Buckle up. Letters to the editor are a wild ride.
Alternative title: How dare I mention peaches, what an arse I am.
People often ask me if I miss editing magazines. There was lots to love - and I’ve written fondly about plenty of it, like the delightful insanity of the international fashion shows. There’s no denying there are worse ways to make a living and I’d never say never to doing it again. But at the same time, I did it for decades so I can’t say I sit around pining for my past life either.
One thing I will always miss though, is communicating with readers. I never grew tired of seeing a magazine I’d edited appear on the newsstands and then just waiting for a response. Which articles would get people talking? Which ones compelled them to write/tweet in their droves to tell you they loved it or hated it? And which ones, worst of all, didn’t move one person to a reaction?
I read and replied to as many readers’ messages as I could. I used to get an extra kick out of replying to a reader’s boring admin complaint - a subscription copy that hadn’t arrived, or a magazine discovered to be missing its middle. Because it used to really throw people that the editor would get hands on with sorting that stuff out. It was also quite fun when someone had been spectacularly rude to me, (eg ‘Your make-up in your photo is horrible.’). I’d keep it sweet and gracious, and generally they’d be very sweet and apologetic and most of all shocked to get a reply. Much like the column I wrote about employees last week, sometimes readers dash these thoughts off without really believing it will be read by an actual human being.
The editor’s inbox is the all-you-can-eat buffet of human nature.
People can be absolutely divine. Like the nurse who, in the peak hell of the Covid pandemic, told me she was using her 2am break to write to me and the team and tell me how much joy that You magazine gave her when she needed it most. She said that people creating distracting entertainment were just as important as healthcare workers and, while I can’t agree with that, it was such a sweet sentiment that I welled up reading it.
People can break your heart and absolutely stun you with the power of magazines. Like the young girl, 15, who wrote to me at Sugar, to tell me that she had not realised until she read our report on incest - a report that one prominent advertiser had asked us not to publish - that what was happening to her in her own home was not normal.
People can be disgusting. Like the person who got in touch with me to call me a ‘stupid bitch’ when I wrote a tribute to the late Caroline Flack - a woman I’d gotten to know both through work and personally over the years. There was a whole lot more poison that I won’t repeat. Unsurprisingly, this person’s bravado did not extend to giving me any identifying details to reply, which is a shame because I’d have enjoyed unleashing hell.
Episodes like that make me wonder if free speech is overrated.
But in my long magazine career, do you know which letters are the ones that really stick in my head and give me the greatest joy of all? The super incredibly petty ones. There’s no greater delight for me than imagining someone actually taking the time to write to you about some imagined slight, some furious offence taken at something mystifying.
Here’s a rundown of my absolute favourites of the category…
I’m sorry for…. whatever it was.
A woman wrote to me when I was at Glamour to say, and I quote, ‘I can’t remember what it was you wrote in your editor’s letter, but it annoyed me.’ End of letter.
The horror scope.
Someone wrote to me at You magazine to complain that they didn’t like what their horoscope had predicted for the coming week. I don’t know what the star sign was, but google tells me Leos are the most controlling?
That time I went too far and mentioned peaches.
Again at You, where we featured recipes in every issue, a man wrote to me to say, ‘You need to get your head out of your arse’. Why? One of our recipes featured peaches as an ingredient, which he deemed ‘elitist’.
My outrageous bra-less-ness.
I made a flippant joke that we should never go back to wearing bras again after lockdown. This absolutely infuriated a 79-year-old You reader. It’s a long letter, but the highlights:
‘You are obviously a woman with small breasts. But I cannot imagine a worst (sic) sight, to see women go braless. It is bad enough in towns to see well endowed women in low cut tops. But to see these without a bra would be horrendous. Even in lockdown I wore a bra every day, perhaps in the evening I may have loosened it but that is all.’
The case of the incredibly busy woman and the contents page mistake.
‘Dear Glamour, I bought your magazine because the cover promised ‘budget beauty buys’. I looked up the feature in the contents page which said page 115, but when I turned to page 115, it was a completely different feature. I had to spend time hunting for the correct feature. I am an incredibly busy woman and I simply don’t have time to be fiddling about it in this way with incorrect information. I won’t be buying the magazine again.’
This. Was. Incredible. In fairness, yes, we’d messed up with the contents page. A very last minute change in the magazine’s running order had to be made but it was too late to change the actual contents page. The budget beauty buys were on the next turn of the page, page 117. Nobody will die, I thought. But I was so amused by this reader’s outrage that I wrote back and asked for forgiveness in a tone you might reserve for when you’ve run over someone’s dog. I even said, ‘If you give me your address, I’ll send you the products from the budget beauty guide as an apology and a goodwill gesture.” She replied, ‘Thank you but I don’t want a gift. The damage is done. Goodbye.’
I howled laughing for days.
Debbie Downer.
Oh my god, this one. I used the phrase ‘Debbie Downer’ to describe my own tendency to be a bit of a pessimist and how that is a bad way to be. It’s a term I’d picked up from my avid watching of Saturday Night Live, it was a character on there for a while.
A lady called Debbie did not see the funny side. She found it grossly insulting and felt that I was saying about her, a woman I did not know, that I thought she was a terrible ‘downer’ of a person and she wished to point out that she was very cheerful and optimistic and listed a great many achievements in her life to date.
I thought the whole thing was ludicrous. I’ve never heard the term ‘your average Joe’ and worked myself into a froth. But I also thought, well, let’s not try and actively lose readers so I wrote back to apologise and explain that it was referencing a TV character I knew, that of course neither I or anyone thinks ‘all’ Debbies are ‘downers’ and from everything she described about herself in her letter to me, she sounded like an upbeat ‘force of nature’.
I got a one line email reply: ‘I am not a force of nature.’
I had to ask several people to sit on my hands for a few hours so that I could not type back, ‘Debbie, you really do sound like a massive downer.’
Won’t someone think of the mens?
Every single fucking week at You magazine, at least five men would write to me to complain that there was nothing for them in it. ‘Sexism!’ they cried. Many threatened to take us to the press complaints commission or the police or something because ‘You’ was false advertising if it wasn’t for ‘Me’. Never mind that the rest of the paper was filled with men’s sports and almost entirely men’s voices. Or that the whole point of You magazine was to create a women-focused magazine to attract women-focused advertisers. Every week, I was fascinated by the men who found it personally insulting that a thing might not be catered exclusively to their interests. Or that if a story was about a woman then they would immediately refuse to be interested in it. Imagine the cultural content that would be cut off for women if we shunned stuff created by or about men.
But despite the moments of poison and downright weirdness, communicating with readers is the thing I miss the most about magazines. Most people are wonderful. It’s just that these above tend to be the stand-outs that get pole position in my memory. It’s a privilege to get to know audiences. So I hope you will continue to talk to me here, my wonderful Substack subscribers, because I love it. But if your name’s Debbie, I just want to say I really do not think you’re a downer, I promise.
This made me laugh out loud Jo - the content page one! People are fascinating. x
People are endlessly fascinating aren’t they?!
I like to think that in this enlightened age we are all more forgiving of the quirks and foibles of others but apparently not..
the fact that people take time out of their day to share negative thoughts baffles me but is also amusing - thank you 😊