The Devil Wears Prada
Weisberger, Lauren. 2006. The Devil Wears Prada. Anchor.
Rating:
8
Summary:
good read, and I’m not into fashion
Andrea Sachs has just graduated from college with hopes of becoming a writer for the New Yorker. Thinking she’ll have to start with a different magazine, she applies to a number of magazines before landing an interview at Runway, the world’s most famous fashion magazine. But what Andrea doesn’t realize is that the position for which she is interviewing is not as an editor, or assistant editor; actually, it doesn’t have anything to do with writing at all. She is interviewed to become the assistant for the magazine’s chief editor, Miranda Priestly. Everything then happens so fast that before she knows it, she is employed as Miranda’s second personal assistant.
And that is how the worst year of Andrea’s life begins. As it turns out, Miranda is the haughtiest woman in the world and seems to have no sense of respect for anyone she deems beneath her, which includes pretty much everyone but her husband and her children. Andrea, as her personal assistant/slave, is demeaned and ridiculed beyond human limits, but bears this burden as Miranda is so powerful that at the end of 1 year as her assistant, Miranda can get Andrea a position pretty much with anyone magazine she’d like, including The New Yorker.
But when Andrea’s neglected personal life climaxes with the near death of her best friend, Lily, with only 1 to 2 months to go in her year of torture, Andrea finally ditches the job. Her life is in shambles and she has just ruined her chance of getting whatever dream job she wanted, but she has the satisfaction of telling Miranda off.
Review:
The only reason I listened to this book is because it was a top seller among books on CD on Amazon.com. We picked it up before heading out on a road trip and, even though neither my wife nor I are at all involved with or interested in the world of fashion, we loved the book. I think we loved it primarily because just about everyone has had a boss, at one point or another, whose unruly and illogical behavior has driven us to the point that we just want to tell him/her to f*** off! Miranda Priestly is the embodiment of the worst of every one of those bosses.
But the story is not so shallow that it is limited to just Andrea’s dealing with her boss. This is another element that makes the book well worth reading. Much of the story actually involves the effect of Andrea’s job on her personal life. The result is that Andrea breaks up with her boyfriend and nearly loses her best friend whose alcoholism has gone unchecked by the one person that could have done something about it – Andrea. The multiple levels of the story make it easier to relate, adding another reason why both my wife and I enjoyed this book.
One problem I had with the book is it is actually just a shallow embodiment of the author’s life. Laura Weisberger worked as an assistant to Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue. Wintour has been given the epithet Anna ‘Nuclear’ Wintour due to her unruly and demanding nature. Even though Weisberger refuses to admit Priestly is based on Wintour, any 9 year old can put those two together. Working as an assistant to Wintour was one of the first jobs Weisberger had out of college. As for the personal life stuff, I don’t know enough details to include those, but the book doesn’t seem a far cry from the reality of Weisberger’s life. Does this make it a bad book? Not at all. It’s still a great book, it’s just that it doesn’t require a whole lot of creativity to come up with a story about one’s life (though living a life meritorious of a book is noteworthy).
The only other problem I had with the book was I was a little thrown off by the structure of the story because it doesn’t clearly set up a conflict for the protagonist to solve. Eventually the conflict becomes more apparent as we realize Andrea just wants to make it through the year, but it took a while for me to be sure that was the conflict being addressed.
This really is a very interesting read. Frankly, it must be considering both my wife and I enjoyed it and we could care less about the ridiculous nature of the fashion industry. You don’t have to know anything about the fashion industry to enjoy this book, you just have to have had a demanding boss at some point; but experience in the fashion industry will probably make it even better.