I wrote a memoir because I kept hearing the same questions from people: How did you get your job? How can I get that job? What is it like to be a VJ? What is it like to interview stars? That, to me, was what people were interested in. And honestly, I really had nothing to hide. People have various stories about my boss [at Rolling Stone], Jann Wenner, but I don’t. He was always nice to me. Are you throwing up now? But he really was. 

What propelled you to writing about your experiences, especially after having subverted yourself for so long? How was the process of writing this different than your journalism?

I always wanted to write a book. It was my dream since I was a kid. For whatever bizarre reason, I thought being an author would be the best job ever. I resisted writing a proposal about my celebrity experiences for a solid year, because I didn’t want to be that celebrity pundit that you see on news shows commenting on Brad and Angelina’s new baby. But after casting around for a subject for a year, I just decided to do it. When I go to parties and people find out what I do, I end up telling the same stories over and over. Why not put them in a book? The process of writing it was so strange for me, because of course I hid behind my subjects for years. Some celebrity profilers insert themselves in the story, but I never, ever did. I figured readers didn’t care about my take or my experience. I wasn’t even going to write about my family; it was just going to be the story behind the story of all my celebrity experiences, but my editor kept urging me to put the family stuff in, and so I did.

I used to be on staff at Rolling Stone before I left a few years ago to go on contract and work at home. Rolling Stone had been my entire life for 15 years — most of my friends came from there, and every single night there was something to do — a show, or a party, or a gathering at a bar. And when I left, I assumed that I would hear from all of my “extended family” at work. Well, I didn’t. It wasn’t that they didn’t care, but when you’re not in the office and in front of people’s faces, life goes on. I realized how much office life meant to me, because I was crushed. It was just a lesson to me that just because you are with people for eight, or nine, or 10 hours a day, it may not mean a damn thing. I learned the hard way to get your own friends and your own life outside the office. 

What do you think you would have done if the Rolling Stone job hadn't opened things up for you? Do you think you would feel like something was missing if you would have taken a different path?

I got that job interview at Rolling Stone as a complete fluke. I met a girl at a New Jersey keg party in someone’s basement. We started chatting as we were in line waiting for the beer bong, and I found out that she worked at Rolling Stone. She took my résumé and actually brought it into work, rather than throwing it in the trash, so I will always be grateful to her. But had I not gotten the job, I certainly never would have had the guts to apply to any other magazine. I had an incomplete degree from a state school, middling grades, and when I was sitting in the waiting room of Rolling Stone, it hit me that I was a total outsider, a Jersey girl with a perm and long red nails (this was the ’80s). After the interview I fled home to my parents’ house and cried. Had Rolling Stone rejected me, I would never have attempted to go to New York again. I would have remained at my copyediting job at an advertising agency in Cranford, New Jersey, married my boyfriend Ritchie, and had a few kids. And that’s a good question about feeling like something was missing if I took a different path. I most definitely would have felt that. When I was a kid, I used to read these ridiculously over-the-top Sidney Sheldon paperbacks, like The Other Side of Midnight and Bloodline.

The writing was pretty primitive, but the story was always set in glamorous places like Monaco or Santorini, and I fully believed that I would have that sort of exciting life, too. Then I grew up and got a job trudging to my gray office in Cranford every day and I thought, “How the hell did I ever imagine I was going to have a glamorous life? I have no connections. I have no money. My dad works at JC Penney and I live with my parents in a New Jersey suburb.”

I think internships are immensely important. I had one at New Jersey Monthly magazine and my editor’s recommendation helped me clinch the job at Rolling Stone. Plus, internships weed out the people who want to be an editor after working there three weeks. It shows you that the first couple of years are a drudge-a-thon of filing and answering phones. I also think that being earnest is key. When I became an editor, my colleagues and I always helped the interns who were earnest and really loved what they did. I had no time for people who felt entitled. But yes, I would say half of it is luck, and being at the right place and the right time, and all of those clichés.

For those of us for whom you were a part of our musical education, it seemed like women were really an equal, integrated part of the scene in the early ’90s. How much of the equality was really there? Has there been a period to compare it to since?

It’s funny; I remember that during the early ’90s — when I really was writing a lot for the magazine — there were a ton of females on the scene. Every week I was talking to Kim Deal, or Kim Gordon, or Liz Phair, or Courtney Love. Now you look on the rock charts and there are barely any females. For a brief, shining moment — I really sound old here — there was this real surge of female energy. And even though, for instance, the Lilith Fair got a little precious, at least there was a large bill of female-led acts. I just feel like we lost momentum, somehow. I mean, I could get into society’s larger shift into raunch culture and quote liberally from Ariel Levy’s book [Female Chauvinist Pigs], my new favorite, and rail against the music industry’s emphasis on looks — remember Debora Iyall from Romeo Void? She could never make it today. 

Part of the allure of the music/pop-culture writer is the idea that you are always meeting or hanging out with people you admire or artists you'd want to meet. As a former employee of SPIN, I know that that isn't true much of the time, that you are covering acts that you don't think deserve the coverage they're getting. What was your experience with that?

