The Only Girl by Robin Green
A review of The Only Girl: My Life and Times Working on the Masthead of the Rolling Stone by Robin Green
“The fact that when we die we are nothing more than worm meat—I just don’t think about it.”
The Only Girl by Robin Green (2018). Published by Little, Brown and Company.
I picked this book up while actually going to the library for the first time in almost two years now. The pandemic has been insane in the fact that I couldn’t go to the library, and literally I was acting like a kid in a candy store. I ended up with ten books to read over the course of three weeks, and so when I stumbled across this one I was immediately intrigued by the title. Media publications still is very much a boys game, with a lot of mastheads being male-dominated in the higher positions.
I had no idea who Robin Green was, so I didn’t have any personal investment in her while reading the memoir, and so I think I can distance myself away personally from the writer and give a less biased review. I also do not read Rolling Stones nor have I ever read it, so I also have no personal connection to that at all either.
Anyways, let’s dive straight into this review!
Book Blurb
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 waterbed 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.
Content / Writing
From the get-go, you know you’re getting juicy details when she starts talking about her and her coworkers very much being treated poorly by the editor at the time of the Rolling Stones. And this memoir truly does get all the juicy details in it—we hear a lot about Green’s sex life, from her sleeping with a girl at a brothel to her many escapades with married men. No judgement, she can live her life, but that is indeed what you’re signing up for when you read this memoir. Some just may not enjoy that.
We progress out of order through her life in the memoir itself; we start at the Rolling Stones, then jump between her time at Brown, being with Stan Lee at Marvel, the Rolling Stones, and then the Iowa Writers Workshop and her career as a screenwriter. Personally, I found these time skips to be kind of inconsistent and all over the place, and so I got confused because one moment she’ll be talking about Rolling Stones and then the next page it’ll be an extended flashback of sorts about her childhood friend Ronnie.
The writing is very good, of course; Green has an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop (although she does admit in the memoir that she sent in mediocre fiction and then basically begged her professor at Brown to petition her case. That’s how she got in. That honestly made me kind of mad because many of us writers don’t have the privilege of being able to do that or even attend an Ivy League school) and has been trained in fiction. She also worked as a screenwriter for a long, long time (she specifically is known for producing The Sopranos).
Basically, this is a memoir following her as she gets through adolescence, starts working at the Rolling Stones, gets demoted from the masthead after refusing to submit an assignment about the Kennedys (spoiler: to get said information, she slept with one of RFK’s sons in his dorm room, which is why she refused), and how she reinvents herself at Iowa and becomes a screenwriter. Lots of nostalgia in this memoir for the good ‘ol days in the sixties, where one could easily hear some good music and smoke whenever they wanted—just like Green did.
This is a deceptive book title. It really is and it’s meant to grab your attention as like this empowered feminist tale of joining the exclusive boy’s club, but it’s not that at all. I didn’t read the book cover for the synopsis nor the book blurb that I found online, and so I was surprised when we didn’t actually use that part of her life for the majority of the book. The beginning is also set up to make it seem like it focuses on the Rolling Stone, but it really doesn’t focus on that afterwards.
Overall Thoughts
I found this book to be an interesting time capsule to an era long gone. Throughout the memoir Green even mentions about how many of the people she’s fondly recalling are dead, how she’s outlived them all. And that’s the sadness and nostalgia that comes with this memoir; like I said, it’s an era that’s gone. We have all of these creatives at the forefront of our public consciousness, but they themselves are no longer here. All in all, while I knew nothing about her originally, I found this to be a good read. Did I love it? Nah. But it kept me entertained for a day (I read it within the span of several hours in a single day) and it wasn’t terrible, like some other memoirs I’ve managed to read within the past couple of years. If you’re into the publishing and writing world, or even sixties and seventies culture, this memoir is worth picking up at your local library.
