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Margaret Hargrove: Hi, listeners. I'm Audible Editor Margaret Hargrove, and I'm thrilled to be here today with pioneering magazine editor Amy DuBois Barnett to discuss her debut novel, If I Ruled the World. Amy made history in 2003 when she became editor-in-chief of Teen People, the first Black woman to lead a major mainstream consumer magazine in the United States. Now, she's making her fiction debut with an electrifying insider's look into the glamorous magazine scene and world of hip-hop music in the late 1990s. Welcome to Audible, Amy.
Amy DuBois Barnett: Hi, Margaret. So happy to be here.
MH: Amy, you've had a prolific career in magazine publishing. You've helmed magazines such as Ebony, Honey, and Teen People. So, what inspired you to write a book, and not just a book but a novel?
ADB: Well, this is actually a return to my original dream. In my 20s, I got an MFA in creative writing at Columbia and thought that I was going to become the great American novelist. That was my first goal. But I needed to eat and have shelter and such, so I started to work in media, and that turned out to be a real skill for me, a place of growth, and something that I'm very honored to have done for a couple of decades. I really value my experience being able to speak to various communities, inform, empower, and entertain. So, after many years doing that, I started to get the itch to return to my dream of writing a novel.
This is a story that had been living in my head for a very long time. I started it back when I was editor-in-chief of Teen People. If I Ruled the World is largely inspired by my experience as editor-in-chief of Honey Magazine, which I ran right before Teen People. I started this story, and it's been sort of burning in my head, and I put it down for many, many years as I embarked on my career in media. And then a few years ago, I just couldn't get it out of my mind, and it became more relevant. I think that was really what it was. It's a story that's important to me, but also what was happening in the world, the reckoning that was going on in Hollywood with MeToo, the reckoning that was starting to happen in the music industry. My feelings after all those years of my career, about what it takes to be an ambitious woman and the sacrifices you have to make and the decisions you have to make, all of that really weighed on me. So, I decided to turn back to this all-important book, and I'm thrilled with how it's come out.
MH: Once you knew you wanted to write the book, what happened next? Can you take us through that process? Once you decided, "I want to go back to this, and I want to finish it," what happened?
ADB: I left corporate media, and many of my friends and family were horrified, like, "What are you doing? To write a novel? Are you crazy?" But I picked it back up, and the first thing that happened to me as I picked it back up, I started to really manifest, “Okay, how do I want to go through this process?” And I got a call from my very good friend Mara Brock Akil about being an artist-in-residence in her writer's colony. That was incredibly helpful to me, because that was really my first month back with this book. It enabled me to have the creative space and the gift of time to focus.
"Even though this is not a roman à clef, my novel is inspired by many of my experiences and is set in a world that I know better than almost anyone."
I reread and reworked, honestly, everything that I had written many years prior, and I got the momentum that I needed to move forward. I spent 2023 reworking what I had and then writing forward. During that time, I also had the wonderful fortune of meeting my agents at Park, Fine & Brower, and we started to strategize how we're going to take it out into the world and what that was going to look like. Then, after many revisions at the top of 2024, my book went to auction. I'm so incredibly grateful that Flatiron and my fabulous editor, Caroline Bleeke, are where I landed, because it's just an incredible team at Macmillan and Flatiron. Caroline is a brilliant editor, and she has helped me hone this book and make it something that I am so incredibly proud of and I can't wait for everybody to read.
MH: What a dream, to be invited to Mara Brock Akil's writer's colony. That sounds like, “How do I get invited to that?” That sounds like a dream come true.
ADB: Call me on the side [laughs].
MH: What would you say were the biggest challenges or differences between writing fiction and writing for magazines?
ADB: Writing fiction is a much more transparent and vulnerable experience. Even though this is not a roman à clef, my novel is inspired by many of my experiences and is set in a world that I know better than almost anyone. It's not my personal story; that being said, I was mining many things that I have seen and many difficult experiences that I had in order to get to the emotional core of my protagonist. And that's tough work. That was something that really took me down an emotional path.
And then the precision, that I would labor over sentences. Some pages, I would write them and they would just flow out, and I would write five pages and just be like, "Woo-hoo." And other days, I would labor over a paragraph for two hours, just trying to get every single word right. I would of course labor over my work as a journalist, but not in the same kind of way. This is more, obviously, an artistic endeavor, and I had a different feeling about it.
MH: If I Ruled the World offers a peek inside the sexy, sleek, and cutthroat world of music and magazines in late '90s New York, and follows Nikki Rose, a young fashion editor who walks away from a prestigious gig to run a struggling hip-hop magazine on the brink of collapse. I recently wrote an Editors Select review for If I Ruled the World, and I said you "infused Nikki's story with the lived-in authenticity of someone who's been there, survived, and has the scars to prove it.” I know you said that this is not a personal story, it's not a memoir, obviously, but how much of your own story influenced Nikki's story? What would you say are the bigger similarities and what are the bigger differences?
