by Mia Freedman
Fortunately, a couple of enormously significant and wonderful things happened at the conference, one that impacted my professional life and one with far more personal meaning.
The guest speaker at this conference was Eve Ensler, the feminist and author of The Vagina Monologues. She was working on a new book about body image and had accepted Hearst’s invitation to the conference so she could interview some of the foreign editors on the subject.
There’s something about Eve, an X-factor that makes her utterly compelling to listen to and completely inspiring to be around. She’s warm and funny and extraordinarily perceptive. When my turn came to be interviewed about body image, I quickly dissolved in sobs as I told her about losing my baby. I couldn’t really speak about anything else. ‘I feel like just when I was making peace with my body as a woman and a mother and feeling proud of what it could do, it’s gone and failed me,’ I stammered, through tears.
She passed me a tissue and held my hand. ‘What do you mean, “failed”?’
‘I couldn’t keep my baby alive inside me,’ I sobbed quietly. ‘I failed her.’
Squeezing my hand, she told me about her own miscarriages. And then she said something I’ve never forgotten. ‘Mia, the fact your baby died was not about you. It was about her. If you make this about you, you’re dishonouring her soul and her journey. She didn’t stick around for whatever reason, but it wasn’t because of you and you didn’t fail. Honour her by knowing that.’
Eve’s words cut through my grief and gave me some clarity for the first time in months. It was a defining moment in my healing process. What she said to me that day, about how this wasn’t about me and how I needed to honour my baby’s journey, has stayed with me ever since. And it helped. I still remind myself of that conversation sometimes.
The other aha! moment of the conference was far less personally profound but would have lasting consequences for my magazine. Since I’d begun editing Cosmo three years earlier, I’d tried all sorts of different cover treatments. While US Cosmo and most other editions around the world used the signature Cosmo cover pose every month—a three-quarter shot of a model or celebrity on a plain-coloured background—I took a different approach. I liked to think of it as creative. You could also call it inconsistent.
Shunning the predictable Cosmo formula, shot in a studio, I decided to be a maverick. I had no rules, and no formula for choosing my cover image. One month, I had a tight headshot of a model. The next, a shot of Jennifer Aniston in cut-off denim shorts and a bikini top standing in a cornfield. My most memorable cover was of Kylie and Dannii Minogue, lying next to each other in a spoon pose on a bed. Hearst hated that one—‘Why are there lesbians on your cover?’ they railed—but it sold well. And good sales were the justification I always had for my wildly fluctuating cover treatments.
But at this conference, sitting there looking at the other editors’ presentations and all the covers of the US and foreign editions that applied the Cosmo cover formula to their magazines, I suddenly realised I was being a goose. By producing a totally different-looking cover every month, I may have had success with individual issues but I was doing nothing to build my brand. In fact, I was harming it.
One month Cosmo looked like a beauty magazine. The next month? A men’s mag. This was partly due to the fact I was sourcing my cover material from everywhere—beauty mags and men’s mags included. Gone were the days when a local cover shoot with a model in a studio was possible. You grabbed whatever you could from overseas magazines for the price you could afford to pay.
Perhaps the purpose of these conferences was to brainwash the editors into submission. Perhaps it worked. When I returned home, I immediately met with my art director and told her we were going to follow the formula. We narrowed our cover-image searches to shots that were three-quarter crop and shot in a studio on a plain-coloured background. It greatly reduced the pool of shots we could buy but the consistency had the desired effect on readership and circulation, which continued to rise.
It was a valuable lesson for me. Sometimes, there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
DOING TIME IN THE HALL OF MIRRORS
SMS to Jason from me:
‘I won.’
‘And the winner is…Mia Freedman!’ It was the highest point in my career at the lowest point in my life. The annual Magazine Publishers Association of Australia awards are the Oscars night for the magazine industry. A panel of former and current magazine editors and publishers judge a couple of dozen categories including best magazine, cover, editor, feature writer, art director and marketing initiative.
