Tabloid queen fixes your lousy life

The mother hen of the rag mag renaissance, Bonnie Fuller, is currently ramping up her own media profile in advance of The Joys of Much Too Much: Go For the Big Life – The Great Career, The Perfect Guy, and Everything Else You’ve Ever Wanted. Qualiying her to write such a book are years of experience spent magnifying the foibles of every famous person, turning the focus of checkout line periodicals from tales of despair, drugs and divorce to an obsession with speculative pregnancies, starlets feigning aloof at the smell of paparazzi in nearby bushes, and Starbucks beverages turned into the most proletarian of celebrity accessories – along with the requisite subplots of despair, drugs and divorce. Fuller developed her chops in the Fashion pages of the Toronto Star, then served as editor of Flare before moving stateside to eventually helm Cosmopolitan, later spearheading the revival of Us Weekly. Now, she serves as editorial director for pulp publisher American Media, given the task of salvaging the Star tabloid with her patented scrutiny of Hollywood subservience amongst young females fixated upon body image, grappling with the whims of their swinging male counterparts, delighted to live in a world where adult reading material requires a Grade 2 education. (That parody cover comes from Panopticist blogger Andrew Hearst.) Last month, Fuller even spoke to students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, an apocalyptic event skewered by Advertising Age. Fear not, this era will be over soon, clearing the path for Bonnie to conquer the self-help shelves. A preview via Mediabistro explains how the book is meant for women in their 20s and 30s, instructing them to reproduce promptly, while not forsaking self-indulgences. Such advice seems predicated on men eager to subsidize all this activity – the ones who’ll literally live up to those recurring claims of “working late”.