ADB: It really is not a roman à clef, although I'm bracing myself for everybody who's not going to believe me when I say that, so I do understand that. There are many similarities, though, in that my protagonist is dealing with many of the things that I dealt when I was coming up in the media industry and is dealing with them at the same time that I did. So, when we first meet my protagonist, Nikki Rose, she's 29 years old and she's about to become an editor-in-chief of Sugar Magazine at 30 years old. I became editor-in-chief of Honey Magazine at 30 years old. My protagonist is also a biracial woman who identifies as Black very strongly, and she is also trying to find her voice and really get comfortable with her own authority in a position that is new to her, and in a world that's not exactly new to her but where her authority and her credibility is questioned constantly.
That didn't happen to me to the same extent that it happened to my protagonist, but I identified with many of the things that she was going through. I was very grateful to have spent many years adjacent to the music industry and as a participant in culture in New York City, in particular in those late 1990s, early 2000s. But I had many uncomfortable experiences dealing with misogynistic men, fending off people who were interested in me for all the wrong reasons, defending myself against sexual harassment, sexual abuse, sexual violence. So, those things really did happen to me, not to the same extent that they happened to my protagonist, but these were certainly things with which I could identify.
"Kristolyn is able to handle the myriad cultural shifts, environment shifts, accents, and everything else, and she does it with so much emotional intensity."
Other than that, I pulled a few incidences that I wrote from real life for the novel. I pulled an incident, actually, at a Puffy party for the novel. And I pulled one particular moment that is quoted a lot when people talk about my book, when my protagonist’s boss at the style magazine says that "Black girls don't sell magazines." Well, that is something that a white boss at a fashion magazine said to me at one point. And then there was another incident about an artist wanting to photograph a Black artist in white face that I also pulled from real life.
MH: So, that moment, that inciting moment for Nikki where she's told Black girls don't sell magazines—I'm a former magazine editor, I heard the same many times when I was working in the industry. Can you talk about why you wanted to include that, or what you were hoping to explore by including that statement in the book?
ADB: I wanted to explore the racism that is baked into mainstream media, and I wanted to talk about the ways in which people of color are often pigeonholed in mainstream media and not allowed to work outside of what is perceived as our only value, which is somehow being a race whisperer or an urban-culture whisperer.
When I was coming up as a journalist, I was very happy to write about race issues and cultural issues pertaining to the Black community, but it wasn't the only thing I wanted to write about. It wasn't my only interest. I really wanted to talk about what that felt like, where you're being asked to come up with sexy race stories, not the real race stories, mind you, not the ones that are most pertinent to the Black community, but the ones that are sexy, like, “Oh, what's the hot urban wedding? What rapper is getting married this week?” kind of thing. You're being asked to come up with those types of stories, but you're also being told that you don't sell magazines. You're being subjected to beauty standards that aren't realistic. You're being dismissed by an entire industry even while they're mining you for your cultural authority, and that was really what I wanted to explore.
MH: Did Nikki's story give you a chance to rewrite history, so to speak? Were you able to write any wrongs or make any different decisions or explore a path not taken through her story and her trajectory?
ADB: I don't want to say rewrite history because that implies that she is a version of me. And really, her trajectory was not my own. When I became editor-in-chief of Honey Magazine, for example, I was coming from Essence magazine, where I was the fashion and beauty features editor. Nikki's coming from Stylist Magazine, which is a mainstream fashion magazine where she feels very suppressed and she's dealing with a lot of racism. That was clearly the opposite of my experience as I was walking into Honey.
But it's interesting, Nikki is a woman who is making a lot of different decisions than the ones that I would have made. She's ultimately inspiring, but in the beginning, as she's coming into her own voice, she’s an incredibly sort of messy person. She's kind of frustrating because she's trusting and loving the wrong men, she's making very challenging decisions as a newer editor-in-chief, and while she's excellent at her job, I think that some of what she is specifically going through is very different than what I went through when I was coming up as an editor-in-chief.
MH: Broadway actor Kristolyn Lloyd, she narrates If I Ruled the World, and she really brings Nikki to life. There were moments where I was screaming like, "Girl, don't do that. Don't get in that car. Don't do that thing.” You feel like you're really in the story. How involved were you with her casting, and have you had a chance to listen to the audio yet?
ADB: I was definitely involved in her casting. When I listened to the auditions of the several actresses who were being considered, she just stood out to me as being somebody who was able to imbue the book with the emotion that it needed, and also handle all those accents. You've obviously listened to the book; I have about 35 minutes left to listen to, and oh, my gosh, one of the things that was most important to me was that the person who was narrating the book was able to handle both the accents, as I mentioned, of the various characters, but also would be able to code switch, right?
