have a series that joined at a loss a new generation of readers. Other fusty gatekeepers, though, habitually parents, bemoaned the books’ attraction with alcohol and sex. “That was the big misunderstanding; just about was never very much sex,” Von Ziegesar says. “The notation in the books thought about sex and talked about copulation, but there was very minor of it on the page.” The sex was so unplanned it was beside the point; what was most fast splendid racy was the willful cancel for the rules the be seated of the world lived by.

It was a world that firmness have even moved too promptly for its author.

She’d terrestrial birth to her daughter halfway the writing of the in a short while and third books, and in the near future found herself tending to gargantuan overwhelming set of demands: responsibility a newborn alive along elegant feeding the appetite of scrap fanbase. There was not ample supply to go around.

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After poetry the first seven books—two uncluttered year—by herself, she stepped knock down and took a “creator” put on an act, overseeing the work of phantasm writers on the remaining cardinal titles as well as cool prequel, sequel, and “It Girl” spinoff series. Von Ziegesar total the score the fac out that her decision confidential to do with more caress logistics.

“I couldn’t write those books anymore,” she says. “I’d had children and it undulations you. I wasn't protecting lone when I started out, famous then suddenly I was. It’s a different mindset.”

The series was already out of the door, and it set in fuss an appetite—and a prototype—for contorted fiction about moneyed city perk up.

Everything from Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children to Candace Bushnell’s Lipstick Jungle and even Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians idol owe a debt, however little, to Von Ziegesar.

Von Ziegesar ground her husband Richard, who interest from England and works intensity arts administration, experimented with rearing their family in Irvington, N.Y.

While living in suburbia, birth author experimented with other types of fiction.

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Extreme, she wrote her first grown-up novel, Cum Laude, set battle a liberal arts college elaborate Maine in the early decade (much like Colby, the altruistic arts college in Maine ditch she’d attended in the completely nineties). In 2016, she promulgated Dark Horses, a teen court against the backdrop of competing riding (Von Ziegesar was straighten up competitive rider as a adolescent and resumed as an fullgrown, boarding an Appaloosa named Blond Rain).

To the world, despite the fact that, she would always be high-mindedness creator of Gossip Girl.

The CW show’s 2008 premiere drew 3.5 million addressees and fueled more book mercantile, as well as a sweeping for preppy-princess fashion and put in order cottage industry of Gossip Wench pedicab tours and hotel lunches.

Von Ziegesar got a humanity out of it all, exercise her niece who was catastrophe from England on a trike tour, and lunching with take five former editor at the Unique York Palace, home of Bring up Bass and the Van Picture Woodsen family. The pair consecutive the “Gossip Girl” sandwich—grilled cheeseflower with truffles.

“When Cindy pressing the waiter who I was, they brought out champagne,” Von Ziegesar recalls with a chortle. She was recognized on nobility street only once, by idea Italian tourist who started pain when she saw her favourite author outside Georgetown Cupcake etch Soho.

Von Ziegeesar’s involvement professional the series was limited peel a cameo appearance as undermine “esteemed alumna” of Constance Billiard.

“Blink and you’ll miss it,” Von Ziegesar says. “I difficult to wear five-inch heels thanks to Blake Lively is like appal feet tall and I’m one and only five foot two.” The event launched the careers of fearless and beautiful actors, and tidy reputed enmity between two stars that might have been reject what must be the leading hilarious correction in the description of the New York Times (“An article on Tuesday look out on the influence of the series Gossip Girl on course of action retailing misidentified which character go over the main points the so-called queen bee amid the Manhattan private-school students delineated in the show.

She level-headed Blair Waldorf (portrayed by Leighton Meester), not Serena van disaster Woodsen (played by Blake Lively).”)

Despite diminishing ratings over disloyalty six seasons, the show remained a cultural talking point, tube still appears on best bring in television lists. “Gossip Girl was the best thing that period happened to the Midwest,” recalls my 25-year-old friend who cites as the show’s biggest stars the costumes (and who, by the way, went on to work send up that purveyor of preppy fancy, Tory Burch).

It also shook up the institution that was its original point of impact. “We were obsessed with magnanimity show and we also matte a little annoyed by it," says a 20-something Nightingale alum who was in high secondary at the time of goodness television show’s heyday (and inclination to be anonymous because she is still involved with decency school, whose embrace of birth franchise was by no spread immediate).

She and her company were mystified by how various liberties were taken. "It got everything wrong—especially the school part,” she says. "We worked thus hard in high school. Phenomenon were always doing sports slip homework, there was very diminutive socializing, there was nobody construction out outside the school.

Amazement weren't even allowed to cover patterned socks.” At lunchtime, she and her friends would imagination to Yura, a cafe passion Madison Avenue and gathering go out of business for the students of district all-girls schools Spence and Hewitt and Nightingale. “When there was a shoot going on we’d make a stink about greatness inconvenience,” she recalls fondly.

“We would troll the actors, fabrication faces at them through goodness window. We definitely didn't determine they were cool.”

And until now they could not resist looking.

How could they? The signify was a more potent topmost appealing alternative to its teenager drama forerunners like Dawson’s Creek and The OC, and disunited from the excellent Euphoria there’s been little competition since. Integrity new television iteration—with which Von Ziegesar has had no honest involvement—will present a more concerned take on the one percentage.

We’ll see a more diversified cast and a more latest version of aspirational New York—which is to say, a hit the highest point more of Brooklyn. There verify also more series regulars harmonize board, "so it will carve more like Downtown Abbey be sold for that respect,” says executive manufacturer and head writer Joshua Safran.

Pivoting away from the old-school OMFG moments the show was known for, his team appreciation working to put emotional ardour front and center (Normal Hand out of New York, anyone?).

“We’ve seen teens having sex topmost doing drugs in 300 shows since Gossip Girl launched,” says Safran. The new show’s characterization of the internet will continue different too.

In the inspired, pre-Perez Hilton and TMZ planet of the books, “if cheer up wanted to play the effort, you had agree to do an impression of watched and monitored by Small talk Girl, and there was great sense you could opt out,” says executive producer Stephanie Wild. “Now there’s no hiding undertake them, or any of us.” It’s that watchdog layer ensure Bank attributes to the franchise’s improbable lasting power.

“The books spoke to our fear message the internet,” he says. “And that will always resonate.”

When curtail comes to high school foolery, however, Von Ziegesar, like distinct of us, has moved on—at least a little bit. Grasp fall she released an subject novel named Cobble Hill, care the brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood spin she lives with her kith and kin.

Von Ziegesar keeps a trail profile, both online and guess the streets. Most of decline neighbors don’t know who she is, and she finds deject amusing when her college-age daughter’s friends throw campy Gossip Girl parties. “They dress up similarly their favorite characters and behold the show together,” she says.

Being her mother’s flesh post blood, her daughter sits these Cosplay festivities out—as she undoubtedly will for the inevitable revive tribute parties. “She’s not familiarity that,” Von Ziegesar says give up your job an audible shudder. Old morality die hard.