Falling Out of Fashion (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: third rail, Karen Yampolsky, Jill White, Richard Ruiz (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Magazine junkies who remember the original Jane will devour this cheeky roman à clef by Jane Pratt's former assistant of nine years. Unlike Anna Wintour's alter ego in The Devil Wears Prada, Yampolsky's alter ex-boss is an off-the-rack heroine. Raised on a commune by inattentive hippie parents, Georgia girl Jill White was an outcast at her New England prep school before a predictably eye-opening stint at Bennington. After Jill descends on New York, a succession of magazine gigs leads her to editing Cheeky (i.e., '90s grrrl glossy Sassy) and, eventually, Jill. At that eponymous publication, idealistic Jill goes up against bottom-line obsessed Nestrom Media (a thinly veiled Condé Nast). Fictionalizations of Pratt's personal and professional moments as editor-in-chief add frisson: Sassy's skewering profile of actress Tiffani-Amber Thiessen becomes Cheeky's roasting of "Kelli Hyer-Burke"; there are plenty of other cameos. In the end, Jill comes off as a sometimes selfish but mostly likable woman who gets beat by corporate magazine land. Survivors of the era, however, may question Jill's claim that she "coined the term grunge." (May)
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Product Description

In the bestselling tradition of The Devil Wears Prada, Karen Yampolsky's hilarious and disarmingly candid debut goes deep inside the glossy, glamorous, and completely ruthless world of magazine publishing, where bitchiness and betrayal are always in vogue, and this month's hotshots are just one dud issue away from a pink slip and a one-line career obit on Page Six...

As a teenager at a prestigious prep school, Jill White studied her roommate's magazines, filled with airbrushed-beyond-recognition photos of whisper-thin blondes who hadn't finished a meal since third grade. She dreamed of one day starting a magazine of her own that would feature women of all sizes and colors--smart, witty, real women with aspirations beyond tinier thighs and shinier hair.

Flash forward several years and a couple of giant leaps up the career ladder, and Jill has it all. Jill magazine is a huge hit, and her fabulous life comes complete with free designer clothes, an abundance of celeb friends, a shamelessly huge salary, and a framed Time magazine cover in her office featuring her beaming face over the legend, "Jill White, Media Wunderkind." Now that mega-successful Nestrom Media has taken over Jill's parent company, its future should be assured. Jill shares the fifteenth floor of the Nestrom building with illustrious Fashionista magazine, and the Nestrom suits are panting with admiration for both Jill and Jill.

But the ashes from the postcoital cigarette have barely hit the floor before Jill's new bosses start barking about getting ad revenue up and toning down articles like "His penis is not a toy...or is it?" in favor of fluff pieces with the reality star du jour. What smelled like team spirit devolves into a bitter game of manipulation and backstabbing. With Ellen Cutter, the blond, bland, Bergdorfed CEO of Nestrom Media, and Liz Alexander, Jill's publisher (and Ellen's conniving sidekick) suddenly aligned against Jill, plus a paranoid new managing editor with an addiction to spying, the situation is as grim as the magazine's decidedly unfabulous new offices. Reluctant to jump ship, and equally reluctant to watch as her baby morphs into yet another cheesy rag, Jill fights back, even as Ellen and Liz plot her next move for her. With her name, her creation, and her future all on the line, Jill realizes mean girls don't get left behind in high school--they grow up and work in publishing...

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Kensington; First Edition, First Printing edition (May 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0758217005
• ISBN-13: 978-0758217004
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #695,456 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, smart chick lit, May 2, 2007

By	www.bookshipper.blogspot.com/ "www.bookshippe... (Montreal, Quebec) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

I picked this up with some fear. Most chick lit these days feels as though it was just written and rushed off to press. I miss the days of the goold old 'a la Bridget Jones chick lit'.

Imagine my surprise when I started reading this book. In an instant, I feel in love with the character, the storyline and the writing.

This is SMART chick lit. No snivelling, wanting to absolutely get married main character here. This girl is smart and the storyline is written in a clever, non whiny way.

I loved the descriptions of the insider going ons of a magazine, the main character is flawed but still came out highly engaging.

No whiny people need apply.

LOVED IT.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Badly-written roman à clef, December 8, 2007

By	alicetiara (Capitol Hill, Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

Although Karen Yampolsky purports to have written this book, it's clear to anyone with a good memory of Sassy and/or Jane that this is the (very thinly veiled) story of Jane Pratt herself as told to Ms. Yampolsky.

The book is very simply written and thus easy to read. It doesn't really have much narrative pull, as it's basically just Jane yammering I did this, then I did that. It's not really fiction so much as it is a blog-like memoir. Jane's obviously quite impressed with her star-studded life and has very little self-awareness of how she might appear to others. She constantly talks about how Jane was this groundbreaking women's magazine that was ruined by moving to a new publishing house, but most women I know thought Jane kind of sucked from the very beginning. Jane is desperate to establish her indie cred, but it falls flat: for example, she runs down the "cheesy reality-tv winner" "Katy Hanson" (Kelly Clarkson), instead championing such slebs as "Serena Sax" (Courteney Cox). Her characters are sketched in the broadest of one-dimensional strokes and the celebrity pseudonyms are unbelievably easy to guess. Anyone in-the-know will immediately recognize "Richard Ruiz" as Michael Stipe, Drew Barrymore as a bisexual, curiously African-American (?) recovering addict who Jane makes out with at a party, and so forth. I gave this book 2 stars because some of the gossip is quite juicy once you get past the aliases.

For fans of Jane/Sassy, this might wile away an hour or so. For chicklit fans, the bar is already so low in this genre that I can't say this is much worse than most of what's out there, but compared to good chicklit like Marion Keyes, this is dreck. It's certainly no Devil Wears Prada, which, while not brilliantly written, was sparkling, entertaining pop trash. This is not.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Summer Read and Glimpse into the Jane World, July 11, 2007

By	Julia L. Wilkinson (Alexandria, VA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is a smart, engaging look into the exciting but sometimes backstabbing magazine world, and a fun way to experience vicariously the kind of real-life "wunderkind" career Jane Pratt, the real person on whom the book is based, had.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the book was how "Jill," the main character in the novel, reconciled her country-educated-but-poor-hippie roots with the prep school and elite world she entered as a teen and adult. I also like how she grapples with her on-again off-again relationship with her best friend, Sarah, which teeters under the weight of her big career.

My only nit to pick with the book is Jill comes off as a little too superhuman in the book, with very few flaws and a few other aspects of her life a little too perfect, without giving too much away. There are some struggles in there, but the two preppy "ice queen" villainesses in the mag world are also a bit one-dimensional. Still, it's a great escape and a wonderful summer read.