"I really did want it also to be a behind-the-scenes look at this incredibly sexy, incredibly glamorous, but also very dangerous era in which it was truly perilous to be a woman."
I needed her to be able to handle the way that my protagonist would speak when she's in a fashion magazine environment and the way that she might speak when she was around her Black friends, or in an urban environment. Kristolyn is able to handle the myriad cultural shifts, environment shifts, accents, and everything else, and she does it with so much emotional intensity. I mean, it's an incredible audiobook recording.
MH: What speed are you listening on? Because you can finish those 35 minutes pretty quickly if you speed it up
ADB: Oh, my gosh, I never thought about that. It never occurred to me. I don't want to speed it up, though, because I'm really enjoying her voice and the way she's reading it. I like it.
MH: The title of If I Ruled the World reminds me of that classic '90s hip-hop song of the same name by Nas featuring Lauryn Hill. Was that song the inspiration for the title? What does the title of the book mean to you?
ADB: Oh, yes. The title directly references that song. There's a little sort of “if you know, you know” moment, because Lauryn Hill is featured on Nas's song “If I Ruled the World,” and she was also the very, very first cover subject of Honey Magazine back in the day. So, there's a teeny little “if you know, you know” in there. I love the lyrics of the song. They're not directly related to the story, but they are very kind of inspirational and uplifting. I liked that as an overall vibe, and of course the inclusion of Lauryn.
I also just liked the title because Nikki, my protagonist, is a very ambitious woman. She really wants to succeed, and part of the story is her figuring out what she's willing to sacrifice to get ahead, and what it looks like for her when she does get ahead, and then she does lose it all. And so If I Ruled the World is really about what would it take for her to be on top? How does she stay on top, and what does she do if, and when, she loses it?
MH: The era of '90s hip-hop and magazines, it really wasn't so long ago, and I feel like you spill a lot of tea in this book. I have to ask, have any of your former peers read If I Ruled the World? Have you heard any feedback? Just curious if other people who were in the industry at that same time, what their thoughts are on the book?
ADB: Some people have read it, but it's now just kind of getting out there, so more people are reading it as we speak. I was very grateful to have the stamp of approval of various of my colleagues at that time for tone and voice and texture and detail. But there's really no characters in my book that I can say are characters from real life. I'm sure I'm going to get asked a million times, "Who's White Hot? Who's Red Hot? Who's this? Who's that?" But there really aren't direct correlations between my fictional characters and real-life characters. Thank God, because I will have much less explaining to do when the book comes out.
MH: What do you hope listeners take from Nikki's story?
ADB: I hope that they are inspired by her journey. She is living in a very rarefied world. She is experiencing things that most people don't get to experience. At the same time, what she's going through is extremely relatable and is very universal, especially for women, certainly for ambitious women, and certainly for women of color. So many of us are dealing with questions around our ambition and what it takes to be successful. We are trying to find love in ways that makes sense all while the very wrong partners are approaching us, and in Nikki's case threatening us. She's trying to hold onto her longtime girlfriend. She's trying to balance her life. It's only when she really comes into her voice and comes into her own, and gets comfortable in her own skin and feels her own authority that everything kind of comes into place for her.
I find that very, very inspiring. I also think that the book is a picture of an incredibly important cultural era. I don't know that many people understand what that particular moment in time was like. We're hearing all sorts of things now relating to this reckoning, pun intended, that's going on in the music industry, but the actual texture of what it was like to be an ambitious woman in that time, we haven't seen that on the page or on the screen that frequently. I really did want it also to be a behind-the-scenes look at this incredibly sexy, incredibly glamorous, but also very dangerous era in which it was truly perilous to be a woman.
MH: You mentioned earlier that If I Ruled the World was the first book in a two-book deal, so I'm curious, will your second book pick back up with Nikki's story, or are you working on something totally different?
ADB: I'm working on something totally different. It is not a book series.
MH: What else is next for you? What are you working on?
ADB: Well, I have a second novel to write, and I also have a bit of Hollywood news that I'll be sharing shortly relating to If I Ruled the World. I'm very hopeful that you'll be seeing Nikki and my other characters on screen at some point soon.
MH: Ooh, that's exciting. This little bit of tea. We got a little scoop there, thank you for that. Well, Amy, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for giving us this irresistible debut from a former magazine editor like myself. It was such a juicy walk down memory lane, and it did remind me of that time of being in the city in the late '90s, early 2000s, and I appreciate how honest and revealing you were with Nikki's story. Listeners, If I Ruled the World by Amy Dubois Barnett is available now on Audible.
ADB: Oh, I appreciate you, sis. Thank you so much.
