Amy Dubois Barnett’s New Novel Is a Love Letter to 2000s Fashion Magazines

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When I interviewed Amy DuBois Barnett a few days after her novel, If I Ruled the World, had published, she was fresh off an appearance on The View. Barnett, the first Black deputy editor in chief at Harper’s Bazaar, as well as a longtime media executive at titles like Essence, Honey, and Teen People, is used to media appearances for the brands she has represented, but this time was different. She was promoting her long-gestating novel, a work that explores the work and relationships of Nikki Rose, a young woman on the brink of career greatness. Like Rose, Barnett has had an influential career in media. In addition to her work listed above, she was editor in chief of Essence. Barnett spoke with Harper’s Bazaar about pulling inspiration from her own time breaking barriers in media and the joys of writing a messy main character.

I’m wondering if you can talk about the protagonist of your novel. You’ve talked a bit about writing a complicated protagonist, a complicated heroine. How did you start to pull this character together?

I just love this character. She is not coming of age because she’s an adult when we meet her—she’s 29—but it’s a coming-of-power story because she is navigating New York City in the late 1990s, early 2000s. She’s working in the magazine industry, with big dreams of becoming an editor in chief, but she’s also music-industry adjacent.

She’s contending with a lot of rampant misogyny. She’s contending with sexual harassment and sexual violence. A lot of what you see in the news relating to the “reckoning” happening in the music industry is a lot of what she’s dealing with, a lot of what I’m writing about in the book.

Everybody’s going to think this is a roman à clef. I’m bracing myself for that. My protagonist, Nikki Rose, is inspired by my experience as an editor in chief. And a lot of what she goes through along her journey reflects some of the emotions that I experienced and some of the things that I observed. I did pull a few small incidences from real life into the book. There’s even one from Harper’s Bazaar, when I was a deputy editor in chief; I pulled one small incident into the book.

She’s also dealing with racism when she’s working at the mainstream high-end fashion magazine where we first meet her. So she is a messy protagonist. She makes a lot of mistakes, but we root for her because she is somebody who is purpose-driven and really wants to represent communities that she cares about. And by the end of the book, she is very inspiring because it’s when she comes into her own voice and becomes empowered that everything sort of falls in place for her professionally, romantically, with her friends.

You of course were deputy editor in chief here at Harper’s Bazaar, and you mentioned an incident here inspiring a part of the novel. Can you talk a little bit about that?

When I was at Harper’s Bazaar, I was leading a meeting when we were talking about upcoming feature and fashion shoot ideas. I was in this meeting pitching ideas about an R&B singer coming out with an album at the time, and I was saying, “Well, hey, she’s coming out with an album. We’re looking for a fashion shoot idea. Maybe we could shoot her, I don’t know, black and white, smoky jazz bar.”

You know how these meetings work; you all work together on the ideas, and you finesse them together. Whatever I was initially pitching would not have probably been the finished product, but it was an idea to be discussed. At the time, Glenda Bailey was the editor in chief, and I learned a lot from her. She is an absolute legend in the publishing industry and also notorious for not easily greenlighting stories. So that’s the context.

When I was in this meeting, one of the editors in the room looks at me and goes, “Oh, that singer is so boring. The only way I could see Glenda greenlighting the story is if she would agree to be photographed in whiteface or something.” And then she looks at me and she’s like, “Oops, sorry.”

Of course, I’m the only Black person in the room. I might’ve been the only brunette in the room, to be honest with you. And it really stuck with me because there were no repercussions. I really didn’t have a lot of recourse around what I could say at the time. It was said so casually. I thought that it was very emblematic of the casual racism that you experience when you are one of the few or the only in these white spaces.

I mean, that brings me to my next question, or it’s a two-part question, which is, what drew you personally to work in magazines when you first began?

I mean, I love magazines into my soul. I’m a magazine maker at my very core, in part because it appeals to my inherent dichotomy. I’m very much textual, obviously love writing. Obviously, I love editing, but I’m very visual. So I loved creative-directing the overall issues.

A magazine is putting together a piece of art every month. I just loved the visual creative sensibilities you need to make an issue hang together. I also really like being a generalist. I like covering beauty and fashion and health and travel. And I also like covering politics and social issues and other topics that are really important to communities that I care about.

I’m very much a roll-up-my-sleeves, work-until-the-job-gets-done person, but I’m also comfortable representing a brand. And so I liked that aspect of it as well. So working in magazines really, really hit a lot of areas that I’m very passionate about.

How has the industry changed? Has there been a change? Is it a surface change, or do you feel like there’s been a meaningful change around magazine publishing?

I mean, when I was an editor in chief and it was the heyday of magazines, that was also the era in which my novel is set. I wanted people to understand what it felt like when magazines were incredibly powerful. A cover could make or break a celebrity. Magazine jobs were very glamorous and very sought after. And the office environments were pressure cookers because they were so desired and also because there was so much at stake.

