WRITER AND AUTHOR TARPLEY HITT is a  New York journalist, as well as an editor and contributor at The Drift magazine. She has previously reported on culture and money for The Daily Beast and Gawker. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Book Forum, The Paris Review, The Guardian, Airmail, Deseret Magazine, and Miami News Times. Her debut book is Barbieland, The Unauthorized History, just out from Simon & Schuster’s One Signal imprint. The New York Times called it “rollicking.” Amazon named it a best book of the month and an editor’s pick. Listen in and read along as the author and I discuss how to develop a writer’s eye, and so much more.

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Marion: Welcome, Tarpley. How are you?

Tarpley: I’m so good. Thank you for having me.

Marion: Well, it’s a joy. The book is an absolute, it’s the bomb. That’s it. I just loved it, every minute of it. And so since we’re a podcast for writers, I wanted to take a little bit of a stroll down memory lane of some of the stuff you’ve written before so we can give some people some insight into how to get to a place that they really want to get to.

So, you have a lovely writing resume, and I want to recommend to everyone to read through your work, specifically in these troubled times, to have a look at America through your eyes, specifically at American culture. And you wrote for a while for the much-missed and now-defunct Gawker. And reading through your pieces, I would venture to say you had some fun there, taking on cultural moments on our behalf. And it’s hard to pick a best of from these columns, though. I can say with great certainty that I delighted at your 2022 characterization of Gwyneth Paltrow as, quote, “Just a conservative with dewy skin.” I thought, Oh, I’ve been looking for that phrase. That did it. And I marveled at your lede about Kyrsten Sinema that reads, quote, “There are a few things in this polarizing climate on which we all, Democrats, some Republicans, Zoomers, Boomers, anyone daring to try a bold tone clash print ensemble can agree that and that thing is that Senator Kyrsten Sinema sucks.”

Yeah, it reads real well. So granted, what we write is shaped in some small part by the publication that publishes the material. But there is a noticeable freedom in your writing, as well as no small amount of bombastic joy. So, let’s start there. My audience is writers, and they just want to be heard above the din. So, what can you say to them about how you found this voice of yours, about finding voice and shaping it, keeping it, holding onto it, changing it? What do you got to say about voice?

Tarpley: I would say it helps if one of your early editors is someone who has an appreciation for developing voice. And my first, you know, one of my first jobs right out of college was at Miami New Times, which is an alt weekly in Miami, of course. Um, and my editor there was this guy, Chuck Strauss, who like so many great alt weekly editors, like really found pleasure in the writing and editing of the longer sort of more gonzo investigative features that alt weekly, that Miami New Times continued to do and continues to do now. And so basically I got down there and like all alt weeklies, they had no money. Um, and so I emailed them saying, I want to pitch a piece and maybe I want to work for you guys. And Chuck was like, here, here’s the situation. “We can pay you like 20, 30 bucks. If you want to write little blog posts for us, we’ll pay you a little more for fact checking. But if you actually want to make rent down here, you have to write these long features. We’ll pay you a thousand bucks for that.” And at the time my rent was $600, which I miss.

Marion: Um, yeah, I bet.

Tarpley: And so I was like, okay, if I could get a couple of these features going, you know, then, um, we could be cooking with gas over here. And so my first piece for them was I found the address of a pretty famous rapper at the time, XXXTentacion, still very famous, though he is now deceased, and went to his house and profiled him for the paper. And Chuck really was the person who, A, taught me all the norms of journalism — who to go to for comment, how to… We went to court to petition… the county court for his voicemails that he’d made in jail. And so, like all these, all the nuts and bolts of reporting he taught me, but then also he was a really patient editor and just, we must’ve done like 28 drafts of that piece.

Marion: Wow. Yeah. Wow.

That’s wonderful. So was his encouragement to you to bring your specific voice to these pieces that you did there? Did he say just be you? Did he say anything in particular? That encouraged you to just have the voice that you have?

