Koa Beck is the author of White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind . Beck is the former editor-in-chief of Jezebel and co-host of “The #MeToo Memos” on WNYC’s The Takeaway. Previously, she was the executive editor of Vogue.com and the senior features editor at MarieClaire.com, and she was a guest editor for the 2019 special Pride section of The New York Times commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Beck’s literary criticism and reporting have appeared in TheAtlantic.com, Out, TIME, TheGuardian.com, Esquire.com, Vogue.com, MarieClaire.com, among others. Her short stories have been published in Slice, Kalyani Magazine, and Apogee Journal. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and serves on the board of directors of Nat.Brut, an art and literary magazine, as well as on the advisory board of GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. In 2019, Koa was awarded the Joan Shorenstein Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School, publishing an academic paper entitled “Self-Optimization in the Face of Patriarchy: How Mainstream Women’s Media Facilitates White Feminism.” She lives in Los Angeles with her wife.

EB: I always love to start by asking about your path to becoming a writer, since it is different for everyone. So, how did you get into writing in general and writing nonfiction specifically?

KB: I became a writer—I always was one, to be honest—since I first kept a diary, when I was five years old. I’ve always wanted to write down everything, whether it was my own personal observations or facets of culture, really anything. One of my first conscious thoughts as a child was that I wanted to publish a book one day. And I retained that dream through childhood and into college, where I double-majored in French and English. I like to joke that I basically took the same major in two languages.

As for nonfiction, I’ve always liked nonfiction, but there always been that duality for me of the type of writing I’ve wanted to do and the type of writing that I’ve been hired to do. They’ve always been parallel for me.

EB: Can you speak a bit about that divide, of personal work vs. the hired work? I know you have worked as an editor and as a writer—how is your editing process different from your writing process?

KB: The skill set that I’ve had to maintain and cultivate in both editing and writing has been a requirement of my industry for ten years. I came up through field that has a really widespread and wide-sweeping set of needs, and so my skill set originated out of that. Though in terms of editing, my career has been pretty varied within women’s media—for example, the way I would edit something for MarieClare is not the way I would edit something for Jezebel. It’s all about nuances in tone and framework. But every editorship I’ve had I’ve always written as well—and that was by design, because I wanted to. So, I’ve maintained a very fluid relationship between editing and writing. I’ve written for people I have edited; I’ve worked for websites that have edited me. It’s a dynamic that I’m really used to.

EB: I just read and loved your book White Feminism. How did it come about?

KB: Because of my career and the different outlets I’ve worked for, I’ve worked around and within white feminism for a long time, and for a while I took my fluency in it for granted. I thought that it was a skill set that I didn’t really see a ton of value to on its own. It just was how I advanced professionally and I was always aware of it in the room with me when I was working.

But as I became more senior in my career, I began to do a lot more talks on politics and gender, and one of the things that always struck me about speaking on these panels is that every time I gave a talk, some young person raises their hand and ask directly about white feminism. Whether it was an issue with their friends, or in professional situations, or with people in their own family, and they would use the words “white feminism” and they would ask me about it. And this happened so many times, to the point where I saw that there was a great need for me to write down what I knew about this ideology, and put it all in one place with historical context. These younger people would raise their hands and ask about white feminism in front of white feminists, in a room of arguably very mixed feminist ideologies, and there was always such an urgency in their faces, wanting to know how do I navigate this?

I always wanted to respond in a more intimate way—one-to-one, with a narrative. I wanted to explain there is a whole history behind this, it’s not just you and your friends or you and your boss—there has always been a long standing-division within organized feminist.

EB: That ties to my next question. White Feminism could have been a 100% purely reported work, but I love how instead you wove in your own personal experiences with your research, such as your time as a student at Mills College alongside the history of the ways that women’s colleges promote a system of elite exclusion. What made you decide to take that approach when writing the book?

KB: One, I thought to not would be a major omission, just in terms of my own experiences, but also how I’ve come to understand white feminism. And given that I am the narrator, and I’m bringing the readers into this history, this strategy, explaining who these key players in white feminism always are, it seems necessary to relay who I am and how I came to all this to the reader.

But the other thing—and this was suggested by my editor, Michelle Herrera Mulligan, who is an actual genius—was the idea of providing a very real connection between all the reports that I have read and cited and used, and then how that information works in real time. So not just sharing the abstract numbers or data, but showing, look, here, this is how this exact phenomenon that researchers have identified works in an office or plays out in a feminist organization. I think that’s very valuable—not just in terms of a cohesive narrative, but also providing three dimensions to this data.