I’d just been announced Editor of the Year and my table of Cosmo staff was going nuts. I rose from my chair and I must have walked from our table at the back of the room up to the stage although I barely remember it. I do remember several people touching me on the arm as I passed their tables and seeing the smiling faces of judges and publishing legends Richard Walsh and Nene King, but it’s mostly a surreal memory.
By the time I arrived at the podium, accepted my award and turned around to face the audience, I was spectacularly nervous. Somehow I managed to get out the one sentence I had in my mind: ‘I’d like to thank the incredible Cosmo team because without them I would be editing a magazine of blank pages,’ and then I think I started to waffle. I wrapped it up and went back down the stairs and through the audience to my seat.
Wine was poured, toasts were made. I was numb. Awards are meaningless rubbish until you win one and then they’re suddenly very important and you are humbled. In some remote part of my brain, I exhaled. Even though I genuinely felt I didn’t deserve the award, by one small measure at least, I’d proven myself as an editor. But my heart was still heavy. In photos from the night, I look like a lollipop. I was extremely thin and my eyes were dead.
I was still deep in grief for the loss of my baby. I should have been nursing a newborn, not a glass of champagne. I should have been on maternity leave not in a ballroom. So while everyone around me began to kick back and party, I waited until the official proceedings were over and then I pretended to go to the bathroom and kept walking to the car park.
I drove home happy about my win but unable to shake my sadness. As I climbed out of the car, the heavy rectangular silver trophy fell out of my hand and bounced onto the road. I crouched down to pick it up and saw it was dented and scratched. How apt. The emotions of the past few months instantly bubbled to the surface. I sat in the gutter and wept.
The next couple of years would be so many things. Lonely, liberating, distressing, angry, depressing, exciting, confusing, happy, unhappy, disappointing, regretful, bitter, intense, devastating, frustrating, sad, bewildering, rewarding, empowering, wistful, frightening, jealous, hurtful, cruel, accusatory, proud. After more than three years of doing things at breakneck speed, everything in my life would grind to a halt.
I would start to see a counsellor every week. Jason and I would stop trying to get pregnant. We would spend some time apart. Therapy was a crucial aspect of that time and the way I eventually found my way out of the mire.
A friend once described therapy as ‘spending time in the hall of mirrors’ and that sums it up perfectly. It’s difficult, unpleasant and confronting to see the less attractive parts of yourself reflected back. But for me, it was vital.
I had so much emotional baggage to unpack. About losing the baby, about the whirlwind of the past few years…there was a lifetime to cover, issues big and small.
Despite how tempted I was to just rent a garage, dump all my suitcases in there and march merrily, blindly forwards, I knew this wouldn’t work for long. Because those damn bags hunt you down. Until they’re unpacked and put away, you have to schlep them through your life.
My weekly therapy sessions were the best thing I’ve ever done and the best money I’ve ever spent. They were also the hardest. It’s a bit like renovating. You know you’re doing something good, something of value, something that will benefit your life in the long term. HOWEVER. In
the short term? In the short term it sucks hard.
It’s neither easy nor pleasant to reach inside yourself, pull out your darkest, dingiest bits and hold them up to the sunlight for close examination.
I knew that therapy was the right thing and the best thing and the only thing. But some weeks? I would have preferred to drink soup made entirely of fingernails.
A couple of months in, at the beginning of an appointment, my counsellor gently said to me, ‘Mia, let’s talk about your resistance to this process.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ve “forgotten” two of our appointments in the past four weeks and you’ve been fifteen minutes late for the other two.’
‘Um, well, yes but that’s because, you know, well, I’ve been really busy at work and…’
‘This isn’t uncommon, but it’s no accident either. What it usually means is that we’re coming up to some issues you don’t want to confront. So subconsciously, you forget your appointments or “accidentally” come late.’
‘Oh.’
