In 2016, Kristin Russo and Jenny Owen Youngs starting the podcast Buffering the Vampire Slayer. Jenny was a long-time fan, and her wife Kristin was a new fan. The podcast would go on to blow up in popularity, becoming a full-time job. It supported its mostly queer fanbase through Trump’s first term and, later, the Covid-19 pandemic. It would also continue through their divorce. In this joint memoir, they openly discuss the hardships and rewards of doing the podcast even through their breakup as well as how Buffy the Vampire Slayer provided a sometimes eerily relevant mirror to their lives.
I’ve been a fan of Buffy for many years, despite its flaws, and I quickly fell in love with the Buffering podcast, too. In fact, when I started reading this memoir, I thought I already knew this story. But while Kristin and Jenny shared some of this with their audience at the time, it was in a professional and guarded way—understandably. Now that they’re years past their divorce (and both remarried), they offer a vulnerable and sometimes painful look at what it was really like to keep working together through their breakup.
This memoir really dives into the messy, painful experience of their separation and the difficulty of continuing the podcast through it. They don’t portray it is a mutual breakup, a parting on good terms. Instead, we see the emotional upheaval of Jenny realizing she can’t be fully herself in this marriage and Kristin’s desperation to fix it. I can’t imagine how difficult this must have been to write, even with some distance. The narration switches between a joint Jenny-and-Kristin perspective and then each of them individually.
Of course, there’s plenty about Buffy, the podcast, and the fandom. There are even some bonuses at the end, like examples of “hell math” and behind the scenes stories about the stars of Buffy that they interviewed. But at the heart of the book is Kristin and Jenny’s relationship and their determination to hold their Buffering community together even as their marriage was falling apart.
I don’t know what this reading experience would be like if you haven’t listened to the podcast or watched Buffy, but they do give context, so you probably could read this without any background… but I have to recommend watching Buffy first. And then listening to the podcast, with all its original songs. And then you should read the book. You could skip to the end, but you’d be missing a lot of great stuff.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I somehow just found out that they’re already on season two of Once More, With Spoilers, where they’re rewatching and podcasting about every episode again!