EB: I am also always interested to know how and why authors structure their books the way that they do. (Probably because I am in the middle of still trying to nail down the right structure for my own book.) Why did you choose to organize the book by theme instead of by, say, chronology? How did you come to the structure you ended up with?

KB: I once again credit myeditor Michelle with really working for a structure that was more beneficial than just linear. As the writer, I’m so deep in it with all the research and the data that you really need the editor’s eye to pull back and see the narrative and the shape of the whole thing. The final structure was a collaborative effort, and we came up with three concurrent narratives—me, history, and contemporary culture—and I made an elaborate braid of the three through a lot of trial and error.

EB: I loved the braid! I loved how you would show something for your life, explain where else it shows up in culture, and then explain where it came from—it’s much easier for the reader to see the connections that way.

Also, speaking of research—I was floored by the amount of information contained in your book. How did you organize your research? Where and how did you do most of it, and how long were you researching versus writing? What advice do you have for writers juggling an enormous researched-based book project? What did you decide to keep in and what did you decide to cut? Because I’m sure you did way more research than ended up in the final book.

KB: Of course I had to cut!

EB: Of course!

KB: So, a few key things with this book. First, I’ve had Twitter for over ten years now but my Twitter is very boring on purpose—I basically just use it to keep track of things I’ve read, articles, studies that have come out, things like that. My Twitter is like an archive. I’ve been witness to fourth wave white feminism, and I’ve had to cover it, either directly or indirectly. So a big part of the more contemporary research was just me remembering say, a certain piece that was in Forbes in 2014, and me searching my own Twitter to find it.

In terms of the historical research, I was awarded the Joan Shorenstein Fellowship at Harvard for the spring semester of 2019. I had to move to Cambridge, and, while there, I had access to Harvard’s full libraries and archive, which are just as amazing as you think they are. They have so many archives that are digitized, there’s so much that you can download, all these amazing special topics, and these fantastic librarians who will help you find anything. So, the challenge with the historical research, actually, was keeping my focus tight and narrow, because there are so many things that you can find in those archives that you can send you off on a whole tangent.

Also, part of my fellowship was that Harvard gave me funding to hire a graduate student research assistant, Priyanka, who was incredibly helpful and very enthusiastic about this book. So, in addition to me doing a lot of my own research, I could give her a lot of tasks like comparing media. She would take a bunch of women’s media pieces that I remembered reading and she would pull and organize them into an Excel spreadsheet, or I would ask her to pull things from different historical and magazine archives.

EB: Having a research assistant is the dream.

KB: That semester was the first time in close to a decade that I was not working at a website. I got the money and resources to just completely immerse myself in the research. I would spend eight hours in a beautiful library every day. I had my phone off. Nobody needed me. It was wonderful.

EB: That does sound wonderful. But did you ever get lonely? Writing and researching can be such a solitary task. Who do you turn to for support? Who makes up your writing community? 

KB: I have to say I don’t have a traditional writing community—I’ve never been part of a writers group. My support really comes from my spouse. My wife is deeply supportive of my writing and thinks I’m really talented. And so I go and prioritize it because of that. The thing that I really value most about her though is that she’s not a writer. She’s never worked in media. She’s not a part of these circles that I’ve been immersed in for a lot of my career. I really value her opinion and her assessment of my work specifically, because she doesn’t write.

EB: I am also with someone who is not a writer, and I am so grateful to have that outside perspective.

KB: I mean, you can’t help who you fall in love with, but being with another writer always seemed very insular to me.

EB: So, what do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction? And what do you find most challenging? 

KB: The most rewarding part is definitely crafting the narrative—I loved doing that in newsrooms, too. When I was on staff at various publications, I loved to see all these different pieces something that has just happened or something that is going to happen assembling into a written understanding of how this came to be or will be.

In terms of the most challenging aspect, I would say the same thing. Crafting narrative is the most challenging and the most rewarding in that it means making sense of what has happened. When you’re sitting in a newsroom, and something has just happened, it can be difficult to recall the context, the history, all these different components that go into it, as something is unfolding. But I think that’s one of the things I’ve always really loved about journalism is that it is history in real time. I think that’s why I’ve always been drawn to it.

EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by another “non-man”?

KB: I recently read Sally Mann’s memoir. I’m a hobby photographer and I love her work, particularly of children, but she has an incredible passage in her book that is super relevant to Instagram, journalism, and a lot of visual representations:

How can a sentient person of the modern age mistake photography for reality? All perception is selection, and all photographs—no matter how objectively journalistic the photographer’s intent—exclude aspects of the moment’s complexity. Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time’s continuum.