‘You know, in therapy, the times you want to come the least are always the times you need to come the most.’
‘…’
She was right, of course. From that point on, I dutifully ploughed through these difficult, confronting sessions, treating them like a job I wasn’t allowed to quit. And every single time it was worth it. Every week, I felt such relief as I walked back to my car afterwards and it was rare not to have at least one ‘ka-ching’ moment in the hour we spent talking, moments of clarity and understanding why I’d done a certain thing or felt a certain way.
I began to wonder how anyone got through difficult times without the impartial help of a counsellor. ‘I’ve got lots of friends I can talk to,’ I often hear people say when the idea of seeing a professional comes up, but the two things could not be more different.
When someone you love is in pain, it can be hard to watch and impossible to be impartial. Mostly, my friends and family tried to cheer me up. Without meaning to, they all brought their own baggage to my situation. They couldn’t help it. And as much as they all reached out to support me, I found myself unconsciously withdrawing from them.
The people who love you are also much less likely to force you to confront the more unpleasant aspects of your personality. They’re much less likely to point out your failings because it’s confronting and difficult for everyone. Difficult, but necessary if you want to better understand yourself and untangle your emotions from a crisis.
It was a revelation to finally understand some of the patterns I’d repeated through my life, particularly my driving need to race from one big moment to the next, never able to stay still and process anything—let alone appreciate it.
I also started to deal constructively with my grief over the death of the baby. On every significant anniversary—the day she was due to be born, the day we found out she’d died, the day she was ripped from my body—I had created a ritual.
I compiled a box of all the tangible evidence that she’d existed—ultrasound pictures, sympathy cards, the pregnancy test that first told me she was coming, medical records—and I made a little shrine around it with picked flowers and a candle three times a year, on each anniversary.
Once, on what would have been her birthday, I even bought a tiny little cupcake. It took all my strength not to buy her a teddy bear. She was my baby and I’d never got to nurture her, to mother her, and it kept breaking my heart.
To jolt myself out of my comfort zone and kick myself off my goat track during the long-term aftermath of my miscarriage, I did new things. I took up yoga. I taught myself how to cook—an activity Luca and I got into together. We started with fun stuff—Nigella Lawson’s How to be a Domestic Goddess was our bible and for a while it replaced bedtime stories. We sat together with a pile of post-it notes and marked all the treats we wanted to cook together. And then we did.
My friendships with my closest girlfriends deepened. I learned how to be vulnerable and ask them for help and support when I needed it. I was approached to write a Sunday newspaper column and rediscovered my love of writing, which I hadn’t done much of since I began editing. I drew strength from my staff and poured a lot of my nurturing into them. Work continued to fire me up in a good way.
AN UNLIKELY COVERGIRL
SMS to my deputy editor from me:
‘Never seen so many bunny ears. Sara-Marie mania peaking. We have to do something on this.’
In the two weeks before September 11, 2001, I was feeling pissed off. I’d done what I thought was a great thing. A brave thing. An inspired thing. And it had blown up in my face.
A few months before, the first season of ‘Big Brother’ had ended and the whole country was now on a first-name basis with a large, cheery girl called Sara-Marie.
I was a huge fan. Of the show and of Sara-Marie. I’d begun watching ‘Big Brother’ out of a sense of pop-culture duty. For work. Editing Cosmo meant I had to keep current with whatever the zeitgeist hurled at my readers, even if it didn’t float my boat personally.
It was instantly obvious that ‘Big Brother’ was going to be a big deal for the demographic who read Cosmo, so I couldn’t afford to be sitting in editorial meetings looking blank and saying, ‘Huh? What’s a bum dance?’
