Mean girls make everything better, at least when it comes to storytelling. Without them, there’d be no conflict, no plot, no grit. And only in the last two decades or so have female characters been increasingly free to be awful, which is its own kind of liberation.

With the release of the new Mean Girls musical movie, the original Mean Girls celebrating its twentieth anniversary in April, and my new book about Mean Girls’ history and legacy, So Fetch, out now, it’s the perfect time to consider why we love spiky heroines like Cady Heron and genuinely terrifying villains like Regina George.

The following books about “mean girls,” from the Cadys who can’t help being attracted to the apex predator lifestyle, to the Reginas who rule by manipulation and fear, show us the inescapable power dynamics of living in any social system. Everyone can relate: reality stars, powerful professionals, publishing assistants, nineteenth-century socialites, MFA candidates, moms, and anyone trying to survive in Hollywood.

Here are some of the best books about “mean girls,” from classics to modern tales, fiction and non.

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Mona Awad, Bunny

Samantha Heather Mackey is a loner attending an elite MFA program on scholarship, but finds herself surrounded by wealthy girls with a cult-like devotion to calling each other “Bunny.” But everything changes when she finds herself mysteriously invited to the Bunnies’ infamous “Smut Salon,” and soon she’s leaving behind her friend Ava to join what turns out to be a social circle with a dark vortex.

Mean Girls meets Heathers meets cutthroat academia: What’s not to love?

Andrea Bartz, The Herd

There’s no better setting in which to examine mean-girl dynamics than a chic all-female coworking space (a la the once-powerful Wing). In The Herd, workspace CEO Eleanor Walsh, the quintessential girlboss, vanishes on the night she’s scheduled to give a high-profile press conference. The subsequent investigation exposes secrets and lies among the friends who have helped her to get where she is—and ridden her coattails.

The twists to come reveal the ways young professional women are taught to see each other as rivals, and the ways they struggle desperately to keep up perfect appearances, even, especially, among “friends.”

Anna Bogutskaya, Unlikeable Female Characters

Regina George herself is cited as her own genre of “unlikeable” female character in this nonfiction exploration of, as the subtitle says, “the women pop culture wants you to hate.” Bogutskaya traces the evolution of major characters from good girls to true anti-heroines, and ultimately celebrates the liberating effects of such characters, which give women permission to be their bitchiest, messiest selves.

Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl

This gripping supernatural thriller, since adapted into a Hulu series, tells the story of young publishing assistant Nella, who’s thrilled when the company she works for, Wagner Books, finally hires another young Black woman, Hazel. But their quick friendship begins to falter as Hazel becomes the new office star at the expense of Nella—maybe intentionally, maybe not.

And then some really strange stuff starts going on, indicating that whatever is happening goes far beyond their Nella and Hazel’s Cady/Regina dynamic.

Caroline Kepnes, Providence

Kepnes is known for the engrossing You series (and its maniacally compelling murderer-narrator Joe Goldberg), but here she weaves sci-fi elements into her tale of Jon and Chloe, will-they-won’t-they best friends who seem destined for a rom com ending…until he’s kidnapped by their H.P.-Lovecraft-obsessed substitute teacher. While mourning Jon’s disappearance, Chloe enters classic mean girls territory, hoping to crack the cool-kid crowd now that she’s set adrift.

Things take many weird turns from there, but at its core, Providence s about the eternal human longing for friendship and fitting in, especially during the young-adult years.

Leah Konen, Keep Your Friends Close

Mom friends aren’t immune from mean girls tendencies. In Konen’s forthcoming thriller (out February 20), newly divorced Mary is desperate for connection as she mourns her marriage and fights a custody battle, so she’s thrilled to meet Willa, a charismatic fellow mom at a Brooklyn park. After Mary reveals a secret about her ex to her new friend, Willa disappears from her life…only to reappear months later when Mary relocates to upstate New York.

Stranger still, Willa is now calling herself Annie and has an entirely new family. And then Mary’s ex suddenly turns up dead. Via this twisty murder mystery, Keep Your Friends Close tackles everything from mom cliques to mom-friend ghosting, and one scene even directly evokes the Mean Girls cafeteria.