Tarpley: I mean, I think anyone who winds up at an alt weekly probably wants to write with a little more voice as a starting place, you know, just because you do have so much more freedom to play around there than at like a daily paper, which I’ve also worked at, and which are great learning experiences, as well. But so I think that’s part of it. But if you end up there, you want to play around. And then what he said, did was sort of show me how to play around in a more directed way.

Marion: Yeah.

Tarpley: Where, you know, how to structure a piece that has, that’s, you know, 5,000 words in five sections, and each section is its own sort of thematic, self-contained thing that starts with an anecdotal lead and, you know, a nut graph and so on and how to stitch those together. So he was sort of giving shape to a play space where you could have a little fun.

Marion: So you’re making a really good point about learning the form, too. And I think that a lot of people think that writing has something to do with some mystical god that drops into our heads and comes out through our fingers. And I’m always the bummer at every writer’s conference I go to saying, “No, every piece has a form. You’ve got to learn the form. Even if you have the most gonzo voice in the world, you’ve got to learn the form.” There’s an op-ed form. There’s a long magazine form. There’s a short form. And you are really skilled at it.

Your pieces have tempo, and they have, as I said, this voice.

I delighted in your 2023 piece in The Paris Review covering the Preakness. I’ve been to a million horse races. I’ve never heard anyone characterize a day at the track as, quote,” having a predictable rhythm. 20 minutes of research, bedding, and crab cake buying, 10 minutes of finding a clear view of the finish line, one minute of watching, 30 seconds of screaming variations of, come on, number nine.” And I was like, Yeah, that is a day at the track. So you write yourself into the Preakness piece, which I really found lovely. And you tuck in those details about you that shape the piece as much as you do the scene, the Pimlico racetrack. And it’s lack of signage. You really focus in on… And it makes for a mighty metaphor because American horse racing is America’s least centralized sport. There’s no NHL, no MLB for the sport of kings, as we used to call it. And the racing rules change state to state and seasons change from track to track.

So, let’s talk about getting all that in there. That could have been a really dry thing to say, you know, American racehorses have no regulation, and blah, blah, blah, blah. Instead, you open the piece and give the reader a lens to read through. So as you were approaching Pimlico, were you taking notes and noticing the lack of signage? Did you go into the piece knowing that the lack of centralized oversight in this sport exists. And then, of course, you were there on a day that a horse broke down and had to be put down. I think my question is, what tips can you give to those listening about how to find and define where you want the reader to look?

Tarpley: That’s a really interesting question. I mean, I think part of it, so with that piece in particular, I had already written quite a bit about horse racing. When I was at the Daily Beast, I covered a scandal that happened at this storied racetrack in California called Santa Anita, where a bunch of horses broke down in quick succession and they had sort of…

Marion: It was horrible. It was like 12 horses in a week and a half or some incredible number. Yes.

Tarpley: And then more kept dying as the season went on. And it was sort of like, what’s going on? So I was covering that in a sort of daily reporting capacity for a couple of weeks and then wrote a much longer feature about the state of horse racing. And so when I went to Pimlico, I sort of had that context in mind.

Marion: Good.

Tarpley: It’s not that I went in thinking like, oh, I’m going to turn the signage into a metaphor for how sort of directionless the sport is structurally and existentially. But I did get literally quite lost for one of the most famous racetracks in the world. It was like everyone was streaming everywhere. And, you know, when you’re entering a stadium, you see a massive crowd and they’re all funneling towards the door. No funnels. Giant hats were all about, you know.

Marion: We get it. And I loved it, and it worked so beautifully.

Tarpley: Well, thank you. I would say, I mean, usually where you’re looking is, like, what are you noticing? What are you seeing? I don’t think there’s really any other way to do it. You can’t come up with things to look for. But if you pay attention to what is drawing your interest, there may be something there worth exploring.

Marion: I think that’s great advice. And I think, again, it’s not… anything terribly mystical, it’s what does draw your attention. And there’s a million ways to enter the sport of horse racing, but we should all be entering it with great capacity for question at this point, because the horses are breaking down, it is unregulated, and it’s a mess. And you did that well, and you did it very entertainingly.