I tried, as much as I could, to remember that Rolling Stone was a business and their objective was to sell magazines. Before I worked there, I naively thought that editors would put people on the cover that they really admired or thought were worthy. I was on staff when the T&A shots really started appearing on our covers — there was one of Jennifer Aniston in bed, showing her tuchis, and it was one of our best sellers of all time. So that set a bad precedent. I interviewed Britney Spears a number of times for the magazine, and Jenny McCarthy, and Cameron Diaz, and the Olsen twins, and I wasn’t thrilled about any of them, but I just looked at them as a paycheck. I pretended they were a bag of money. And for every Britney, I got to interview Johnny Rotten, or Paul Westerberg, or Joni Mitchell! So, you know, I could hardly complain.

  I've read Ariel Levy's book, as well, and think she's really on to something. But how do you silence yourself when the magazine is sexing up your story with photos that don't have anything to do with anything? Isn't there a bit of responsibility for those on the inside to try to influence those kinds of decisions?

Yes, there is definitely a responsibility for those on the inside to raise a ruckus, and I often did. But the majority ruled, and I was most definitely the minority. Sometimes I was able to strike down various nudge nudge, wink wink cover lines surrounding a super-sexual photo, but mostly I just wrote stories that had nothing to do with being hot and sexy. I never asked any female star what her secret sexual fantasy was, or any of that stuff. Maybe that’s a lame justification, I don’t know.

I had been warned that Christina Aguilera and Mary J. Blige were surly and difficult; and I've interviewed them both a couple of times and loved them. Mary was so vulnerable, and shy, and very straight up about being insecure, and was really funny when she got rolling. I last interviewed her at a photo shoot, and she had her husband with her the whole time, which normally annoys me, but she really needed him around and I understood. Christina too — people get down on her but I found her to be refreshingly unfiltered, smart, funny, the whole works. The person who least embodied their public persona, for me, was Jerry Seinfeld, who was pretty dour. And Beyoncé, who was this giggly teenager and seemed very young (in a good way) — not at all the sophisticate that you see onstage.

I would love to meet or interview David Bowie, Prince, Elizabeth Taylor, Oprah Winfrey, Aretha Franklin, Olivia de Havilland, and Omar Sharif. I tend to like the 50-and-up crowd.

I love the Korean photographer Atta Kim and the latest album from Be Your Own Pet. On my reading table is The Women of the House: How a Colonial She-Merchant Built a Mansion, a Fortune, and a Dynasty, about a family of powerful women beginning with Margaret Hardenbroeck, a Dutch trader who came to New York in the mid-17th century and became the richest woman in New York. I love those sorts of books. Also But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz, by the British writer Geoff Dyer. I just had the absolute crap scared out of me by the British horror film The Descent.

What is the brightest moment of your career so far — the point at which you were like "it is awesome to be me"?

It’s a three-way tie: interviewing Madonna, maybe because she’s so famous and doesn’t do many interviews, or when Joey Ramone dedicated a song to me onstage (“Sheena Is a Punk Rocker”) or — this may be the best — when I was interviewing Ray Charles at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in New York. It was just the two of us, and he said, “You want me to sing something?” I said, “What, to me?” He said, “Sure, baby. Pick a song.” I picked “You Don’t Know Me,” and he sang it to me. I almost cried. And really, when my book came out, and I ran down to the bookstore near my apartment and saw a pile of my books, I did cry, and startled the security guard.

The Olsen twins were the hardest, because they were just so blank. I labored for days to get them to say anything compelling and failed. On air, when I was a VJ, the guys in Green Day were really nasty, so much so that their publicist made them apologize to me the next day. Which was almost worse.

I forcibly removed myself from the rock scene, because I just felt like I didn’t want to be that aging rock chick in the back of the club wearing my ancient leather jacket and trying to get a quote from Lou Reed. But that’s me. My tastes have just changed, too. I knew it was over for me a few years ago when I went to a Hives show, and I started looking for the fire exits. I thought, “These hipsters aren’t going to save me. They are going to trample right over me.” But really, if a Mission of Burma revival is going to make you really happy, why not? A lot of my peers were excited by that tour, actually. I will say that for some reason it’s more acceptable in my line of work to be an aging William Miller than to be a woman. You can be in your 60s and still doing the rock thing as a guy, but you don’t see any females doing the same thing. Can you imagine sending a 60-year-old woman to interview the Arctic Monkeys? Not going to happen.

I really love grandma-ish pursuits, like gardening. I have a little terrace in my apartment and it is stuffed with plants. I just ordered an apple tree bred for small urban spaces that grows apples vertically on the tree, one by one. I love to bake. Yesterday I went blueberry picking and made a blueberry pie. God, I really am a senior citizen. My favorite thing to do now is travel. In the past year, I’ve been to Nova Scotia, Delhi, India, London, Madrid, Beijing, Rome, and Vienna.

We both work at home, which my friends assume is a nightmare but it’s actually pretty easy. We both go into different rooms and just start typing away. He’s a quiet, easygoing type and as writing is such a solitary experience, it’s a comfort to have him here. It also stops me from watching I Love the ’70s, Part 2 all day. My day is always the same. When I was writing the book, I was the happiest girl in the world — up at eight, coffee and the paper, change into my sweatpants, put the cat on my lap, and start writing around 10. Break for lunch; write more in the afternoon, close the computer at five or six. Some people would pull their hair out, strand by strand, but I love it.
Photos courtesy of janceedunn.typepad.com