Amy Rossi
Amy Rossi received her MFA from Louisiana State University, and she lives in North Carolina, by way of Massachusetts, with her partner and two dogs. The Cover Girl is her first novel.
My Q&A with the author:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Amy Rossi's website.
The Cover Girl is about just that: the girl on the cover of albums and magazines. The girl who exists in the context of an ad and is a projection of everyone who sees her – and the woman she becomes. It’s the story of an aging model, Birdie Rhodes, who looks back on her relationships with the two people that defined her life: the rock star who made himself her legal guardian after she posed for his album cover at age 15 and her legendary former agent.
This is the third title for the book; it went on submission under Look Away – a nod to the Iggy Pop song about his role in the 70s baby groupie era and the amount of silence that made situations like Birdie’s possible – and it was announced under another. We finally decided on The Cover Girl to give readers that immediate hint that they were getting a book that deals with the modeling industry.
What’s in a name?
When I first started writing, the main character’s name was Libbie, short for Olivia, which I changed to Elizabeth, because it suited her New England WASP background better. The nickname Birdie also did more work in that sense – hinting at that kind of old money tendency toward nicknames that don’t have an obvious root in the given name. Birdie also connotes a more delicate figure, suitable for a tall, thin model.
In the book, 56-year-old Elizabeth has shed young Birdie; it’s easier for her that way. References to her old name help prompt her reckoning – people from her past look at her and still see the girl she has tried to rid herself of, forcing her to realize she cannot keep two halves of her life separate and live wholly.
The rock star who upends Birdie’s life, however, remains nameless. This was my way of keeping the book firmly focused on her. Too often, the Birdies of the world are only considered in relation to the men who harmed them. Those men do not want for additional attention. It doesn’t matter who he is; it matters what he did. By not naming the rock star, I hoped to make it more possible for Birdie, and for readers, to name everything else that happens.
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?
Not surprised in the least, and in fact, she’d be thrilled. As a teenager, I was obsessed with classic rock and with all the women I saw on Behind the Music who had been girls with the band, girls whose stories were always the liner notes to someone else’s. I had it in my mind early on that I was going to write about this one day. I also really wanted to be an actress and had gone to weekend classes at a modeling school, so that I ended up writing about these things wouldn’t be a surprise either.
However, as a teenager, I think I did romanticize all those songs about girls my age, so I mightnot have anticipated my older self wanting to see more accountability in that space.
Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?
The beginning is definitely harder for me. It’s the entry point, the tone-setter, and it has to be exactly right. It’s also the part that naturally gets fiddled with and overthought the most because it’s the part that has been in existence the longest. At some point in drafting, I knew what the ending of The Cover Girl would be, and when I got there, my writing speed probably tripled. Once I could see that end in sight, I got out of the way and let the story do its thing.
What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
Music, for sure. It’s the most common starting point for me. But as someone who came of age at the turn of the millennium, I’m also really influenced by commercialized nostalgia, pop culture, and misremembered or misjudged women. My early teen years were marked by the Clinton impeachment and the explosion and pillorying of pop princesses like Britney Spears. I think that definitely shaped what I am most interested in writing about.
Maybe all of this is to say that I’m deeply influenced by early 2000s VH1: all the rock docs and the construction of a story of the 70s and 80s on the Sunset Strip and the pulling together of a particular narrative of how things were then based on what we choose to bring forward from the past now – and who gets to do the telling.
Writers Read: Amy Rossi.
--Marshal Zeringue