“Every time I write something, I want to write something really new, and not just do the same thing over and over again,” she tells Esquire. Post- Gossip Girl, Von Ziegesar branched out into adult novels.
That night, Von Ziegesar and her nineteen-year-old daughter went home with souvenir Constance Billard sweatshirts (by the way, we’ve been pronouncing it wrong all along Von Ziegesar insists that the emphasis should be on the second syllable, not the first). “ You're coming to talk to me?” she joked. At HBO’s premiere party for the reboot, she was shocked to be greeted with reverence by the show’s young stars. Von Ziegesar wasn’t involved with the original Gossip Girl series, nor is she involved with the reboot, but all along, she’s been cheering on the shows (and catching the Easter eggs) from the sidelines. Meanwhile, amid a cultural reckoning about privilege and income inequality, Gossip Girl 2.0 promises to interrogate its characters’ staggering wealth, rather than purely glamorize it.
Unlike the original series, which teased the identity of anonymous scandalmonger Gossip Girl until the very last episode, this show outs her to viewers right away, casting her as a group of teachers eager to clap back at their disrespectful students. Now, Gossip Girl is poised to captivate another generation on HBOMax, where writer and showrunner Joshua Safran (an alum of the CW show) has rebooted the series, with a twist. The books were banned in school libraries around the country meanwhile, the show used the barbs of its critics, like “every parent’s nightmare” and “a very nasty piece of work,” as advertising fodder. Now a cult classic, the show’s racy tales of sex, scandal, and heartache among the uber-privileged earned the devotion of teens and the outrage of parents, resulting in a bona fide cultural phenomenon.
#GOSSIP GIRL BOOK 1 SERIES#
Though the Gossip Girl series became a New York Times bestseller when the third book hit shelves in 2003, Von Ziegesar credits the CW’s television adaptation, launched to great fanfare in 2007, with transforming her characters into household names. When Cecily Von Ziegesar started writing the Gossip Girlseries in the early 2000s, she expected her books to “fizzle and die on the shelf”-now, nearly two decades later, they’ve been adapted for television a second time over, coinciding with a splashy reissuing of the first three installments. Not many writers can say that their bestselling series gave rise not just to one hit television show, but two.