You walked into the office, and we’re all dressed to the nines, and it looked like a runway every day. But we are in a world where there is much less value in the permanence that magazines represented. There was deep value in creating and writing an article for a magazine because it would exist forever. But if it goes up on digital—and no disrespect to digital, because I absolutely love that form too, and I’ve run a bunch of digital brands—but if it goes up and there’s a mistake, you can correct it. You know what I mean? You could pull it down.

A magazine article had to be perfect. When it went to print, that was it. I do think that people are getting a little sick of digital. There’s going to be a return to analog. I’m seeing that, but I think that it will be probably more niche. There’ll be smaller niche magazines that people really gravitate toward. I am grateful that many magazine brands have become digital powerhouses, but I do miss print magazines.

What do you make of the current … I don’t know if you can really call it a reckoning, but maybe a reexamination around misogyny and sexual assault and sexual violence in hip-hop culture and, by extension, some of these publications that both supported and also reported on some of these incidents?

I am really grateful for the courageous women who’ve come forth and are shedding light on some of the worst offenders and worst offenses that took place in the era of my novel and in the era when I was an editor in chief. It was very much a part of the culture.

I love hip-hop. I’m a hip-hop head, and I value the art form, and I respect the art form. But when gangster rap became more prevalent in the industry, I think that a lot of the lyrics in some of the songs turned more violent and more misogynistic. And that became something that threaded throughout not just the music but then the music industry and then the culture at large.

Certainly there are bad actors [in the culture] now experiencing a reckoning, but it’s going to be more of a challenge to deal with because it’s a culture that you’re trying to change versus taking down a few bad apples. I’m grateful that people are starting to recognize what a lot of us went through. And I’m very interested to see how this continues to play out.

This is a novel that, as we’ve said a few times, is set in the late ’90s. It’s almost like a historical novel because you have to go back and figure out how you’re going to orient your characters to understand the world at that time and understand their positionality at that time. So can you talk a little bit about the process of writing into that space?

I listened to a whole lot of late-’90s, early-2000s hip-hop and R&B when I was writing it. I was, like, livin’ my life like it’s golden. So that really helped me a lot, to get back into the time. And a lot of it I lived, so I could remember things and I could mine my own observations. And some things I researched. What was the lingo for that? What was on the corner of this street and that street?

The book is very much a love letter to New York City, very much a New York City book. I wanted to get those details right too. Where was this coffee shop? Was Cafeteria there? Was Florent there? It was a combination of memory, of giving myself some era-appropriate stimuli, and then just some straight-up research.

What was the most challenging part of writing this book?

There were sections where my protagonist was going through some really emotionally difficult things in her life. They were tough to write. It’s just tough to have a character you love going through things. People underestimate how difficult it is to love characters and then put them through the ringer. You feel like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe she’s going to deal with this.”

While my protagonist’s journey is not my own, it does reflect some of the emotions that I experienced during that time and also a lot of what I observed my friends go through. So on one hand, it was cathartic because I could write out some of the emotions. And on the other hand, it was difficult because I was then imagining what this person I know went through. So I found those kinds of scenes, especially the sexual violence, a little difficult.

How did you want it all to end for your protagonist?

My protagonist goes through a whole journey where she makes a lot of mistakes and she screws up a lot of things professionally, in her love life, with her friends. She has successes, she has failures, but it’s really when she becomes empowered and she finds her own voice that things fall together for her. And I wanted that to happen for her. I wanted her to go through this really messy, difficult journey but be able to become an empowered woman by the end of it and realize that it’s in that power that she’s able to achieve a lot of her goals and bring a lot of things into her life that are valuable and that she loves.

And now it’s in development to become a television series. How did that come about?

I always envisioned it on a screen. It got discovered by a book scout, a very powerful Hollywood executive named Emma Watts, who read it, loved it, and she gave it to Lee Daniels, who is an Oscar-nominated genius. The fact that both of them love the book and wanted to work with me was already an honor. I’m thrilled to say Lee and I have a development deal for the television adaptation of If I Ruled the World set up at Hulu. So I’m cowriting the pilot with him, and I’m very optimistic that you will be seeing this novel on screens sometime.

What’s it like to cowrite with someone? Because magazines are inherently collaborative work, but novel writing is so individualistic; it’s really just you and the page. So how has it been different in this writing relationship?

I’m very grateful to be working with somebody who has such an incredible track record in Hollywood and has so much institutional and creative knowledge to share. So I’ve just been like, “Please mentor me. Please take me under your wing.” That part is kind of fun. I’ve been in leadership positions for such a long time and I am excited again to just sit at the feet of somebody who has such a tremendous reputation and learn something brand-new.

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