The Only Girl: My Life and Times on the Masthead of Rolling Stone

by Robin Green

Overview

A raucous and vividly dishy memoir by the only woman writer on the masthead of Rolling Stone magazine in the early Seventies.

In 1971, Robin Green had an interview with Jann Wenner at the offices of Rolling Stone magazine. She had just moved to Berkeley, California, a city that promised "Good Vibes All-a Time." Those days, job applications asked just one question, "What are your sun, moon, and rising signs?" Green thought she was interviewing for a clerical job like the other girls in the office, a "real job." Instead, she was hired as a journalist.

With irreverent humor and remarkable nerve, Green spills stories of sparring with Dennis Hopper on a film junket in the desert, scandalizing fans of David Cassidy and spending a legendary evening on a water bed in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s dorm room. In the seventies, Green was there as Hunter S. Thompson crafted Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and now, with a distinctly gonzo female voice, she reveals her side of that tumultuous time in America.

Brutally honest and bold, Green reveals what it was like to be the first woman granted entry into an iconic boys' club. Pulling back the curtain on Rolling Stone magazine in its prime, The Only Girl is a stunning tribute to a bygone era and a publication that defined a generation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781549144967
Publisher:	Hachette Book Group
Publication date:	08/21/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)

About the Author

Robin Green is an award-winning TV writer and producer known for her work as an executive producer and writer for The Sopranos on HBO and for creating, with her husband Mitchell Burgess, the CBS drama Blue Bloods, now in its seventh season. She is an alumna of Brown University and holds an MFA degree from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Green lives in New York City with her husband and mixed-breed dog, Silenzio.

Robin Green is an award-winning TV writer and producer known for her work as an executive producer and writer for The Sopranos on HBO and for creating, with her husband Mitchell Burgess, the CBS drama Blue Bloods, now in its seventh season. She is an alumna of Brown University and holds an MFA degree from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Green lives in New York City with her husband and mixed-breed dog, Silenzio.

What People are Saying About This

Co-Founder and Publisher of Rolling Stone - Jann Wenner

“Robin has written a frank, witty and loving about memoir growing up in the milieu of the seventies at Rolling Stone. Her honesty and insight brought all those times back, some of RS’s wildest and wackiest early days.”

Bestselling author of My Kitchen Year - Ruth Reichl

“Compulsively readable, laugh out loud funny and beautifully crafted. I ate up every word. If you thought they had more fun back then, this book will prove that you were right.”

Creator of Southland and Ray Donovan - Ann Biderman

“What a time! A hilarious, mordant, and finally deeply touching bildungsmemoir of a gifted writer finding her voice among “the men”, at Rolling stone and later, in the trenches of Hollywood. Her sexual picadillos are laugh out loud funny and at the same time deeply moving. The diffidence of youth smacking up against a search for her voice provides a brilliant ride –I couldn’t put it down.”

Editorial Reviews

08/20/2018
In this ribald memoir, Green describes her rise from aimless college graduate to rock journalist and writer/producer for The Sopranos and Blue Bloods. Green grew up in Providence, R.I., and attended Brown University in the late 1960s, where she became the only woman on the editorial staff of the Brown Daily Herald. In 1971 she got an interview with Alan Rinzler, an editor at Rolling Stone, and soon had her first assignment from Jann Wenner to write a feature on Marvel Comics, which became the cover story. While Green never goes deeply into how it felt to be the first woman on the masthead or her own personal and professional struggles at the magazine, she does write of her worries that others viewed her as “sleeping her way” onto the masthead (especially as she was in a relationship with an editor). Green wonderfully tells of her various assignments, including a failed interview with a stoned and evasive Dennis Hopper (so “cruel, so high”) and how she escaped his compound and later wrote an eviscerating article; riding in a car with Annie Leibovitz, with Hunter S. Thompson at the wheel loaded on Wild Turkey and pills; and sleeping with RFK Jr. in his dorm room at Harvard but refusing to write about him. Green stopped writing for Rolling Stone three years after she got the job because of disagreements with Wenner. Green’s book is an entertaining look at the early era of Rolling Stone and rock journalism. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"She writes unsparingly of her frailties, her fixations, the honest appetites of an explorer in a fragmenting America. Brave survivor of the psychedelic wars, she came, she saw, she conquered."—USA Today

"A dishy memoir about life as the first woman on the masthead at Rolling Stone magazine during the sex and drugs heyday of the 1970s."—New York Times

"They say if you remember the '60s, you weren't there. But Robin Green was. She remembers the '70s, too, and all that followed. And what's more, in "The Only Girl," she names names... lately, Green's been thinking back on those hippie San Francisco days again. Her trips to Big Sur, beautifully crazy friends, and her own flower-child belief that anything — absolutely anything — was possible. Turns out, she was right."—New York Daily News

"a stunning tribute to a bygone era and a publication that defined a generation,"—Red Carpet Crash

"a must-read for anyone who has ever been or felt like, well, the only girl in the room."—Hello Giggles

"In this candid memoir, she shares how she earned a reputation as a bitch, what it was like working alongside the intimidating Annie Leibovitz and witnessing the drug-fueled ravings of Hunter S. Thompson, and why she was fired over a Kennedy story...Filled with plenty of sex, drugs, and some rock 'n' roll, this offers a one of-a-kind perspective on the people behind a cultural phenomenon."—Booklist

"The Only Girl's vigor comes from her blunt acknowledgment of the diffidence she faced early in her career. To follow her path to being paid, published, and praised amid many tribulations proves both a solace and great reward."—Zyzzyva