So let’s start talking about this new book of yours. There are well over 400 books related to the Barbie franchise. So let’s talk about finding your place onto the bookshelves. Like many people, I had no real working knowledge of the history of Barbie. And now that I’ve read your book, I see it as a uniquely American tale of the repurposing of a doll who at first was considered, as you write, quote, “an unmarried tart with too many shoes,” my favorite line, into a doll who at one point, by Mattel’s count, two Barbies were selling every second in the world. And Barbie spent decades as not only the top-selling doll in the world, but the top-selling toy. So The New York Times review of your wonderful book says it’s “a rollicking tale of how Mattel spied, copied, and stole its way to market dominance, then fought with military intensity to compel us to buy more and more.” So let’s go back to you entering this scene. If you would, please describe how and why your interest began and what story you thought you were going to tell if it differs from the one that you delivered.

Tarpley: Well, I thought I was going to write a book about horse racing.

Marion: Oh, okay.

Tarpley: So it evolved quite a bit. So to describe the sort of literal journey of how I got to this book, when I wrote that piece about horse racing for the Daily Beast, which was in 2019, I got an email from a man I had never met before who… said that he was an editor at Simon & Schuster and had I ever thought about writing a book. And the idea of writing a book had occurred to me, but I had not, you know, I didn’t know how one did that exactly. And I didn’t really know that I had an idea that would work at that scale. But he thought that this horse racing story should be expanded into a book. And so I sort of asked around and a couple of people sent me their proposals to try to understand what a book proposal looked like. And I started writing a book proposal for this book about horse racing. And I got it to a place where I was, you know, sending it to agents and stuff. But it didn’t feel quite like an architecture for a book that I could picture. And that was sort of the feedback that I was getting. It was like, “We need more characters here. We need more, you know, a sense for like what besides sort of the state of the industry is going to draw the reader in.”

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Tarpley: And so I sort of let it fall to the sidelines. But this editor emailed me with admirable persistence, probably like once a month for four years.

Marion: I love this editor.

Tarpley:  I know it was really something. And so, and at the time I had all these day jobs. And when you’re working digital media, the pressure to write all the time and constantly, you know, put something out to keep up with the churn of the internet is pretty unrelenting. It was hard for me to finish this. And so eventually, like three years ago, that editor called me up and was like, “Clearly this horse racing book isn’t doing it for you. I’ve got a different idea. What if you wrote about Barbie?”

And I was curious. I had never played with Barbies. My parents did not let me have them. And then by the time they, you know, the jig was up, I was sort of too old to, to get into it, but I had written a lot about dolls. So I’d written a piece about, have you ever heard of Reborn Dolls? Right. So they’re these hyper-realistic baby dolls that costs, you know, thousands of dollars and you pick them up and they feel like babies because their silicone feels like flesh and they’re weighted to feel like babies. And what was so funny to me about these dolls is that because they’re so realistic, they make you treat them as actual babies. Because if you leave one in a hot car, someone will call the cops. If you take one out without a sweater and it’s cold outside, you’re going to get weird looks. And so these doll makers were like cackling, explaining like the rule book, basically they schooled their customers on, on how to bring these babies around in the world.

And I just, I loved that. Obviously they inspire vastly polar emotions in people, you know, some people use them in grief therapy and they really form sincere emotional attachments to these dolls, and other people find them utterly repulsive, not because they’re uncanny, but because they’re not, they’re too realistic.

Marion: Yeah. That was my response to that. Yes. Yes.

Tarpley: And so, that polarizing response I’ve been interested in about when it comes to the question of dolls, and like why we make these little replicas of ourselves and give them to kids and sometimes worship them, you know? And so I could see a story about Barbie because there’s no doll that has inspired more of a polarizing reaction in the history of the world.

Marion: Yeah. Yeah, I would think that would be, that’s such a wonderful description of how you got there. Like, where do we land when somebody says, “I think you should write about this?” There’s a lot in that sentence. It’s a great compliment, but you have to figure out if they’re right, if you should write about this. And it sounds like you landed in the right place with that.