Jessica Knoll, The Favorite Sister and The Luckiest Girl Alive

Knoll is a surefire bestseller for a reason. Her women are remarkably, unapologetically complicated, and her success only proves how eager female readers are to see themselves, at their barbed best and worst, reflected in their books. In The Favorite Sister, Knoll tackles reality TV tropes and sisterhood at their gnarliest, and in her debut, The Luckiest Girl Alive, she combines mean-girl high school politics with school shootings and the pressure to make good as a wife and mother for an incendiary commentary on modern womanhood.

Knoll knows how to make a mean girl human, and how to make a mean-girl experience meaningful.

Kirthana Ramisetti, Advika and the Hollywood Wives

Ramisetti’s novel is an Alice in Wonderland-like journey into the vertigo-inducing world of high-rolling Hollywood. Aspiring screenwriter Advika Srinivasan is working as a bartender at the Oscars afterparty when she’s suddenly whisked to the upper echelons of showbiz power via a flirtation with legendary director Julian Zelding, which quickly progresses to courtship and marriage.

Just one month after their wedding, though, Julian’s first wife, famous actress Evie Lockhart, dies and stipulates in her will that her ex’s “latest child bride” is to receive $1 million of her fortune and a mysterious film reel, but only if Advika divorces him. What appears at first to be a case of a Regina wreaking havoc from beyond the grave becomes an empowering tale of female solidarity as Advika begins to investigate her new husband’s past through his three ex-wives.

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Want to go more classic to get your mean girls fix? Wharton’s 1905 novel follows Lily Bart, a beautiful socialite struggling to maintain her place in wealthy New York circles of the Gilded Age. She lives with her aunt and longs for lawyer Lawrence Selden, but feels she must pursue someone wealthier to improve her situation; she lost her parents at age twenty, and has gambling debts but no inheritance.

Things heat up when she discovers that Lawrence used to be romantically involved with mean girl Bertha Dorset, and many North Shore High-like machinations follow from there.

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So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (and Why We’re Still So Obsessed with It) by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong is available via Dey Street Books.

In the fall of 1948, a 49-year-old woman, the absolute prototype of a Jewish mother, marched into the Madison Avenue office of the famous and debonair William S. Paley, the man in charge of CBS, and made a brazen demand. She wanted to write, produce, and star in her own television show. Gertrude Berg believed that she, of all people, deserved a spot on television, and she insisted that one of the most powerful men in media give it to her.

This ultimatum alone would speak to her chutzpah in any TV era, including our own. But she issued it in 1948, not a time we associate with women’s liberation.

Five feet five and 150 pounds, the mother of two grown children, Berg proposed an idea that seems radical even today: that she should star in a TV sitcom as the mother of two young teenagers. Of course, she did come with a track record. For the previous two decades, during radio’s Golden Age, she’d written and starred in a radio comedy called The Goldbergs. Radio had been the default, dominant mode of national entertainment. Families had gathered around their living room radios daily to hear the latest installments of their favorite dramas and comedies as well as news and music. She had reigned supreme in this era. She looked like the prototype of the Jewish mother because she had created it.

In fact, she had already lived an entire situation comedy lifetime: on her show The Goldbergs, she had played radio’s favorite meddling mother, Molly Goldberg, who had raised her children to adulthood over its 17-year course. Now she insisted on starting all over again as television’s favorite mother.

And she wasn’t the only woman who made such bold claims to the new frontier of television, a discovery I was surprised to stumble upon in the early annals of the medium’s history.

I was born in the 1970s, and I grew up with the television on. I watched all the syndicated reruns as a kid, dating back to I Love Lucy and Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, through The Brady Bunch and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, through All in the Family and The Jeffersons. I memorized the theme songs to The Facts of Life and Silver Spoons. I read every TV Guide that came to our suburban Chicago home cover to cover. I led the day-after conversations at school about The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Seinfeld. My family communicated in TV catchphrases: “This is Carlton, your doorman.” “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

When I grew up to become a journalist, I landed at Entertainment Weekly, where I covered the television business for ten years. I specialized in the great women of television, using my deep appreciation for TV history to write stories about Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Alias, and Grey’s Anatomy; I drew comparisons along the way to Carol Burnett, Mary Tyler Moore, Murphy Brown, and St. Elsewhere. I transitioned to writing books about television history, chronicling the lives and legacies of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Seinfeld, and Sex and the City.

