Sometimes, you just need a trashy chic lit book. I usually abhor chick lit, but this was one of my favorites in college, and after finding it for 99 cents at GW, I had to give it another read to see if I still loved it as much as I did six years ago.
In Laura Weisberger's dishy The Devil Wears Prada, our heroine, Andrea Sachs, is a Jewish post-graduate trying to break into magazines when she scores the job "a million girls would die for" working as the junior administrative assistant to Runway magazine's editor-in-chief, Miranda Priestly. Upon hearing the rumor that working one year for Miranda guarantees her lackeys their pick of positions at virtually any magazine they desire, Andrea decides she'll endure any sort of abuse and hand her life over to the tyrannical Miranda, in hopes that next year, she'll be working for The New Yorker. What unfolds is a nightmarish tale of one horrible year working for the Boss from Hell, and the decision that Andrea must make between attaining the job of her dreams or becoming the sort of person she hates.
I loved this book when I was 20, a junior in college, and going through a rough breakup (during my aforementioned "summer of reading" after one of only two serious boyfriends I had before David broke my heart and I lost myself in reading anything that wasn't nailed down). I thought that, seven years later, I'd love it just as much. It's amazing how six years post-graduate and four years working as an office manager, secretary, and personal assistant all-in-one will do to change your outlook.
It's true. Miranda is the boss from hell. She's anal-retentive, demanding, rude, selfish, obsessive, and doesn't have a single thought to spare for anyone other than herself. I am not excusing her behavior (or Anna Wintour's, since it's obvious that's who she is modeled after). But Andrea's attitude throughout the book makes it impossible to identify or sympathize with her, let alone root for her. I am sure that schlepping around NYC in freezing cold or rainy weather to grab lattes, dry cleaning, takeout lunch, etc. is a pain in the ass. I wouldn't want to do it. However, that is what a personal assistant does. I am not saying that Andrea had to like enduring all sorts of verbal abuse and punishment at Miranda's hands. But her whining, her complaining, and her attitude towards a job she felt she was much too good for, leaves me cold. Also: this isn't prison. Andrea was not sentenced to work in a labor camp for a year. At the crux of the story, she could leave any time she wanted to. She stays for purely self-interested reasons -- she wants the job at The New Yorker, she has to put in the time.
(I have to add that this book came out before the Great Recession, and that today, there is no way that even working 10 years as a personal assistant is going to get you a job working at The New Yorker -- or any magazine -- no matter how "powerful" or "important" your boss is.)
After the book's great success, and its virtual skyrocket to the New York Times' bestseller list, an article was printed in the Times, exposing Prada for what it was: a thinly-veiled expose about its author's year working as an assistant for Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine. Kate Betts, who wrote the article in the Times, worked for Vogue and for Anna Wintour herself, and stated that Weisberger had apparently learned nothing in her one-year tenure with the "boss from hell", saying that she "had a ringside seat at one of the great editorial franchises in a business that exerts an enormous influence over women, but she seems to have understood almost nothing about the isolation and pressure of the job her boss was doing, or what it might cost a person like Miranda Priestly to become a character like Miranda Priestly." (Betts, 2003) Betts also begs the question, "if Andrea doesn't ever realize why she should care about Miranda Priestly, why should we care about Andrea, or prize the text for anything more than the cheap frisson of the context?" Nicely put.
The book is fun when taken at face-value. Finding out what it really is -- a tell-all, revenge book on an unfair boss -- really disappointed me. And it doesn't make me any more sympathetic for the heroine. Like I said, it's amazing what seven years and a little employment experience can do to change you.
Rating: ** and 1/2
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