The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
Andrea Sachs has a job a million girls would die for...or so she's told many, many times every day. Problem is: she'd rather die than spend another minute working as Runway magazine editor Miranda Priestly's junior assistant.
So why does she suffer through the coffee runs, unceasing demands, late-night phone calls and verbal and emotional abuse? Because she's virtually been guaranteed a ticket to any job in the publishing world if she can stick it out with Miranda for a year, and her dream is to be a writer.
The question is can Andy make it through her year without losing her friends, her boyfriend, her sanity and, most importantly, herself?
I know I'm a bit belated on this one, and I'm also breaking one of my bookish rules--to always read the book before seeing the movie. Truthfully, I wasn't super-excited about either the book or the movie, so I stuck one on the TBR pile and the other on the queue and just let whichever come first, come first.
No big spoilers, but the main difference to me was that the movie was the story of Miranda and Andrea (cast brilliantly with Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway), but the book was the story of Andy--what she learns, how she changes through her year. Miranda doesn't start coming across as too horrible until about halfway through the book, when her character progressively grows more grotesque. And neither we nor Andy can quite reconcile the dichotomy of admiring Miranda for her accomplishments and hating her for how she treats others.
The book was...cute. Part fun; part fluff. I was bothered by the level of snarkiness, the waste of food and money and the great value people seem to place on magazines like Runway, which, if rumors are true, is based on Weisberger's time at Vogue with Anna Wintour. So the bothersome bits are bothersome to me in real life, too.
Mostly, though, I was bothered by Andy. I don't deny that her job was difficult, but it got tough to feel sorry for her when she copped such an attitude, made it clear to her co-workers that she resented having to do what she was hired to do and wasted time talking on her phone and smoking cigarettes when she was supposed to be carrying out specific job-related tasks.
Still a fun, fairly light summer read...even though I probably should have read it five summers ago. ;P
Favorite quotes...
So this was what four years of diagramming and deconstructing books, plays, short stories and poems were for: a chance to comfort a small, white, batlike bulldog while trying not to demolish someone else's really, really expensive car. Sweet life.
It was hard to fit into words the sense of urgency each of these had taken on at the time, how when I was at work it seemed that my job was supremely relevant, even important.
The starvation so endemic at Runway was not, in fact, self-induced; it was merely the physiological response of bodies that were so consistently terrified and all-around anxiety-ridden that they were never actually hungry. I vowed to look into this a little more and perhaps explore the possibility that Miranda was smarter than all of this and had deliberately created a persona so offensive on every level that she literally scared people skinny.
All things non-Miranda somehow ceased to be relevant the moment I arrived at work.
