Have you read "THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA" by Lauren Weinsberger?

Question

Please give ur opinion IF you have read it.

Answer 1

The novel is narrated entirely in the first person by Andrea, and told in mostly chronological order after the first chapter. Overall, it is a very realistic style with little in the way of literary device or flourish.
The Devil Wears Prada (2003) is a best selling novel by Lauren Weisberger about a young woman who, freshly graduated from college, is hired as a personal assistant to a powerful fashion magazine editor, a job that becomes hellish as she struggles to keep up with her boss's capricious and demeaning requests. It was greatly successful, six months on the New York Times bestseller list and the basis for the successful 2006 eponymous film, with Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, and Anne Hathaway.

A prime example of "chick lit," the novel was widely seen as a roman à clef about Vogue magazine and its iconic editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, since Weisberger worked there as an intern. Although she denies the story's editor is modeled on Wintour, many readers believed otherwise, which helped propel the book to the bestseller list.

The novel begins with its main character, Andrea Sachs, stuck in midtown Manhattan traffic, trying to remember how to use a manual transmission. She has picked up the Porsche roadster that belongs to her boss, Runway magazine editor Miranda Priestly, from a shop and must return it to Miranda's apartment in time for Miranda's family to go out to the Hamptons for the weekend. While she is attempting to do this, Miranda calls on her cell phone and excoriates her for not doing her job properly. She also tells her to pick up her pet French bulldog (in the British edition, a Persian kitten) from the veterinarian's office. Trying to comply, Andrea ruins some of the expensive designer clothing she is wearing. She wishes Miranda would die. But if that did happen, she reminds herself, she'd lose the pleasure of killing Miranda herself.

In the next chapter we move back in time and learn how she got into this predicament. After graduating from Brown with a degree in English, she visited India with her boyfriend Alex Fineman and came down with amoebic dysentery. Recovered, she leaves her home in Avon, Connecticut for New York City. There she moves in with her longtime friend Lily, now doing graduate studies in Russian at Columbia, and looks for a job.

A longtime reader of The New Yorker, she blankets the magazine publishing industry with her résumé, hoping to land enough experience somewhere and eventually get a job at the prestigious weekly. Still not over her dysentery, she gets a surprise interview at the Elias-Clark group. Afterwards she is hired as Miranda's junior assistant. While she knows little of her, she is told repeatedly that "a million girls would kill for your job."

That job is primarily doing personal errands for Miranda, who sometimes mistakenly and sometimes deliberately calls her Emily, after her predecessor who is now the senior assistant. Miranda is a classic "boss from hell" — she rarely gives enough information or time to comply with her demands, yet she routinely berates those who fail. She makes people go to great lengths to accommodate her only to change her mind after they have done so. She feels no compunction about ordering Andrea and others to do things such as getting coffee or lunch anew if they have gotten too cold for her in the meantime.

People at the magazine are afraid of finding themselves alone in an elevator with her, or making critical remarks about her even to their close friends. She christens this attitude the Runway Paranoid Turnaround, as whenever one of her co-workers makes the slightest negative comment about Miranda, they immediately follow it up with a "turnaround" positive comment, due to their fear of their boss somehow finding out about their attitude and firing them.

All the same, Andrea is told that if she manages to stick it out working for Miranda for a year, she can have her pick of jobs in the magazine industry, so she struggles onward. Even in the present, the perks aren't bad — between Runway's "Closet" of designer clothes ostensibly on loan for photo shoots but rarely returned and often "borrowed" by the staff and the general obsequiousness she encounters as Miranda Priestly's personal assistant, she is able to acquire enough free designer clothing to fit in better with the rest of the Runway staff. Eventually, she develops an appreciation for it and stops incurring Miranda's displeasure. She gets a Bang and Olufsen phone for free when Miranda doesn't want it, and learns that Elias-Clark's policies regarding expense accounts are rather lax, to the benefit of herself and her friends.

She also goes to parties with celebrities. At one of them she meets Christian Collinsworth, a Yale graduate who has been identified as the hot (in more ways than one) up-and-coming writer of his and her generation. They become attracted to each other, complicating her relationship with Alex.