Still, I didn’t know until recently, and many of even the nerdiest of TV history nerds don’t know, that there was a time—a time before, even, Lucille Ball—when women ran television. Not everything, of course: Paley and his buddies occupied the biggest offices. But a surprising number of women pioneered the genres we still watch today, negotiated contracts, directed, produced, and wrote. But their names and contributions have now been largely forgotten.

I got my first hints of this as I researched The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Reaching back before its 1970 premiere to understand its history, I ran into Gertrude Berg, who came up as I investigated predecessors to Rhoda Morgenstern, Mary’s no-nonsense Jewish friend. Berg played the original groundbreaking Jewish character Molly Goldberg. Unlike Rhoda in the 1970s, who was only implicitly Jewish until the second season of the show, Molly’s identity had been explicit since her first radio appearance. I had never heard of her, but Mary Tyler Moore Show creators Allan Burns and James L. Brooks assured me that she had been a big deal in her time.

I also learned that Betty White’s Mary Tyler Moore Show character, a TV hostess named Sue Ann Nivens, was meant as a send-up of White’s previous persona, described as “sickly sweet.” That baffled me until I looked it up; indeed, White had spent the early years of her career, throughout the 1950s, as one of the first daytime talk show hosts and then a sitcom pioneer, known for her adorable demeanor (and “high necklines”).

A surprising number of women pioneered the genres we still watch today, negotiated contracts, directed, produced, and wrote.

As I rooted around in this era, I found still more women whose contributions to the medium—not to mention their liberated lives—should have made them household names still known today, but were largely lost to footnotes. Irna Phillips, for example, had conceived the soap opera, including its defining tropes, dramatic organ cues and cliff-hangers that punctuate complicated interpersonal problems. And she did it while she raised two adopted children as a single mother, building an empire along the way that included shows that would run for decades to come. She hoped, she said, that she would eventually meet a man for whom she would give it all up. But she never did; her Guiding Light, in fact, holds the record as the longest-running scripted program in broadcast history, ending in 2009 after 72 years on radio and television. Decades’ worth of soap fans are thankful Phillips never found the right guy.

Hazel Scott, meanwhile, had parlayed a successful career as a jazz musician into hosting a variety show, which made her the first Black person, male or female, to host a national prime-time program. But insidious opposition to her work as a civil rights activist would cut that short and even drive her out of the country.

I wanted to tell the story of a time in television when women’s ascendance and equality seemed possible, and their prominence allowed them to set the standards for everything that came after them. They were brave enough to try what hadn’t been done before, and in the process found what worked (or didn’t), for instance, on a daytime talk show, a TV soap opera, or a family sitcom; they showed us smart, interesting, multifaceted, dignified versions of women of color, single career women, and Jewish mothers. They did all of this 70-plus years ago, when segregation was still legal and quite the norm, especially in the American South; when women were expected to get married straight out of high school and stay home to feed their husbands, clean the house, and raise the children; when divorced women, single women, and working women were seen as threatening, selfish, failed, used-up, and suspicious.

I found four women, in particular, who represented the different parts of television’s, and women’s, history of the time: Berg, who played up her motherhood while building an empire; the single mother and daytime soap impresario Irna Phillips; the glamorous political firebrand and variety show pioneer Hazel Scott; and the perky, deliberately single daytime talk show host Betty White.

Television had existed in theory for nine years as these women first entered the business. But it was just growing out of infancy and into toddlerhood in 1948, as television sets’ price point crept downward and more people could afford to own one. The number of homes with televisions in the United States reached one million, which represented just two percent of the population.

Signs indicated that a growth spurt would soon come. The C.E. Hooper Company had just begun tracking television ratings after doing the job for the past 14 years for radio, the primary means of mass entertainment in the United States. The first nightly newscast, CBS TV News, had debuted in May, not long after the radio network had launched its first substantial commercial television programming overall.

The other major radio network, NBC, set out to use television to distribute high culture to the masses, bringing its NBC Symphony Orchestra, led by the renowned Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, over from radio. ABC, which lagged far behind the other two radio powerhouses, launched on television as well, hoping for better fortunes on the new frontier. DuMont, a TV manufacturer, was operating its own network and giving ABC some serious competition. WTVR in Richmond, Virginia, became the nation’s first TV station south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The variety show hosts Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan were becoming TV’s first superstars.

