This is a depressing novel about the implosion of the publishing industry. It’s like reading a book written about the social life of weavers just as the loom has been invented.
It’s not marketed as such. In fact it is marketed as jolly chick lit, which it sort of tries to be, but chick lit in the context of the collapse of the chicks’ careers. The author is a magazine writer, so I guess she is writing what she knows.
It’s about the friendship of three women after that friendship has died. One of them moves to New York to try and find a job in publishing after a brutal breakup, and the other two variously pity and avoid her. Here she is, at her first cocktail party.
“Hey,” she said, a desperate edge to her voice. “Are you going to the drinks thing?”“Where is it?”Something lifted within her. “I don’t know—I can ask Sunny?” “Nah.” Gus shook his head and looked down. “I’m supposed to meet someone in the city, actually.” He didn’t need to say any more. Another woman was written all over his face. Geraldine’s heart snapped. ….. She was humiliated, but also slightly relieved that he was leaving so she wouldn’t have to spend the drinks portion of the evening being rejected.
Ouch. But where the book really shines is in the workplace:
All the staffers had gone to Ivy League schools and had the social skills of staplers. They stared at her from their workstations and waited for her to talk, and she had to fill the air with references to her quirky travels and friends and obsessions. There was something profoundly sad about these once-brilliant people who clung to their perches in corporate media as if there were a chance in hell the industry would take care of them. Get out while you still can, Sunny wanted to tell them all, but she had to pretend to be operating under the same misapprehension as the rest of them.
Overall it didn’t quite work out for me as a book – I couldn’t get up a head of steam to care about the characters, and their relationship. But I enjoyed the world. Makes me feel like while I may not have made the perfect career choices, it could have been worse.