Meredith Walker is best known as the co-founder and Executive Director of Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls, a positive, inclusive online community for young people. Prior to her work with Smart Girls, she built a distinguished career in television as a producer for Nick News and as the head of the talent department for Saturday Night Live. In a culture that constantly tells girls how they should look, act, succeed, and even feel, Walker is offering something radical: permission to question the rules, embrace imperfection, and write their own story.
Her new book, Be Yourself and Other Bad Advice: A Teen Girl’s Guide to Unlearning the Rules (with a foreword by Amy Poehler), blends personal stories, thoughtful prompts, and hard-won wisdom to help young readers get to know themselves and build authentic lives. Walker’s path — from producing groundbreaking segments for the Peabody and Emmy award-winning Nickelodeon series Nick News alongside legendary journalist Linda Ellerbee, to heading talent at Saturday Night Live where she met her longtime collaborator Amy Poehler — gives her a rare vantage point on creativity, resilience, and the power of showing up as yourself. In 2008, recognizing a gap in content for young women navigating adolescence, Walker and Poehler teamed up to create Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls, which focuses on helping youth cultivate authentic identities and celebrate their passions. In this wide-ranging conversation with AMFM Magazine, Walker opened up about the real work behind the book, the power of questioning everything, and why talking to yourself like you would your best friend might be the most important skill a girl can learn.
Interview by Paul Salfen, Text by Christine Thompson | AMFM Magazine
Girls today are surrounded by expectations — how they should look, how they should act, what success is supposed to look like, and who they’re supposed to become. Into that noise steps Meredith Walker with a refreshingly honest message: some of the best advice you’ll ever receive might sound like “bad advice” at first.
Her new book, Be Yourself and Other Bad Advice: A Teen Girl’s Guide to Unlearning the Rules, arrives with a foreword by her Smart Girls co-founder Amy Poehler that sets the tone perfectly: “Are you looking to avoid failure? Do you want to figure everything out? Feeling ready to finally be perfect? Well, I have some bad news for you. That is impossible.”
Walker, who cut her teeth producing at the groundbreaking Nickelodeon series Nick News, later headed up the talent department at Saturday Night Live, and co-founded the beloved online community Smart Girls with Poehler, knows a thing or two about navigating big dreams and bigger pressures. In a wide-ranging conversation with AMFM Magazine, she opened up about the real work behind the book, the power of questioning everything, and why talking to yourself like you would your best friend might be the most important skill a girl can learn.
The Book That Almost Didn’t Focus on “Me”
Walker admits the writing process surprised her. “Having written a book, it’s so much harder of a process than people think,” she told Paul Salfen. “Once you’re done writing it, you’re not done at all. That’s just the beginning.”
The biggest challenge wasn’t coming up with ideas — it was editing them down and deciding how much of herself to include. She wanted the book to feel useful to the reader, not like a memoir. “I kept thinking that was a little too much ‘me,’” she said. “I wanted to keep the focus on the girl experiencing or the reader.” Her editors gently pushed back, reminding her that personal stories often help readers connect most deeply. The result is a warm, practical guide filled with stories, prompts, and thought-starters that invite girls to explore their emotions, values, and choices without judgment.
Walker designed the book so readers don’t have to devour it cover to cover. “There’s sometimes I want to see the chapter or the subject matter that covers something I’m particularly interested in in that moment,” she explained. “And so they can do that here.”
Unlearning the Rules
One of the book’s core invitations is to question the unwritten rules society hands us. Walker is clear: going along with things to keep life running smoothly is fine — until it isn’t. “It doesn’t mean you can’t question some of them,” she said. “Why do people think that I should be this way? Why do people think success looks like this? Or I should look like this? It’s okay to question things. Unlearn some of that stuff and just look into it and then decide if you agree with it or not.”
That philosophy runs through every chapter. The goal isn’t rebellion for its own sake — it’s self-knowledge. As Walker puts it in her own words about the book: “Girls are surrounded by expectations about how they should look, act, and show up in the world. One of the most powerful things you can learn is how to think for yourself. I wrote this book to help girls get to know themselves through stories, prompts, and thought starters, and to use that self-knowledge to build a life that feels like their own.”
Follow Your Curiosity (Even When It Leads to a Hail Mary)
When asked what advice she would give someone who wants to do what she does, Walker didn’t offer a tidy five-step plan. Instead, she urged authenticity and curiosity. “Follow your own curiosity,” she said. “Sometimes there were times in my life when I was chasing things but they weren’t really my idea. When I stopped doing that and thought, ‘What am I actually drawn to in a serious way?’ that always served me very well.”
She also warned that the path won’t be straight. “Be prepared to be let down, go off the path,” she added. “Sometimes it doesn’t feel great, but sometimes it leads to a really cool turn.”
One of her own biggest turns came early. After reading a book by legendary journalist Linda Ellerbee, Walker felt a strong pull to know her. She wrote Ellerbee a letter. Ellerbee wrote back. A correspondence began. Eventually, Ellerbee offered her a job at her production company. That single, brave letter changed everything. “I’m just going to write a letter to this person because I want to know her,” Walker recalled. “And it really set me on a great path.”
The Smart Girls Origin Story and the SNL Reality Check
Walker and Amy Poehler’s friendship naturally evolved into Smart Girls because they kept circling back to the same truth: middle school and adolescence are tough for almost everyone. “There were things that helped us,” Walker said. “We realized there are things that are helpful for girls and maybe we can be part of that.” What started as a small web show inviting girls to talk about their lives grew into a movement as the internet and social media expanded.
Even dream jobs come with reality checks. Landing at Saturday Night Live felt like a childhood fantasy fulfilled — but Walker is quick to remind young people that “your dream job also has real paperwork and HR departments and everything else. As happy as you’ll be, it’s still work. It’s still a job.” The lesson ties directly back to the book’s message: let go of the idea of being perfect, because “it’s never going to happen ever.”
The One Practice That Changes Everything
If there’s one practical takeaway Walker hopes every reader carries with them, it’s this: learn to talk to yourself the way you would talk to your best friend.
“We can turn on ourselves and get really critical and be like, ‘Oh, you’re such a loser,’” she said. “Why would you be mean to yourself? If you can get in the habit of talking to yourself the way you talk to your best friend, that will really help you handle the next thing that doesn’t go exactly how you want it to go.”
She also shared a simple mindset shift that has carried her through hard days: even after a terrible day full of bummers, she deliberately looks for what went well or brought comfort. “Having that mindset makes it a lot easier to find more of that,” she said, “and then it just takes on a power of its own.”
Relief, Not Pressure
Above all, Walker wants girls who pick up the book to feel relief. Relief that they will make mistakes. Relief that they won’t have their whole lives figured out at 13 (or 23, or 43). Relief that they don’t have to be perfect to be worthy. The book, and the conversation around it, gives them permission to be in process — and to enjoy becoming who they are.
This fall, Walker and her team are taking that message on the road with a major tour of colleges, high schools, and middle schools, meeting girls face-to-face to talk about exactly what’s in these pages.
In a world that often tells girls to shrink, perform, or fit in, Meredith Walker is doing something quietly revolutionary: she’s handing them a mirror, a map, and the radical permission to be themselves — even (and especially) when that looks like the best kind of bad advice.
