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The Fug girls talk the Green Monster, blogging no-no's, and getting 'Messy'

Print | Comments () Posted by Rachel Raczka July 20, 2012 11:01 AM

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Once deemed the "meanest queens in the cafeteria" by the Village Voice, the two writers behind the celeb commentary blog, Go Fug Yourself, Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, happen to be quite pleasant. Actually, they're very nice, even when I called them up at 9 a.m. at their hotel after they spent the evening at last night's Sox game. The duo is currently in town to promote their new book "Messy," the "follow-up" (but not quite a sequel, as Morgan pointed out) to their 2011 YA novel "Spoiled," which is about, what else? Means girls in Hollywood.

Cocks and Morgan will be at Brookline Booksmith tonight at 279 Harvard Ave. for a "Messy" signing tonight at 7 p.m.

Courtesy of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

So last night you went to the Sox game?
Jessica: Yeah, we had a great time. They won at the last moment and there was this British family next to us and it was their first baseball game ever. It was fantastic and Fenway is awesome.

Heather: It was so cute because the people next to us were so stoked. We explained the rules [of baseball] and what the Green Monster was and at the end of the game when they hit the home run to win it, we turned to them and were like, 'This is so exciting and at your first baseball game!' And he goes, 'We know! And under the Green Monster -- it's amazing!'

Heather: I looked at Boston College when I was doing my university tour but this is really the first time I've been here as an adult. It's been amazing, we're loving it. We hung out and ate sandwiches at Boston Common yesterday which is like the GFY HQ dream outing. It was perfect.

It's interesting that for writers who cover celebrity fashion all day, you're such sports fans.
Heather: It always surprises people that the other side of our coin is so tomboyish, but we’re both really big sports nuts.

Do you have any advice for young independent bloggers who are just getting started?
Jessica: We started GoFugYourself.com in 2004 and we were really fortunate to get in when there wasn’t as much competition for readership. But I think the advice is always the same, you need to write about something you’re interested in and you have to write it the same way you would if you had 20,000 or 2,000 or 2 people reading you. If you’re not interested in what you’re writing, people can tell. It’s not a 'get rich quick' scheme like a lot of people think.

Heather: I also think if you’re starting out in the blogging world and you have journalism experience, that’s going to come in handy. You want to learn to not sacrifice accuracy and quality for speed. You want to double-check things the same way you would if you were in print and you had a big boss coming down on you. For us, news judgment also comes in a different way, like we’ve learned over the years the thing we don’t want to talk about, like women’s bodies, their DNA, and if we're talking about someone's hair, we have to make sure it's in a way that we're discussing how it's styled in the picture and not just that the person was born with lame hair.

Clothes are one thing. If you’re having a bad day and you're wearing an ugly outfit, I'm sorry there’s no way we can know that, but the body issues are so hot button that you need to step back. When you’re starting a blog you need have to think about how you’re going to treat your material and subject matter and often that’s where your relationships will come from. I think that’s where we’ve gotten a lot of our loyal readers over the years from because they know they can come to GFY and won’t find us body shaming someone. You want to approach what you’re writing about in a smart way that is true to who you are but is also in a way that you would want to be represented if you were on the blog.

Is there any strategy to how you decide what looks you like and which ones you doing?
Heather: It’s all about the context. Like Emma Stone is someone who takes some really interesting fashion risks but early on, she had a few tells. If she was wearing something and we didn’t really love it, it felt as thought she wasn’t 100 percent behind it herself because she wasn’t standing straight with her shoulders back. Instead she'd be standing there with her shoulders curled and a sheepish smile, like 'Yea, I know… be nice to me… I know it’s kind of weird.' Very often, you [the wearer] are what sells an outfit, and that’s also part of why there’s no rhyme or reason to why we like or don’t like things. Some people just have a natural ability to carry things off and some don’t and that’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Now that "Messy" is on the shelves, are there possibilities for a third book?
Heather: We always say: If there's demand, we'll happily supply! There are a lot of characters in this world that could share a book with Brooke Berlin but we're currently working on a pitch for another YA novel that's totally separate people and a different plot as well. We want to make sure we give the ["Messy"] characters a chance to breathe before we dive into a third.

Need more Fug? With the nominees list just released this week, we asked Morgan and Cocks to give us their top three Emmy looks ... ever.

(Matt Sayles/AP; Laura Rauch/AP)

1) We were concerned about this one at the time because we saw her have a very hard time walking in it, but this red Donna Karan on Nina Dobrev was a HUGE statement for her -- as a relative newcomer AND as a CW actress -- and in retrospect was one of the very most memorable dresses of 2011. She used it as a jumping-off point for a) some very polished style choices in the year since, and b) a really fruitful collaboration with Donna Karan that yielded her equally amazing Met Ball dress this past May.

2) Claire Danes looked perfect in this Armani Prive in 2011.

3) Julia Louis-Dreyfus wore this Narciso Rodriguez in 2006 -- it was, I think, her first trip back to the Emmys in a long time (she was there for "The New Adventures of Old Christine"), and she completely knocked everyone out.