Tarpley Hitt: On Filling In the Historical Blanks

Tarpley Hitt is a journalist in New York and an editor at The Drift magazine. She previously reported on culture and money for Gawker and The Daily Beast, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times, Bookforum, The Paris Review, The Guardian, Air Mail, Deseret, and Miami New Times. Barbieland is her first book. Follow her on X (Twitter), Instagram, and Bluesky.

In this interview, Tarpley discusses researching the doll craze for her new book, Barbieland, the importance of finding the right editor, and more.

Name: Tarpley Hitt
Literary agent: Alice Whitwham at the Cheney Agency
Book title: Barbieland: The Unauthorized History
Publisher: One Signal/Atria, Simon & Schuster
Release date: December 2, 2025
Genre/category: Nonfiction
Elevator pitch: A history of America’s most recognizable toy since the Slinky, and the incredibly litigious corporate apparatus that made her unavoidable. It’s also meant to be a bit of a tour through the literature of dolls, as well as an exploration of the “knockoff” — the tension between Barbie’s cultural branding as the first “adult” doll and the fact that she was a near-exact copy of a campy piece of advertising merch for a conservative German tabloid.

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I’ve always been a bit intrigued by dolls and this millennia-old impulse we have to make little replicas of ourselves—sometimes to worship, sometimes to give to children, and so often a bit of both. Several years ago, I wrote about the craftswomen who make “reborn” dolls: hyper-realistic (and very expensive) baby dolls which are so detailed that they not only look and feel like actual infants but demand certain human-like behavioral norms. (If you leave one in a hot car, for example, someone will likely call the cops.) What struck me about those dolls was the amount of emotion both the craftswomen and their customers invested in these inanimate objects; they cared for them like real children, to an extent that was both bizarre to an outsider and somewhat moving. It seemed like an exaggerated version of the kind of complex relationship children (and adults) form with any doll, and perhaps none more so than Barbie, arguably the most famous doll in the history of human civilization.

The event that precipitated this particular doll book was, of course, the movie. About a year before the movie came out, an editor I’d been in touch with for years about a different book on a different subject (horseracing; gambling) told me he wanted a history of Barbie. I’d never had a relationship with Barbies—they were banned from my house—so the craze the film was already generating took me a bit by surprise. Barbie came with so much baggage; she struck me as a bit dated, slightly embarrassing. And yet here she was, in her 70s, mobilizing several generations of doll-havers, and about to rebrand herself for the next. The thing that got me interested was this idea of a dispassionate history told by a Barbie-agnostic trying to understand the grip this one doll had on the American imagination. But what sold me was what I came to understand a few weeks later, after reading as much as I could about the toy industry—namely, the degree to which that grip had been engineered from the beginning, and the lengths, both nefarious and pretty goofy, that Barbie’s guardians had gone to maintain it.

I sold the book in early December of 2022, and started my reporting in earnest in February 2023, after the website where I worked, Gawker 2.0, was shut down. I spent most of the first year reporting, most of the second writing, and much of this past year editing and fact-checking. I would have happily kept tweaking for another year or seven, but that is unfortunately not how deadlines work, which is probably for the best. The idea changed quite a bit—partly because of the abbreviated proposal process, and partly because the information you have going into a book necessarily changes after a year of reporting.

Everything was a learning moment, more or less. I knew very little about book publishing before this project—from the logistical process (the makings of a proposal; the differences between various imprints), to the creative process (how to structure something so large and unwieldy), to little things, like the jargon of publishing (“first pass pages” or “FPP” means the first review of the manuscript in layout, apparently). I did not know, for example, that much of an “advance” is actually not paid in advance, but in scheduled “tranches,” the majority of which come after you’ve delivered the manuscript. The fallout of not knowing this was reporting so little income during my second year that the accountant I called about filing taxes laughed into the phone. Something to plan ahead for, should there be a second book.

Many. I’m still reeling from a conversation I had about two years ago with one of Barbie’s veteran designers. She’d joined Mattel in the 1960s, stayed into the late-90s, and spent the decades since touring the broader doll collector circuit. She was both deeply knowledgeable about Mattel and very generous with that knowledge, so I was thrilled when she told me she was in the process of donating her papers to a well-known toy archive. But when I went to visit her, I learned that this process involved going through her files and burning anything marked “CONFIDENTIAL.” (On the audio recording of our chat, you can hear an unsettling yelp—my reaction in the moment). It’s not that I assumed she would hand over decades of work without some pruning. But the idea of all these internal documents literally going up in smoke reminded me just how curated the public record can be. My hope was to fill in a few of the blanks.

A couple hours with some true 20th-century eccentrics. One of those bumper stickers that says, “Get corporations off welfare.” A reason to agree with Baudelaire, when he asked of the toy store: “Is not the whole of life to be found there in miniature, and in forms far more colourful, pristine, and polished than the real thing?”

Find an editor you trust to be anal, vicious, and right.