And so I work with writers all day long, teaching them to write memoir. And I always tell them that as they approach a book to simultaneously learn to write a personal essay and an op-ed, perhaps early on to attract an agent or a publisher, like you did. Somebody from Simon & Schuster said, “Hey, you write really well. I want you to do this.” But you can attract an agent, an editor, later on to attract an audience, and after the publication of the book to keep that audience.

And you’ve just published Barbieland, The Unauthorized History, and in the same month as your publication, you published a fine piece in Slate that is adapted from the book. So let’s talk strategy. Set up for the listeners your timeline of doling out these pieces, this piece. Did you say, okay, if the book comes out in December of 2025, in the first week of December, I’ve got to have a piece that’s excerpted. I’m going to do this. Was that told to you by your editors? You know, I tell writers to do this all the time and they look at me like I have no concept of what I’m talking about. I guess I’m asking you to back me up here.

Tarpley: Well, the nice thing about my publisher is they have an in-house publicist. Early on, some writers pay for a supplementary publicist as well because, you know, the in-house publicist is in charge with marketing all of the books that the imprint is publishing at that time. So that can be a pretty hefty burden. I talked to a bunch of book publicists and I’ll just say they were out of my budget by several zeros.

Marion: Yeah, that’s what I hear.

Tarpley: I was like, wow, that’s cool that someone could do that, but it’s not me. So if you work with an independent publicist, they’ll usually say you need like six or seven months of lead time before the book comes out to sort of start thinking through a marketing campaign. And around that time, I met with my in-house publicist, and she sent emails to all the major book editors and newspapers and stuff. And then one of the early priorities was who’s going to get the first serial and who’s going to get subsequent serials, the serial being an excerpt. And you usually sort of shop around an exclusive excerpt that can run on the publication day before opening up other excerpts to other outlets.

And, you know, it can be hard to find someone who wants to run an excerpt, especially if like, you know, there’s so much news going on right now. It can be hard to make the case that, you know, actually this nonfiction book really deserves some of the page space that you could be using to cover some of the chaos in the country right now. So, yeah, I mean, I think we had a couple outlets interested and then we were just trying to think of like what would be the audience that we weren’t reaching through other channels, you know, that kind of thing.

Marion: Well, it’s very effective. And I would say you successfully crashed through the news of the first week of December because you opened the piece by breaking pretty much all of the rules I was taught about writing a lede. By putting in lots of names, dates, facts in the first paragraph, you even get Sigmund Freud in there amid the Mattel founders plumbing the psyche of the American consumer’s desires via motivational research techniques. You name the founders, marketing team names, and then you stick the landing of the lede, ending it with the line, quote, “The hope was that the Freud of Madison Avenue could bring some much needed clarity to the question of Ken’s penis.”

Yeah. I laughed so hard that I have to tell you, I actually spit my tea onto my computer. I was not ready for that. When you just broke all, I mean, I was taught these rules. Don’t burden your audience with a lot of, we don’t even try to remember the names. You got us on this luge ride of American determination to sell something.

So let’s talk about having some fun when you write. We sort of opened the conversation there. And I would say your writing may be the antidote to these troubled times. But humor, joy, sending up some language, it’s work, right? It’s work. Getting that funny, getting that good, sticking that, ending with penis, that works. So talk to me about what the work involved.

Rewrites. Do you read your stuff to anyone? Do you suffer from self-doubt? Or is self-doubt a good thing? You know, what can you talk to us about in terms of writing the way you do?

Tarpley: Okay, I’ll break that into a couple questions. Do I suffer from self-doubt? Absolutely.

Marion: Very generous of you. Thank you.

Tarpley: Yes. And I think in my family, having a good punchline is pretty important. It’s kind of a sink or swim situation where if you don’t have a good story, you don’t really get the space to tell it at the big family dinner table. So that’s part of it. But also, I mean, there’s reading other writers, reading really funny writers is like the best way to learn, I think. I mean, when I’m stuck, I go to my copy of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, and just open it up to one of his essay openings and try to understand what he was doing there.