Since my personality tends towards the addictive, it didn’t take long for my professional interest to turn to personal obsession. I loved that first season of ‘Big Brother’ like a crackhead loves her pipe. I didn’t care that it was bad for me; I was hooked. And, like a crackhead, this addiction obscured my better judgement in certain areas. Jason certainly thought so. ‘I can’t believe you’re letting Luca watch this shit,’ he grumbled when he came home night after night to find me and my three-year-old sitting together on the couch watching Sara-Marie, Ben, Blair, Peter, Christina Ballerina, Gemma and the other housemates.
But I saw no harm in it. The rude stuff was quarantined to a separate late-night show and anything remotely adult went straight over Luca’s head. Because it was the first season, there was an innocence about the whole thing—the housemates were wide-eyed and there to have fun. And it was fun to watch with Luca—a bit like a Wiggles video but without the skivvies and with a bum dance instead of ‘Rock-A-Bye Your Bear’. It was all quite harmless and cartoony, I thought, and Luca loved it as much as Jason loathed it.
Naturally, when Channel Ten offered to fly me up to Queensland for the final couple of nights of the show and a private tour of the house, I couldn’t say yes fast enough. Luca stayed at home with Jason. Even in the grip of an unhealthy reality-TV obsession, I knew where to draw the line for my child.
Sitting in the audience the night of Sara-Marie’s surprise eviction, I was astonished by what I saw. Around me were girls of all ages, shapes and sizes dressed like Sara-Marie in pyjama bottoms and bunny ears, with little singlet tops, their rounded bellies wobbling merrily as they bounced with excitement. I’d never seen anything like it. Their body confidence—like Sara-Marie’s—was astonishing. I was inspired.
Back at the office, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and immediately organised to shoot Sara-Marie for an eight-page fashion story. I recognised this was a zeitgeist moment and I wanted Cosmo to be part of it.
As an editor, I rarely went on shoots any more. Not because I didn’t have time, but because I found them excruciatingly boring. On any kind of shoot, there is more mindless waiting around than you could possibly imagine and even when the action gets going and the photographer is shooting, the novelty wears off in two minutes and it’s dull again.
But on the day we shot Sara-Marie, I was so there. I even took Luca, who wore the bunny ears I’d brought back from the ‘Big Brother’ finale. He had a lovely time and couldn’t quite believe he was meeting Sara-Marie, who was, at that moment, the most famous person in Australia.
Like all the shoots we did with ‘real’ girls and bigger models, I had no intention of hiding Sara-Marie’s curves. The clothes brought along by th
e fashion editor were sexy and fun, evening wear mostly and also a blue bikini. Sara-Marie was a delight to work with and her body confidence was no act. She was utterly uninhibited in front of the camera and I watched her chow down on a big lunch before the bikini shot—something a skinny model would rarely do.
When the pictures came back from the photographer a few days later, I excitedly pored over them with my art director. Impulsively, I decided to do something radical.
Britney Spears had already been locked in for the October cover and the shot we had was pretty standard. She was wearing hipster jeans and a white bra with a fuchsia lace wrap top, exposing acres of flat brown tummy and a diamond stud in her belly button. Her hair looked great, her outfit and accessories were strong, her make-up was beautiful, the pose was sexy. Tick, tick, tick, tick. Very Cosmo.
We’d run Britney on the cover several times before and she was always a great seller. This cover would tie in with her tour of Australia—the ideal situation for circulation, readership and publicity—the publishing trifecta.
But I loved the Sara-Marie shots and wanted to do something more special than just run them inside the magazine. I wanted to make a statement about body image by putting someone who wasn’t size eight or even size twelve on the cover.
So I decided to do a ‘flip’ cover—have the shot of Britney on one side of the magazine and a shot of Sara-Marie on the reverse side. There would be no ‘back’ cover, just alternate fronts. Newsagents could decide which of the two equally gorgeous images—with the same coverlines and text—to display. I also decided to build an entire special Body Love issue around the shots and phenomenon of Sara-Marie. I asked her to guest-edit the issue, which is something that magazines do from time to time with a celebrity who resonates with their readers. Vogue did it several years ago with Karl Lagerfeld.