In that Wild West era of television, no one knew what might work. Broadcasts were live, and anything was worth a try. When Berg did get her television show, she had to layer two or three housedresses over one another on a show night, then run backstage between scenes to strip one off as her quick costume change.

I wanted to tell the story of a time in television when women’s ascendance and equality seemed possible.

Phillips and her directors had to teach the first TV soap opera stars how to play to cameras instead of just speaking into a microphone as they had on radio. (The actors spent Phillips’s first TV soap visibly tracking their lines on a blackboard just off camera, making them resemble lookouts rather than soap stars.) Scott had to maintain her trademark cool, fresh beauty while she played piano under broiling TV lights in a silent studio, the opposite of the adoring crowds she was used to. White hosted one of the first daytime talk shows and had to improvise on camera for five and a half hours a day, six days a week, with no writers to help.

The nascent television business included these and other women in a surprising number of jobs, both in front of and behind the cameras. Women hosted daytime music and cooking shows, led industry unions, and even developed new TV news formats, including one of the first public affairs programs, NBC’s Meet the Press, created and hosted by the broadcast journalist Martha Rountree. It’s still on the air as of 2020, making it TV’s longest-running show.

In fact, the creative teams behind the handful of scripted, serialized, prime-time shows in 1949–1950 were about 25 percent female, according to my own count, almost exactly where things stand today in television. (Comparable statistics aren’t available for the radio industry of the time.) That would drop over the next few decades to a dismal 6.5 percent in 1973—a time when the growing women’s movement forced Hollywood’s Writers Guild of America to undertake such a count at all; in the years between, no reliable statistics are available.

San Diego State University’s Center for the Studio of Women in Television & Film began tracking those statistics more closely each year starting in 1997, when women made up 21 percent of behind-the-scenes talent. In 2018–2019, women made up about 25 percent of TV creators across platforms at a time considered to be a high point for women working behind the scenes in the medium—landing us now roughly where we were back in 1949 in terms of gender representation behind the scenes.

Many of the earliest TV stars, female and male, came up through the radio ranks, writing and performing for what was Americans’ dominant home entertainment medium until the 1950s. While radio reigned supreme, TV signals reached tentatively across the country, in hopes that someone would be out there to receive them, literally: television was live and broadcast quite similarly to radio, sending signals out to transmitters, which would beam them to home antennae and produce the picture and sound viewers would experience as it was broadcast. Every broadcast existed only in the moment.

Crucially for women in the business, television was also still a speculative business. Resources were scarce and fame wasn’t a sure thing. Women led among the pioneers, willing to try a new field where men didn’t yet hog all the airtime. While male writers, actors, and hosts enjoyed the Golden Age of Radio from the 1930s through the 1940s, women grabbed the chance to write, produce, host, and act for TV while it was still an open field.

The most enduringly famous of these women was Lucille Ball, who came to television from radio in 1951. CBS asked her to bring her radio hit My Favorite Husband to the new medium, and she agreed to do so only if her real-life husband, the Cuban American musician Desi Arnaz, could play her spouse. After they proved their dual appeal with a successful vaudeville act, CBS agreed. Their show became I Love Lucy, the era’s defining hit for two major reasons: Ball’s genius for physical comedy and their insistence that the show be shot on film, which allowed it to live on in syndicated reruns for decades to come. But Lucy wasn’t the anomaly she appeared to be; many women had come before her in television, with equally important roles both in front of the camera and behind the scenes.

Men flooded the industry and took over many of the jobs women had been doing when, in the mid-1950s, television became big business and a conservative wave washed over the country. It was the era that would be idealized as true Americana: idols of white, straight masculinity, such as James Dean and Elvis Presley, ruled. Marilyn Monroe was objectified relentlessly as America’s biggest film star, revered for her girlish, feminine wiles.

Women led among the pioneers, willing to try a new field where men didn’t yet hog all the airtime.

The economy was at full blast, like the new sounds of rock ’n’ roll blaring from a suburban teenager’s car stereo. American life was grand—as long as you were a white, straight, well-heeled man with a house, a wife, a few kids, and a few cars. TV began to reflect that Father-knows-best patriarchy. As a result, many of those women’s contributions, aside from Lucy’s, vanished from memory.