Her job begins to affect her health; she starts to lose weight because she can't bring herself to eat. This is due to the fact that she knows that she, after years of being tall and fairly thin, is now the fat, lumpy dwarf. Eventually, she begins to rationalise her not eating by thinking that "Missing one meal won't hurt, and anyway, $2000 pants don't look so hot on a fat girl." She realises that she, in that thought, has begun to embody the Runway attitude.

While working for Miranda, she receives a letter from a teenager, telling Miranda that she loves her magazine, spends all her money on trying to look like the models, but still hates herself because "my butt is huge" and "I'm too fat". The teenager is begging Miranda to send her a dress to wear to her prom, but ends by telling her that, even if she throws the letter in the trash can, she'll still love her. Andrea begins to doubt the true value of her job, as it is, primarily, encouraging the woman who makes teenagers all over America hate themselves as much as this one. However, she keeps going, thinking that it will all be worthwhile when she gets a job at the New Yorker.

The 14-hour days she puts in almost routinely leave her little free time to spend with Alex and Lily, who is increasingly turning to alcohol and picking up dubious men in order to relieve the pressures of graduate school. Her relationship with her family also begins to suffer. Her parents complain she isn't making time to visit her older sister, who is expecting her first child. However, Andrea ignores all this, even to the point of staying at work when Lily is arrested for going 'bottomless' while on a date with her latest dubious conquest.

Matters finally come to a head when Emily gets mononucleosis and Andrea must take her place accompanying Miranda to the fashion shows in Paris. She agrees, although this will mean cancelling her and Alex's homecoming weekend trip, which has dire consequences on her relationship with Alex.

In Paris, she has a surprise encounter with Christian. Later that night Miranda finally lets down her guard a little bit and asks Andrea what she's learned, and where she'd like to work afterwards. She promises to place phone calls to people she knows at The New Yorker on Andrea's behalf once her year is up, and tells her she can actually do some small written pieces for Runway.

But back at the hotel she gets two urgent calls from Alex and her own parents asking her to call them. She does so and learns that Lily is comatose in the hospital after driving drunk and wrecking a car.

Though Andrea is receiving much subtle pressure from her family and Alex to return home, she tells Miranda she will honor the commitment. Miranda is pleased, and tells her that her future in magazine publishing is looking bright. At the Paris fashion show, however, a livid Miranda phones her, demanding that Andrea replace her daughters expired passports in time for them to catch their flight, in three hours time. After she hangs up, Andrea stares at her phone, trying to think how to accommodate Miranda's impossible demand. Then, Andrea finally realizes that her family and friends are more important than her job, and realizes that she is becoming more and more like Miranda. On the spot, Andrea flips out her cell phone and tells her family that she's coming home. Miranda disapproves, but Andrea tells Miranda publicly "**** you, Miranda. **** you." She is fired on the spot, but returns home to reconnect with her friends and family. Her romantic relationship with Alex is beyond repair, but they remain friends. Lily recovers and fares well in court for her DUI charge, receiving only community service.

In the last chapter we learn that the fallout from her standup to Miranda made her a minor celebrity when the incident made 'Page Six'. Afraid she had been blacklisted for good from publishing, she remains in Connecticut for a while and works on short fiction. Seventeen buys one of her stories. She returns to New York and gives herself a comfortable financial cushion by selling all the designer clothing she took to Paris with her to consignment shops. She saves one dress, and sends it to the teenager who wrote to Miranda.

At the novel's end, she is returning to the Elias-Clark building to discuss a writing position at another of the company's magazines. She arrives in the lobby to hear her friend, Eduardo the security guard, singing American Pie, the goodbye song she never got to sing. She looks round, and realizes that it is, in fact, Miranda's new assistant who is having to sing, while loaded with Miranda's coffee, shopping bags, newspapers, and her beaded clutch. She remembers that that used to be her. Eduardo winks, and buzzes her through "like I was someone who mattered."

Answer 2

I enjoyed the book much more than the movie. They more deeply explore how this "dream job" affects the main character's relationships with her family, boyfriend and her friends.

Answer 3

I actually preferred the movie over the book!

Answer 4

I liked it. Of course, it was better than the movie.....More detailed, better character development...

Answer 5

It was cute.. better than the movie.. but nothing earth shattering.