Marion: Lovely.

Tarpley: I’m trying to think of who else I go to for specifically for funny. I mean, David Foster Wallace, it’s almost embarrassing to cite him as an influence, but I just love him.

Marion: Sorry. Yeah, as you should. And we read to learn, and we read to love, and we read to be informed. But boy, as a writing education, can’t beat it. Anybody else come to mind?

Tarpley: Susan Orlean.

Marion: Yep.

Tarpley: I mean, there’s so many people I go to for sort of structural advice, but with funny specifically, I just feel like Sullivan has such a wry tone and is a just devious master of the sly observation that sort of tells you so much about a character without saying so much at all.

Marion: A devious master of a sly observation. Nice. And I think you’ve mastered that yourself. Yeah, good. I love that. And it helps people. And so can you… So you’ve admitted to some self-doubt. What do you do with the doubt? What do you do when you say, oh… Good God, you know? And by the way, it’s a question I ask a lot of people. And even Anna Quindlen, who people of my generation consider the GOAT, talked to me and said that she gets up every single morning with doubt. And I think that’s wonderful of you to admit. I think it’s wonderful of her to admit. What do we do with it, though, when you get up with it? Do you go just for a great writer? Do you sit yourself down? Do you do what I do and over-caffeinate to the point where you can’t hear those voices anymore?

Tarpley: Yeah, well, caffeine is definitely a critical ingredient, as is the many forms of nicotine delivery that I have sprinkled around my apartment. My boyfriend has an impersonation of me writing this book where it’s just sort of me pacing around my apartment for two weeks saying, “Oh, my God, I’m an idiot. I’m never going to write this chapter,” you know, and then him being like, “Well, should we talk about it? No, I just got to sort this out myself.” Continue pacing. Two more weeks pass. And finally, I talked to someone about it, be it him or someone from my family or one of my friends. And then immediately something clicks. And then, you know, two days later, the chapter is done.

Marion: Yeah.

Tarpley: So I think you can’t discount the importance of pacing and self-loathing. It’s all part of the process.

Marion: I think maybe we should get that needlepointed on a pillow. Pacing and self-loathing, yeah. There’s just such a heavy dose of both of those in all of the experience. And I just think that everybody needs to hear that. It’s just what it is. I mean, you’re annotating everything you have on you. It’s not a pretty process, but it’s a magnificent one. So there you are.

All right. So 2023 in July, the Barbie movie comes out. The film grosses $1.44 billion and achieved several milestones, becoming the highest grossing film of 2023, 14th highest grossing film of all time, blah, blah, blah. Some writers would have been terrified by the possible competition of a major Hollywood movie coming out. What was your thinking?

Tarpley: Well, I mean, that was part of the impetus for writing the book is I started a year or and change before the movie came out, or almost a year. And my editor’s pitch was like, this is going to be a peg that will prompt people to sort of reconsider this perpetually there doll franchise. And so that was definitely part of it. I have to say I was sort of taken aback by the sheer craze that emerged around the movie.

Marion: Yeah.

Tarpley: Especially because I was sort of coming at this project as kind of like a Barbie agnostic, who didn’t have this sort of child nostalgia for the doll. And so I remember thinking, Oh my God, they’re really making movies out there. Everything’s a brand movie. Now we’ve got Cheetos, we’ve got Air Jordans. There’s like the 70th Marvel movie is coming out, you know, like, can’t we just get back to a, a legal drama where that’s like a budget of $5 million and like, Matthew McConaughey is doing an atrocious Southern accent. What happened to the simple country lawyer? And there was a lot of indicators to suggest that maybe people were growing tired of this stuff. Marvel movies weren’t doing as well, and part of that was the pandemic, and people weren’t going to the theaters. But then the movie comes out, and even well before the movie actually debuts, there’s a total craze. People are wearing pink like they were going to run out of dye soon or something, you know? And so that to me was just sort of a testament to the kind of mysterious hold that this doll has on people of all ages, you know, going back seven decades. And it made me more curious about what that was about.