I chose these four women—Gertrude Berg, Irna Phillips, Hazel Scott, and Betty White—to tell this story, which encompasses many other female television firsts, because they each represent a different dominant strand of that story. Berg and Scott took on the big leagues of prime time and fought ethnic and racial stereotypes along the way, paving the way for Clair Huxtable and Olivia Pope, The Nanny and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. As a result, they also battled direct attacks on their careers from the supposed anti-Communist crusaders of McCarthyism, who used the Cold War as cover to attack the left.

Jews, civil rights activists, and progressives—many of them women—lost their voices and livelihoods in the process. Phillips and White worked in the daytime realm, where female audiences ruled, even though they were often condescended to. Phillips and White pioneered the territory that would later provide fertile ground for the careers of Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres. All four women faced an incursion of patriarchal, conservative forces that compelled them to fight for their survival.

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Excerpted from When Women Invented Television: The Untold Story of the Female Powerhouses Who Pioneered the Way We Watch Today. Used with the permission of the publisher, Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2021 by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong.

If you’re interested in having a commercial hit as an author, you’re interested in being something akin to a pop star. Pop stars are artists who, by happenstance or design, make something lots of people like, then dedicate themselves to reproducing that success at the behest of their corporate benefactors. Many find this process suffocating, since they are dynamic human beings who seek new experiences and expressions as they change, while the market demands they replicate the same fun trick they did that one time on their hit record. Successful pop stars must keep making the same thing, slightly differently each time, but not unrecognizably differently, or they must do something difficult and rare: come up with a totally new trick that people like just as much as the first one.

Commercially successful authors must do the same. I realized this as I researched and wrote my recent book Pop Star Goddesses, which charts the career and life trajectories of 35 female hit-makers of the last 30 years. We authors spend more time tending to flabby sentences than we do sculpting our bodies, and thank goodness for that. But we do tend to our public images—via social media and regular old media—with relatively equal obsession, performing the complicated choreography of balancing our personhood with our products.

I’ve experienced all of this over my ten years of writing books for major publishers. Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted was my passion project. I wrote a thorough proposal laying out the case for a history of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, emphasizing the many female writers—unusual for a 1970s comedy—who turned their own lives into storylines for the series. It went over well enough to sell at auction, and I ended up at Simon & Schuster. I cried with joy when I got the email from my agent.

The book was well-reviewed in major publications, including The New York Times, when it came out in 2013. If I were Adele, this would be my 19, not a breakthrough but good enough to advance to the next level. As a result, I got a second book with Simon & Schuster, though choosing the topic was tougher this time, with a committee involved. It was understood I would pick another TV show worthy of a cultural biography. But now, the show had to be bigger. Will & Grace was deemed too niche. A Cosby Show idea, conceived at a time when few were aware of the sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby, thankfully died with the announcement of an impending Cosby biography. Finally, we settled on Seinfeld.

The result was a bestseller, making the New York Times list its first week and staying for many more. If I were Adele, this would be my 21, the one with “Rolling in the Deep” and “Someone Like You.”

Now, I had no choice for the next book.

I pitched new approaches to cultural criticism, working for the better part of a year on one proposal that I loved—and still love enough that I’m keeping it to myself. But that wasn’t what anyone wanted from me now, so it was time to pick another TV show. Could we find an even bigger one? We finally agreed on Sex and the City, which felt like a sure thing. There was a legitimate story to tell about women, sex, and consumerism on television in the 2000s. Everything Sex and the City seemed to turn to gold. Multiple massive-selling books had been Sex and the City-adjacent, from the Candace Bushnell collection that served as the basis for the TV series to the self-help guide He’s Just Not That Into You by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tucillo, which was based on just one line in the show.

From the day I signed that deal until the day the book came out in summer 2018, people inside the industry and out said the same thing to me: “This one is going to be bigger than the last one!” It made me nervous, but I also believed it. Aren’t careers supposed to go up, up, endlessly up?

What I learned is how expectations change everything. Sex and the City and Us actually did okay—better than Mary and Lou—but felt like a failure because it sold way less than Seinfeldia. When Seinfeldia made the bestseller list, I didn’t expect it at all. I didn’t even know when the list came out. I was in the back of a hired car on my way to a library event in New Jersey when I got a call from my agent with the news. On the Wednesday after Sex and the City and Us came out, I parked myself on the sofa with my laptop and refreshed my email constantly, waiting for the news that I had made the bestseller list, because that was what we all expected. I had wine ready to toast with. That email never came, that week or any other week. I had gone from bestseller back to midlist, and I felt the fall. If I were Lady Gaga, this would be my Artpop, the one everything seemed to be building up to, but instead was met with a shrug.

