Shortly before the birth of my first child nine years ago, while browsing the bookstore for mommy wisdom, I discovered Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year and fell in love with the author and the book. More than any parenting truisms the book might have contained, it was Lamott’s writing style—funny, self-deprecating, and brutally honest—that kept me reading. The big mommy insight I gleaned from Operating Instructions was that I wasn’t quite as neurotic as Anne, so my kid and I would probably be all right.
This is the magazine I’ve yearned for ever since I realized how shitty Mademoiselle and Seventeen made me feel. A strongly womanist/feminist magazine for women of color, it succeeds where all others have failed: combining fashion and lifestyle topics with serious sociopolitical analysis in an ethnically diverse setting with both integrity and ads. Two of the editors are former Sassy interns, and it shows in the little things like the record review rating system and more broadly in the ironic co-optation of old-school girl-mag themes.