Hesse’s Got Style

By Harry Jaffe

Can a slight, self-effacing, 26-year-old writer from Normal, Illinois, help revive a Washington Post Style section suffering from shortened stories and shrinking staff? If readers come for witty prose on sometimes weird subjects, Monica Hesse could help bring Style back.

You want quirky? She’s written about a woman who wrestles alligators, the death of facts, overpriced enviro-gadgets, and a polyamory convention—that’s for couples who believe multiple partners is the way to go.

“I had to have her,” says Style features editor Ann Gerhart, who picked Hesse as a summer intern last year. Now she’s hired on as a two-year intern.

Getting a job at a big daily in these days of buyouts and layoffs is hard; landing a job at Style is like forcing a typewriter through a pinhole.

“I was never interested in journalism when I was growing up,” Hesse says.

Her father taught writing at Illinois State; her mother was a therapist. Life in Normal was, well, normal—and sweet, thanks to the Nestlé factory.

Hesse came east to college at Bryn Mawr, an all-female school outside of Philadelphia. “If you didn’t belong in high school,” she says, “you will belong at Bryn Mawr.”

She wrote a column for the school paper and took a class in feature writing. The summer of her junior year, she was assigned an internship at a magazine. Her friends went to places like Rolling Stone; she got AARP the Magazine.

After college she had her New York experience, sharing a flat with two struggling actors and a Lab puppy that needed house training. She read unsolicited manuscripts for a division of Penguin. She lasted four months: “Only so much bad writing you can read in a day.”

AARP, publisher of AARP the Magazine, asked her to join its staff, so she came to DC in 2003. She moved from fact checker to writer of the Big 5-0 column—at age 23. She interviewed celebs turning 50. Her favorite was Dee Snider, front man for heavy-metal band Twisted Sister.

“After he sharpened his teeth into vampire spikes,” she says he told her, “his wife refused to have sex with him.”

Being 23 didn’t stop Hesse from writing for fiftysomethings. Not drinking didn’t stop her from writing about the bar scene for On Tap, a free DC tabloid.

She took a nonfiction-writing class at Johns Hopkins where Post Style writer Laura Blumenfeld spoke one evening; Hesse says she latched onto Blumenfeld “like a bulldog.”

One day Hesse saw a sign for a church that would “save your soul” on 14th Street in DC’s Shaw neighborhood. She took a peek: “People were talking in tongues and writhing on the floor.” She wrote it up; the Post’s Metro section published it.

Gerhart grabbed her for an internship last summer. Says Hesse: “I just wrote. I never went home.”

Style kept her on and has published 100 of her stories. People talk to Hesse, perhaps, because she has the querulous, nonthreatening look of a kid who grew up amid cornfields. Her stories can be funny and also biting.

“What comes off as wry might be an appreciation of how weird life is,” she says, “how absurd even the most normal things can be.”

Is Style—often called “the sandbox”—normal?

“It’s the most awesome place ever,” she says.

For once, Hesse sounds like she’s 26.

This article appears in the June 2008 issue of Washingtonian. To see more articles in this issue, click here.

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Posted by: sneakercn, Jun 29, 2011 04:13:39 AM

Posted by: sneakercn, Jun 29, 2011 04:11:24 AM

Join the group "We <3 Monica Hesse!" on facebook!

Posted by: Facebook, Jun 23, 2011 12:29:53 AM

Love Monica Hesse. Great comic writing and extraordinary acuteness. Her stuff makes me think, and chuckle.

Posted by: Kia Sanders, Nov 16, 2009 07:19:15 AM

Monica Hesse is a despicable human being who is doing all she can to make bigots like Bryan Brown look sane and sympathetic.

We’re waiting for her pieces on why the Klan is really just kooky fun!

Posted by: Walter Cronkite, Aug 28, 2009 06:52:25 PM

I had the pleasure of working with Monica on the Post Style section article on polyamory that was published on Feb. 13, 2008, and it was a distinct pleasure. Though matters are much improved these days, there was a time not so long ago when polyamory was poorly treated in the press. Monica was professional and respectful in every way with everyone she interviewed.

I imagine many seasoned journalists would consider spending a full weekend in a Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Philadelphia immersed in such a conference a less than ideal assignment. Monica was was clearly committed to portraying polyamory in a realistice light, something that isn’t as easy as it sounds since polyamorious relationships take many forms. Nevertheless, Monica captured the subject well because she was so diligent in her work.

As a polyamory advocate and local Washingtonian, I was delighted with the whole experience, including the way the article turned out. I was also mightily impressed that someone under thirty had earned such a prestigious position at such an early age. Monica is definitely a keeper, and the Post was very wise in snapping her up when it had the opportunity.

Posted by: Anita Wagner, Jun 03, 2008 05:12:22 AM

I was one of the people at the polyamory conference that Hesse wrote about, and I run a blogsite called Polyamory in the News (http://polyinthemedia.blogspot.com/). Of the 200-plus articles collected there, Hesse’s piece (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/12/AR2008021203072.html) stands out as one of the most true-to-life portrayals ever about who we are. We got snarked in places, and a couple bits made me cringe, but her one-sentence portraits of people I know were incredibly spot-on, and overall we had to admit that the Post hires the best.

Posted by: alan7388, Jun 02, 2008 02:56:04 PM

Hesse’s Got Style

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