I began to understand why several authors have stopped publishing new, book-length works regularly after gigantic hits: Gillian Flynn after Gone Girl and Cheryl Strayed after Wild, for instance. Their peaks were so high, they were unmistakable, and they, perhaps, had the luxury of a nice long break as they waited for inspiration that’s truly worth the trouble and the risk.

After the crash, it’s tempting to keep up the pretense of world domination in the age of social media. I could not bring myself to correct people when they commented that I was “killing it!” or when they erroneously identified this book as a bestseller, too. I felt, once again, like a pop star, presenting the “bestselling author Barbie” version of myself on social media.

This is where my Pop Star Goddesses have taught me a lot. Writing about their long-term career arcs for the book showed me the patterns: Stick around long enough and you’ll experience a downfall—in sales, in public affection, often in both. But a failure can be freeing. Lady Gaga followed Artpop with Joanne, a departure into Americana and pink, wide-brimmed hats that no one asked for—but seemed to be invigorating to her. (And it is, for the record, my favorite Gaga album.) Britney Spears and Mariah Carey are also among the goddesses who have released excellent under-the-radar albums in recent years (Britney’s Glory in 2016 and Mariah’s Caution in 2018) while under far less immediate pressure to crank out hits.

And the best art often comes after you stop chasing hits. This is when you may—or may not—pull off the long-odds trick of doing something new that people like as much as, or more than, the trick you were known for before.

Some goddesses have done it. Beyoncé’s self-titled surprise release in 2013 marked a clear departure in her sound. She said it herself in the track “Haunted”: “I’m climbing up the walls ’cause all the shit I hear is boring / All the shit I do is boring / All these record labels boring.” And then: “Probably won’t make no money on this / Oh well.” Rihanna got similarly, beautifully weird and messy on her 2016 album ANTI. She hasn’t made one since, despite her fans’ constant histrionic pressure for more output. Both were critical smashes and did just fine on the charts, too.

Of course neither I, nor most working authors, can truly emulate Lady Gaga and Rihanna for one major reason: money. They might be risking their pristine record of hits, or even some bad reviews. But they’ve likely got a stash of money to get them through an album that sells only a few million instead of tens of millions, for instance.

At the same time, many of us do want to write hits, because we want to make our living as authors, or because we want to reach as many people as possible. That’s okay, too—another lesson I learned from my goddesses. Gwen Stefani, for instance, honestly recounted, in a New York Times interview, her devastation when her record executive told her to give up on hits and make “an artistic record” when she was 46. “Once you have a hit,” she said, “there’s not much point in ever writing a song that doesn’t have the intention of being a hit.”

I hope there always remains a point to writing a song, or a book, that will never be a hit. But I understand her position. I’m working on my next book now, more narrative nonfiction about TV history, but also a little different: When Women Invented Television will tell the stories of female pioneers in the medium from 1949 to 1955, who laid the foundation for what we watch today but have been largely forgotten. I hope it’s my Lemonade, but I’ll take a Joanne.

A few years ago, I started playing covers of my favorite pop songs at open mics, and I began frequenting a dance class where we learn the real choreography to Britney and Beyoncé songs. I am in no danger of someone sullying these efforts by offering to pay me for them, so they have reminded me of what it felt like when I first started writing, when no one was waiting for me to produce anything, much less expecting me to reach a certain very large number of people with my work.

Somewhere between here and Gwen Stefani lies a sweet spot, a place where we can balance love and money. The money part may get harder in the years to come, as the world and its economy attempt to find normal after the coronavirus pandemic and publishing figures out its place in it. But we can look to our favorite pop stars for that bit of inspiration to begin, to feel like a superhero version of ourselves as we put on our Joanne hat and start writing those lyrics. Maybe we’ll pull a Beyoncé and sell the world on a whole new trick of ours. If not, remember that even Lady Gaga has her down moments.

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Pop Star Goddesses by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong is available now via Morrow Gift.