Really enjoyed this book and the zines it contained, made me want to find more zine written like Pagans. ( )

Really fun read!

I received an earlier book by Pagan Kennedy from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, The Dangerous Joy of Dr Sex, and enjoyed that very much. This one is even more original, imaginative, funny, poignant, and engaging. She may be presenting her 'zines all about herself (and her hair) but it is not the least bit self-absorbed. Instead, Kennedy manages to include all manner of things that life throws at all of us, and she does it with wit and good writing. Thanks to Sante Fe Writers Project for providing the book for review. I look forward to reading more!

p.s. makes me want to make my own zines! ( )

Super fun. Pagan Kennedy tells a fast-moving, fascinating story about finding her voice in zine culture. I especially loved the reproduced Pagan's Head zine pages; they are charming and recall the past while still being effective in and of themselves, today.

In many ways, reading Pagan Kennedy’s Zine was like a trip down memory lane. The author and I are the same age and I fondly remember the 1980’s as a time when my friends and I all had vaguely artsy ambitions. I even tried my hand at quasi-feminist collage art pieces that I sent out anonymously to total strangers in an attempt at mail art. And while I never created my own zine, I was certainly a fan of the genre, frequenting Untitled, a shop in NYC’s Soho, to pick up home-made chapbooks, illustrated periodicals (my favorite being the postage stamp sized Public Illumination), underground comix and zeroxed zines.

So it’s definitely cool that this book includes the entire run of Kennedy’s zine, Pagan’s Head. Issues of the zine itself (in all its amateurish glory) alternate with chapters describing what was going on in her life at the time, offering some fascinating insights into how some of her more depressing experiences manifested themselves in the work. Ultimately I found myself more interested in the expository material written specifically for the book, which is much more personal and less cloyingly glib than the zine itself. Groovy as it was as the time, a lot of that stuff hasn’t really aged all that well.

Early on, Kennedy claims that the zine-writer Pagan was a persona who wore madcap outfits and enjoyed being the center of attention everywhere she went, as opposed to the “real” Pagan who was more reserved and mundane. But over time, it seems like the two versions of Pagan came closer together as the zine begins to focus less on quirky, arcane subjects (like her teenaged obsession with The Partridge Family) and more on her real-life experience of burgeoning celebrity. The ultimate convergence between the two different Pagans occurs when she devotes an entire issue, in the style of a graphic novel, to a personal medical misfortune. Pretty heavy stuff indeed.

Zine was originally put together, in the exact same format, when Kennedy was only 32 years old – a mere year after the final issue of Pagan’s Head. This is a re-issue of the same book. My only disappointment, in an otherwise engaging and fun book, is that the current publisher didn’t opt to include a final Epilogue written by the now 50+ author. I think it would have added an extra dimension if the reader could get an insight into her feelings about the work with a twenty year perspective. But still an entertaining (and frankly, envy-provoking) read. ( )