Longtime fans of Autostraddle will recognize the names Kristin Russo and Jenny Owen Youngs, either from meeting them at A-Camps past, watching Kristin’s “Getting in Bed with Kristin” Q&A sessions, or maybe even reading the essay about them Heather Hogan wrote that is quoted in the very book I’m reviewing. But most of you, at this point, probably know Kristin and Jenny best as the co-hosts for the podcast so popular it was an answer on Jeopardy: Buffering the Vampire Slayer, a Buffy rewatch podcast. (Though now it’s called Buffering: A Rewatch Adventure, because after their first run through of Buffy, they also covered shows like The X-Files and Yellowjackets; they’re currently going back to their roots and doing Buffy again, “once more with spoilers.”)
Slayers, Every One of Us lays out the history of the podcast, from its inception to finishing the first run of Buffy’s seven seasons but, perhaps more interestingly, along the way it chronicles Kristin and Jenny’s personal lives, including their thoughts and feelings about the podcast and the work they embarked on, but also a deeper look into their relationship as a married couple at the start of the podcast, their struggles with trying to conceive and experiencing a miscarriage, their eventual divorce somewhere in the middle, and the path to friendship they found by the time Buffy and her friends stood around the gaping hole where Sunnydale used to be and wondered: “What are we going to do now?”
The book bops around in perspective, sometimes from Kristin’s point of view, sometimes from Jenny’s, and sometimes as a hybrid royal we. It follows their journey, all while drawing parallels to where they were in the podcast, the trials and tribulations of Buffy and her Scoobies reflecting like a funhouse mirror with almost eerie parallels to Kristin and Jenny’s lives. As someone who watched Buffy when it was live as a wee closeted child through my teenage years and clung to the show as a buoy in my darkest times, I was one of the many beyond thrilled to listen to a podcast with two queer women talking about the show through their lens, a lens that looked a lot more like mine than other Buffy opinion pieces on the wide weird internet. I wasn’t alone in that feeling, and Kristin and Jenny took that responsibility seriously. Just like Buffy often had to hold her everyday life in balance with the responsibility of her slayer duties, Kristin and Jenny had to hold the joys of the community they were building in balance with the truths of the hardships they were experiencing.
Obviously it’s impossible to dig too deep in a book that covers such a wide expanse of time in so many pages, so in some ways it feels like it only scratches the surface, but both Kristin and Jenny don’t waste a second of it, being raw and real and vulnerable about what they were thinking and feeling during the hard moments.
The book itself is a quick read, especially if you’re familiar with the Buffy plots they sprinkle in quippy summaries of to give you an understanding of the podcast timeline. I read the physical copy, but if you can’t fathom consuming Kristin and Jenny content any way but aurally, they do narrate the audiobook, and where the physical book has printed lyrics (and, in an appendix, chord sheets) the audiobook has songs, plus clips from the podcast and from live events mentioned throughout. Overall, Slayers feels very much like a love letter to the Buffering community Kristin and Jenny have cultivated over the years — both those who helped create the show with them, and everyone who listened.
I was lucky enough to be a tiny part of the Buffering universe, however briefly, working at a New York Buffy prom and doing some social media for them. Buffy prom was unreal, and was really healing to my inner child, who once kept her love of a show, like her sexuality, a secret, but suddenly was an adult and surrounded by accepting and mostly queer people, working with talented people she only knew through her job as a professional lesbian (aka writing for Autostraddle). It was fun to follow along the timeline while I read and gleefully exclaim (out loud, to my bemused mother) when I got to an event (like Buffy prom, or an A-Camp or FlameCon live taping, etc) that I had attended.
I think many of us who love Buffy can point to moments of the show and the way it affected or reached us in our lives at particular moments, and it’s cathartic in a way to see Kristin and Jenny do the same. The Buffering gals, of course, had to do it publicly: from getting to “Prophecy Girl” right after the 2016 election to reaching “The Gift” in the wake of all the horrors 2020 had to offer, and more, not to mention the strange alignments between what Buffy and her friends were going through and what they were going through. I, for one, am always going to be a fan of a new way to re-consume my favorite show, especially by way of people who love the show as much as I do. (And lately I have found myself revisiting the song for “Prophecy Girl.” “What will come if our world belongs to them?”)
One of my favorite bits I do with my friends is loudly proclaiming “love is a lie” because I am not one to care for sappy romance stories, and honestly mostly to watch my friends protest loudly about how love is real, and someday they’ll convince me! And of course I know that’s true, because while romantic love has yet to find me, and maybe never will, I do know love. I know deep and unyielding love; I know love that can withstand arguments and giant evil snake politicians and frustrating miscommunications and gaping hellmouths; I know the love of friendships so deep “chosen family” is the only way to describe them. I know love is real and worth fighting for, and even though their relationship drastically changed over the course of the podcast, and their love took on different shapes, Kristin and Jenny beautifully describe exactly what they did to make sure that love in some form never fully left them — and never got in the way of their podcast, their labor of love — and what we have to do to protect and nourish love like that in the face of whatever comes next:
Just keep fighting.
Slayers, Every One of Us is available now in physical, digital, or audio format.