Marion: That’s lovely. I think the idea of being a Barbie agnostic is a fascinating way to hold your place as a writer. You know, people tell me all the time about, “Oh, I’m writing a passion project.” And I just wonder about when your heart is in it in one way, what it brings to the writing, versus when your heart is in it another way, what it brings to the writing. You’ve summed that up nicely as a Barbie agnostic. Thank you for that.

As we wrap this up, let’s talk about your other job for a few minutes. My audience is writers, as I said, and they want to know about places to read and publish. You’re an associate editor at The Drift, and it’s a print and digital publication found in 2020. And it states on its website that it aims to introduce new work and new ideas by young writers who haven’t yet been absorbed into the media hive mind and don’t feel hemmed in by the boundaries of the existing discourse. So Talk to those people listening who want to get published in 2026 in places like The Drift and otherwise. You’ve published across the spectrum. What advice can you give to someone looking out over the landscape of the print and digital world?

Tarpley: Well, one of the things that makes me so proud to be part of The Drift is its focus on new writers. And I feel that we do a couple of things that makes it an excellent place to get a sort of first piece published. published. One is that the drift takes editing seriously in a nearly religious way. I mean, every feature piece is really a hands-on process that can take months to go from pitch to publication. And so especially if you’re a young writer who’s just getting published for the first time, you will really have the sense of people having your back and making sure that the final thing is something you’re really proud of. I mean, as someone who came out in digital media, I have had many experiences where something has just gone up unedited, you know, and, and do I wish that they could be deleted from the face of the internet? Absolutely. That’s not…

Marion: Yeah, there’s that.

Tarpley: But so I think that the editing experience that The Drift offers is like extremely rare and so valuable. The other thing I think that the drift as well is a kind of greater transparency over the pitching process than you might get at a lot of publications. So if you go to our website on our about page, there is a link to our pitching guide, which has a very detailed explanation of what we look for in a pitch. Because while we get a ton of great pitches, but I recommend people check out this pitch guide because adrift feature is kind of a specific and different animal than what would otherwise be a great story, but is better suited for a different magazine. We’re usually looking for, they’re kind of polemical. They’re usually argumentative interventions into some sort of ongoing conversation that’s bringing together all the disparate, you know, discourse on that topic and saying something new. And that bar for what that new thing is can be quite, you know, high, especially if the subject is something that has a lot of writing about it already.

Marion: That’s wonderful. It sounds like you’re bringing to the work what was given to you in your first experience in Miami. And that’s lovely. That’s so lovely.

Tarpley: I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I would love to be channeling Chuck Strauss. One more thing I will say is that a really good entry point, if you just want to tip your toe into The Drift waters, is in addition to editing more features, I also run the Mentions section. And Mentions are super short reviews. They’re basically capsule reviews of 100 words or fewer, but they go through as intense an edit as the features. And I am not kidding. I’ve had multiple Mentions where it’s like crack up upon getting our fact checks back, where these three sentences have like nine footnotes.

Marion: You’re trying to outdo The New Yorker in your fact checking.

Tarpley: Exactly. But I hope that doesn’t scare anyone off. It’s all good faith. And, you know, some of them are more, you know, suggestions. But they are, I think, multiple writing professors have told me they teach these in their writing workshops because they’re are a good exercise in concision and how to have voice with limited resources.

Marion: Perfect. Well, we’ll have to end it there, but not without me saying thank you. Thank you for the book. Thank you for making me laugh like hell reading through your work and clutch my chest and say, Damn, that’s a way to write a lead. So… It’s a joy to read you. Go sell a million of these books, please. And thank you for coming along today.

Tarpley: Thank you so much for having me. You’re so welcome.

Marion: The author is Tarpley Hitt. See more on her at tarpley hitt net. The book is Barbieland: The Unauthorized History, just out from Simon & Schuster’s One Signal imprint. Get it wherever books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow Qwerty wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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