May 25th, 2012 
Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan – aka The Fug Girls – are the brains behind the hilarious, hilarious celebrity fashion website Go Fug Yourself. They’re also the brains behind the new YA book Messy, which is a follow-up to their first book, Spoiled. Spoiled followed Molly Dix as she left her old life in Indiana to move in with her celebrity father and his – um – challenging actress daughter, Brooke Berlin. Messy, however, is all about Molly’s best friend, Max McCormack, an aspiring writer and outsider at her very chic LA private school, who finds herself ghost-writing Brooke’s escapades via blog. There’s also Max’s brother Teddy – who also happens to be Molly’s boyfriend – and Max’s longtime crush Jake Donovan, and his infomercial-starring girlfriend Jennifer Parker, and Brooke’s co-star Brady Swift, who is playing Ned to Brooke’s Nancy in an upcoming Nancy Drew remake. Oh, and Brooke’s genius best friend Arugula, heir to a lettuce empire.
Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan (Photo Credit: Kim Fox)
Did you get all that? It’s very high school, very angsty. It’s so sharply written and witty – much more so than any Young Adult (YA) book I’ve read in a long time. Much like Go Fug Yourself itself. Except with high school. And angst.
Anyway, so I had the opportunity to ask Heather and Jessica some questions about Messy. Heather and Jessica, it may be said, are just as funny via e-mail as they are on GFY. And just as nice. And they didn’t say a single word about my outfit. Possibly because they couldn’t see me.
Max McCormack is a writer who feels like a fish out of water in LA, who ends up writing a sharp-tongued, witty, acerbic blog with observations about the celebrity lifestyle. You two are also writers who live in LA…and write a sharp-tongued, witty, acerbic blog about the celebrity lifestyle. So I have to ask…did you draw on anything from your own lives in writing Messy?
HEATHER: Surprisingly not much from my life in L.A. — or at least not in an obvious sense; both Spoiled and Messy are very much drawn from the things we’ve seen and heard just from living in this town, but in terms of my personal experience as a blogger, not so much. We sensed there was an appetite for including a blog akin to Go Fug Yourself in one of our writings, and this felt like a pretty organic way to do it. Spoiled was about a geographic outsider being dropped into the middle of this rare universe; Messy is about someone who is an emotional outsider. Both of them are drawn outside their comfort zones in different ways. Much of that stuff comes from feelings we’ve had through our lives — everyone’s felt like an outsider at one time or another. Are you on the outside looking in, or are you on the inside trying to get out? Are you naturally different and trying to fit in, or are you trying to fit in by making yourself different? That sort of stuff. We’d rather, I think, be emotionally autobiographical than anything else.
JESSICA: Yeah, it’s not really actually based on anything we’ve experienced as bloggers — although I can see why it begs that question. I do think that Max’s writers block, and her concerns that she’s actually a fraud, or whatever, IS a very common feeling for writers of all stripes, though.
Amazon.com
Max ALSO feels like a fish out of water at her high school, which…didn’t we all. But she tries her best to appease her headmistress-mother by being a part of the committee organizing Colby-Randall’s carnival. What high school activities did each of you do that you really loved? Or really hated? Or both?
HEATHER: I was big into drama and music and singing at first. Unfortunately, when I was about to start grade ten, I moved to a school in Calgary that was very small and didn’t have much in the way of any of that, but I did what I could. Also, I’m such an alto that I’m practically a bass, which doesn’t help. Before I moved I was really into the theater stuff; after, where there was no drama club, I moved into journalism — my friend co-founded a new school newspaper and I ended up helping her run that. I also played field hockey one year. Man, I wish I could go back and do that again. I’d be so much better at it now. But wearing a little skirt and shin guards and cleats and a mouthguard was fun. I remember sometimes I’d melt it down and reform it just for kicks because it felt cool.
JESSICA: I was, like Brooke Berlin herself, the co-president of my drama club in high school. I really, really loved theater. I also wrote for the literary journal, which was fun. And at my high school, the senior class traditionally wrote and performed an SNL-like skit show at the assembly right before Christmas break, which I wrote along with a friend. We opened with a 90210 skit — obviously, because it was 1993 — in which I played Dylan McKay. That was an extremely fun project. I don’t recall really hating anything other than math class.
I’m SOOOO intrigued by Go Fug Yourself, not just because it’s hilarious and amazing but also because I’m always curious about how blogs get to be so big. (Just to let you know, I may or may not have discovered GFY while sitting behind a classmate in grad school in 2006…she checked it religiously when she really should have been doing other things, and now so do I.) How did GFY come about? How did it take off so much?
HEATHER: First of all, I love that story. That’s awesome. As for the blog’s origin, it came out of an inside joke, basically. We were wandering around the mall shopping and drinking Diet Coke or whatever, and we noticed all these awful movie posters targeted at tweens — horrible styling, girls who looked cross-eyed when they clearly actually were not, et cetera. And we couldn’t figure out why that was supposed to be enticing. This morphed into a joke about fugly being the new pretty, and THAT morphed into a riff on horrible Hollywood/red carpet styling. And here we are! I wish we had an intelligent theory for why it took off; I think a lot of it is that we came up right when blogs were exploding, and so there were fewer of us, and more of them were compartmentalized. Like, NOW, a lot of them do gossip and fashion and lifestyle all rolled together, but back then, it was gossip or fashion or lifestyle. And we slipped right in there with fashion, doing something that not that many other people were doing as specifically as we did. Also, having a voice that was distinct helped.
JESSICA: We really never anticipated ANY of this. We just wanted to amuse ourselves, and our friends, and so much of it was being in the right place at the right time, and getting some link love from larger publications, like Defamer (when it existed).
Do your love interests tend to be Bradys or Jakes? (Or Teddys?)
HEATHER: I think everyone has had a few of each, right? I suspect my husband is a mix of the best parts of all of them: smart, silly, funny, self-deprecating, cute, talented, always willing to see the best in people (which is how I view Jake; he’s a doof, and he’s not the sharpest tool, but he seems to find good in everyone somehow, even Jennifer. He gets a kick out of life).
JESSICA: I think Teddy is my favorite of the fictional love interests in our books — and the one I would date myself, if I were fictional. My actual love interests generally lend themselves more to a tragicomedy than a young adult novel.
Is there going to be a third book? I need more Arugula.
HEATHER: From your lips! Right now there aren’t plans, but if there’s demand, we’d certainly love to supply.
(Messy will be released on June 5, and is currently available for pre-order on Amazon. Oh, and check out Spoiled, too. And, you know. Add GFY to your reader. You’ll be glad you did.)
