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Do you remember The Baby-sitters Club? The book series published between the late-1980s and the early-2000s aims to teach young girls responsibilities like dealing with friends, prioritizing chores, and being kind to others.
There's Mary Anne, who is cursed after throwing away a chain letter in Mary Anne's Bad-Luck Mystery. Then there's Claudia, who breaks her leg after a prank gone awry in Claudia and the Bad Joke. But these stories came out years ago. The girls have surely grown up by now and would definitely be living a new kind of life. As imagined by 26-year-old artist Siobhán Gallagher, their lives have become quite relatable and their attitudes totally blasé.
The artist and illustrator released a series of updated book covers focusing on the former girls of The Baby-sitters Club. They are now all part of The Jaded Quitters Club. But aren't we all?
The new, modernized members of the Jaded Quitters Club deal with such issues as overwhelming amounts of man buns, chronic napping, and maintaining a sassy online persona.
Gallagher spoke to Refinery29 via email to share her inspiration behind the piece and what the original series meant to her growing up.
"The characters in The Baby-sitters Club were such young, entrepreneurial go-getters that, although they were fictional, I admired as a kid," Gallagher said. "Much like reports on former child stars or celebrities, I thought it would be funny to see 'Where are they now?' and discover they're just average, bored women who maybe lost their ambitious attitudes and are a lot like the rest of us."
Gallagher said she read the series "obsessively" growing up, and that she wanted to start her own baby-sitter's club, before realizing that she had a lot more fun dreaming up fictionalized adventures for them to being a baby-sitter herself.
"I love stories about and for girls and women as well as the nostalgia involved in books from my childhood," she told us. "This was my way of remembering those characters and thinking of the types of issues they would experience today in a funny, relatable, and kind of boring way."
See more of Gallagher's work on her Instagram feed and in the slides ahead.
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