"A lusty, reflective, score-settling memoir from the woman who steered a chaotic career course between Rolling Stone and The Sopranos...Green's memoir is both a solid insider's account and a happy-go-lucky, lifelong coming-of-age story."—Kirkus

"With humor and candid self-reflection, the author details her struggles after being fired from Rolling Stone...Reading like a real-life road novel, Green's memoir is a must for aspiring writers."—Library Journal

"Brutally honest, Ms. Green writes about what it was like to be the first woman granted entry into an iconic boys club."—WNYC

"[A] funny, candid memoir...Green paints a vivid picture of being at the epicentre of the new rock'n'roll bohemian culture with the Rolling Stone crowd."—Guardian

"Entertaining, page-turning, and scorchingly candid new memoir."—No Depression

"Compulsively readable, laugh out loud funny and beautifully crafted. I ate up every word. If you thought they had more fun back then, this book will prove that you were right."—Ruth Reichl, bestselling author of My Kitchen Year

"Robin has written a frank, witty and loving memoir about growing up in the milieu of the seventies at Rolling Stone. Her honesty and insight brought all those times back, some of RS's wildest and wackiest early days."—Jann Wenner, Co-Founder and Publisher of Rolling Stone

"A funny, frank, powerful and ultimately moving memoir by an extraordinary writer who didn't merely roll with the Zeitgeist but remade it in her own image."—T.C. Boyle, author of The Harder They Come and The Terranauts

"This isn't a memoir recollected in tranquility. It doesn't 'capture' an experience. It animates a specific time and place - - making it jump off the page so it smacks you in the face. If you didn't live it, you do now. If you did, it's déjà vu all over again. Robin Green stares down her life in the clarifying light of truth. Her fearlessness and reckless honesty give her story an aching power, poignancy, and immediacy you won't soon forget."—Joshua Brand, writer and producer of St. Elsewhere, Northern Exposureand The Americans

"Robin Green broke ground for women as part of two media revolutions-Rolling Stone's reimagining of the magazine and the new era for television ushered in by The Sopranos. With The Only Girl, she offers sharp and striking scenes of a culture in transition, creating a vivid sense of both the thrilling possibilities and the heartbreaking limitations of the times."—Alan Light, former Editor-in-Chief of Vibe and Spinmagazines and author of Let's Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain

"Only girl on the masthead? And in the room! And still standing! And with cojones! Green has written a straight-talking, utterly indiscrete, deliciously shocking story about being in the right place at the right time pretty much all the time."—Bill Buford, journalist and author of Among the Thugs and Heat

"Her prose has a freewheeling, informal quality, summoning some moments vividly."—Financial Times

From the Publisher

Author Robin Green narrates her own #metoo story of life as the only woman at the boys’ club that was ROLLING STONE magazine. The audiobook is an unabashed account of sex, drugs, more sex, and, oh yes, groundbreaking journalism. The weakest aspect of the work is Green's narration. A voice that sounds like too many years of cigarettes coupled with unintentional pauses makes the listener wish for a more experienced narrator. But there is no denying the hypnotic power of the salacious stories and her ability to get the rich and famous to share their darkest secrets. The rampant sexism of the early ‘70s made her biggest challenge her own workplace. Her admission that she sometimes literally seduced her subject taints her journalistic integrity a tad, but not the voyeuristic pleasure. M.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2019 - AudioFile

Author Robin Green narrates her own #metoo story of life as the only woman at the boys’ club that was ROLLING STONE magazine. The audiobook is an unabashed account of sex, drugs, more sex, and, oh yes, groundbreaking journalism. The weakest aspect of the work is Green's narration. A voice that sounds like too many years of cigarettes coupled with unintentional pauses makes the listener wish for a more experienced narrator. But there is no denying the hypnotic power of the salacious stories and her ability to get the rich and famous to share their darkest secrets. The rampant sexism of the early ‘70s made her biggest challenge her own workplace. Her admission that she sometimes literally seduced her subject taints her journalistic integrity a tad, but not the voyeuristic pleasure. M.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2019 - AudioFile

2018-05-28
A lusty, reflective, score-settling memoir from the woman who steered a chaotic career course between Rolling Stone and The Sopranos.In this debut book, Green recounts the lively, raucous tale of how she found, lost, and regained her groove, smoking dope and winning Emmys in the process. The well-educated daughter of "upwardly striving East Side Jews," she headed west in the late 1960s with a diploma from Brown University, a rich boyfriend, and only a vague sense of what to do when she got there. By dint of luck, as well as talent, Green wound up at Rolling Stone, scoring a cover story on Marvel Comics (where she had briefly worked) that established her trademark droll tone. "Go be ironic" was her mission, and she delivered with numerous significant pieces, including profiles of Dennis Hopper at his most obnoxious and David Cassidy at his most naïve. Besides breaking a pot-befogged glass ceiling—she distinguished herself among "the brainy and evolved sugar candy that was the girls of Rolling Stone"—she happily indulged her inner wild child. She also got sloppy—e.g., setting out to interview the children of the late Robert F. Kennedy, she "crossed a journalistic line" by sleeping with his son. Although her career briefly bottomed out, Green staged an impressive comeback as a TV writer who could navigate both the high (Northern Exposure, The Sopranos) and mid-range (Blue Bloods) plateaus. Her story is wildly picaresque—upper-middle-class to rags to homes in New York and Los Angeles—revealing (especially when dealing with the backstage politics of TV production), and at times wearyingly materialistic and self-absorbed.Arriving on the heels of Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan's biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, Green's memoir is both a solid insider's account and a happy-go-lucky, lifelong coming-of-age story.

Kirkus Reviews