Amy Rossi is the author of “The Cover Girl.” (author photo by Samantha Everette)
Bookmark This is a feature that highlights new books by College of Arts and Sciences faculty and alumni, published the first week of each month. This month’s featured book is The Cover Girl (HarperCollins) by Carolina alumna Amy Rossi (communication studies ’06).
Q: Can you give us a brief synopsis of your book?
A: In The Cover Girl, an aging model named Birdie Rhodes receives an event invitation that prompts her to reckon with the truth about the two most significant people in her life: her legendary former agent and the older rock star who made himself both her boyfriend and her guardian when she was a teen. The novel follows Birdie across two timelines, both as a teen in the 1970s and beyond as her time with the rock star defines who she becomes, and as an adult in 2018, now going by Elizabeth and trying to live a quiet life separate from all that until the past comes roaring back.
Q: How does this fit in with your research interests and passions?
A: My writing interests tend to gravitate toward pop culture and its impact. Coming of age in the early 2000s, there was a lot of looking back — Behind the Music, I Love the ’70s and all that. Consuming so much nostalgia-centered media led to me having a real interest in the footnotes of pop culture history. Why do we remember what we do, and what could we be remembering instead? What stories are too inconvenient to carry forward? Who gets brushed aside in service of a more palatable narrative? A girl like Birdie Rhodes — almost famous but not quite — could easily slip through the transition from print to digital media and not be remembered at all.
Q: What was the original idea that made you think: “There’s a book here?”
A: I was working on another novel set in the 1980s on the Sunset Strip, and in my research, I kept coming across these stories of girls as young as 13 and 14 hanging out with rock stars in the 1970s, including a few instances of guardianship. This was over a period of years, and I kept coming back to what a story about a girl in this scene could look like. It stuck with me because it’s something that’s been kind of pushed aside despite being worthy of discussion. While Birdie is not based on any one girl in particular, her story is inspired by true events.
Q: What surprised you when researching/writing this book?
A: I did a lot of research about modeling to try to render Birdie’s life as authentically as possible. I was surprised to learn that in some ways, modeling was more diverse in the ’70s and ’80s than it was in the ’90s and ’00s, and runway modeling in particular was more of an art back then, with the models developing distinct walks and showcasing their unique personalities (Pat Cleveland, for example). The end of the Cold War opened up opportunities for models from Eastern Europe, which ushered in a new era of viewing models not as unique but as “clothes hangers” (not a particularly flattering term!) and emphasizing uniformity in appearance. Bethann Hardison’s documentary Invisible Beauty does a wonderful job of telling this story (and of dispelling the myth that models are just pretty faces).
Q: Where’s your go-to writing spot, and how do you deal with writer’s block?
A: This is not going to sound very writerly (or ergonomic), but I usually write on my couch. It’s cozy, I can put my feet up, and there’s generally always a dog to offer encouragement.
My best tactic for dealing with writer’s block is to skip ahead to a scene I know I want to write and then keep skipping until I uncover what it is I need to connect all these pieces. If it’s not happening linearly, then I don’t force it. The only way out is through!
Rossi received her B.A. from UNC-Chapel Hill in communication studies and her M.F.A. from Louisiana State University. She lives in North Carolina, by way of Massachusetts, with her partner and their two dogs. The Cover Girl is her first novel.
Read more about the book (including an excerpt) in People magazine and see Publishers Weekly’s review.
Read more books by College authors by checking out our fall 2025 books list, and nominate a book we should feature by emailing college-news@unc.edu.