Bullseye with Jesse Thorn : NPR
Gevinson attends the front row for Rodarte during NYFW: The Show on September 11, 2021 in New York City.
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
Being a kid can be tough. So many choices get made for you. And the people who make those choices, grownups, don’t often feel like explaining themselves. Now add to all that a new wrinkle of being a gifted child.
Think about the pressure that’s applied to keep doing that thing you’re good at for the rest of your life. The pressure to keep getting better and better at that thing, lest your peers catch up with you.
Tavi Gevinson was a gifted child. She started keeping a fashion blog when she was only eleven years old. Then, at fifteen, she founded Rookie – a teen magazine that covered fashion, gender, pop music. Rookie was fun and frivolous at times, serious and thoughtful at others, but always engrossing.
Glimpses of the Moon by Sam Freilich and Tavi Gevinson
Audible
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Rookie ended its run in 2018. Tavi is no longer a gifted child, because, well, that kind of thing only lasts so long, by definition. She’s made her way into gifted adulthood. She is seriously very talented. She’s acted in movies, TV, on and off Broadway. She still writes, too.
Last month she released Glimpses of the Moon. It’s an audio book that tells the story of a man and a woman who stage a fake wedding to get free stuff.
She also just self published a zine – yes, a zine in 2024 — called Fan Fiction. In Gevinson’s own words, she describes it as: “a deranged novella about a writer named Tavi and her friendship with Taylor Swift.”
Tavi returns to the show to talk about her new projects. She also talks about how the ever-changing world of social media has impacted her work. She also gets into how she dealt with the pressure of being called a wunderkind, and how it’s kind of a relief not to be one anymore.