Imagine me, sitting in a dark theater, watching the opening scene of the Devil Wears Prada 2, when writer Andrea Sachs admits to a roomful of her industry peers that she and a table of her colleagues had just been laid-off via a text message.
Get this, during an award show celebrating the best of journalism. Andy was at the podium because she had just won a prestigious award. She’s now an award-winning unemployed journalist.
I was obviously triggered. But it was a small scene I didn’t expect that really dusted up my media layoff PTSD. I won’t spoil how she got there but you all know from the premise of the film, Andrea ends up back at Runway magazine, and this time she’s making double the salary of the job that just let her go.
Her friend Lily (from the first one!) suggests she move into an apartment befitting her new station in life as a fancy features editor at a storied fashion magazine.
The apartment is gorgeous. It’s huge and airy. The unit she toured sat at the top of a historic building with its insides gutted to suit its new spiffy modern design. My heart immediately started pounding. I know it’s a movie but shouldn’t she wait? Make sure she likes the job? Put the bulk of her first few (apparently now) huge paychecks into a savings account? I get why she didn’t though and this scene surprisingly reminded me of a book I read in 2023. It was visceral, almost.
I felt my eyes welling up as I read the following passage in Lily King’s novel Writers and Lovers.
“I pore over the Globe classifieds for an apartment. I call about the smallest, cheapest ones, and they are already taken. Finally, I find one I can go and see. It’s in Cambridge. Inman Square. A basement studio in a yellow Victorian. The landlord is surprised by how captivated I am by it. I stand at the stove for a long time. A real gas stove. I turn on and off each burner. And the fridge is enormous. He laughs at my awe and says it’s standard size. The wall-to-carpet smells a bit, but it’s nothing like my potting shed. Off the back, through the sliding doors, is a private patio encircled by flower beds and a crab apple tree. It’s more than I can bear.
Probably because I’m so taken with his worst apartment, he asks if I want to see the two bedroom he’s renovating upstairs. I follow him through the flights. As he unlocks the the door he says he’s planning to renovate all four units. The basement will be last, he says, but he’ll get to it. He swings the door open. It’s all light and shiny wood floors. The kitchen gleams with new appliances. A bay window with a wide built-in seat looks down on the neighborhood. Big arms of maple tree stretch out at eye level as if protecting the house. Beyond it you can see out across the tops of the other trees and gray roofs. Something in my chest eases at the same time. ‘They’re still working on the bathroom.’ He looks at his watch. ‘Of course they haven’t shown up yet.’
He shows me a big bedroom with the same polished floors and the attached bathroom with the same polished floors and the attached bathroom where the floors are still plywood and the vanity is in a box. In the corner is a modern tub below a skylight. We go through to the second bedroom. There is a wall of bookshelves and a space between two long windows where a desk will go.
I go back to the window seat in the living area. I know he’ll make me leave soon.
‘What do you do?’ he asks.
I shake my head. I don’t even make enough for the basement.
‘I wasn’t asking for that. Just curious.’
I need him to know how pathetic I am. ‘I’m a writer.’
‘A writer. That’s cool. Tough, making a living in the arts.’ He turns toward the door, jangling the keys. ‘But worth a shot, right?’”
Ugh. I know this girl. Writer Casey Peabody is having a tough season. She’s been working on her own novel for 10 years, all of her writer friends have moved on from writing, getting more stable jobs, she’s not having the best time romantically, and on top of everything, she has to move out of the shitty studio apartment she’s living in inside her friend’s garage.
I often fantasize about living in an old Victorian home, filled with trinkets and beautiful things. I would have been just like Casey, touching everything and imagining who I would be in a space like this, how life would treat me in an apartment like that.
It’s actually how I chose my current apartment. It’s high up, bright and airy, with a curved living room, and when I toured it, I immediately wanted to sit in the window overlooking the busy intersection. I thought about who I could become with and in this space.
So Casey finishes her novel. She gets an agent. And this is the part that gets me because when Casey’s agent is ready to shop her book around, she checks in with Casey one last time to see if there is potentially a number Casey would like to see her book, her words, sold for, ideally.
And Casey lets herself dream.
“Jennifer tells me about a new round of offers. ‘Let me ask you,’ she says. ‘Is there a line you want to cross? A number you need to get to? You mentioned you have some outstanding loans.’ Did I? ‘Give me your wildest dream number.’
There is a calculator on my desk. I punch in a year’s rent for that top-floor apartment with the window seat and bookshelves and add my debt. I tell her the number. We are not even close.”
I can feel my eyes welling up even now typing this, just thinking about the relief Casey must have felt when her agent came back and said not only had her dream number been accepted, she was fielding multiple offers from several editors and publishers.
“‘Casey.’ The school’s receptionist, Lucille, is squatting beside my chair. ‘I’m sorry. She said it was urgent.’ She hands me a blue Post-it. ‘Jennifer,’ it says. ‘Line 2.’ I follow her out of the classroom to the office.
She shows me into the development office, which is glassed-in like Aisha’s but cluttered with stacks of brochures. I pick up the phone.
‘So Amy Drummond has offered thirty North American.’ Someone else offered twenty, and someone else has come in-between with twenty-five for world. She goes on to mention other editors and subsidiary rights, but I’m still on the word ‘offered.’
‘I’ve let the other houses know we’re receiving offers. Some of them had blown it off and now they’re speed-reading.’ She guffaws. She is giddy, in her own way. ‘You there? Your book is going to be bound and sold, Camila. We’re in auction. Start practicing your signature.’”
Andrea got her apartment. Casey got hers, and I got mine, too. It’s currently half-furnished because I have a vision and an aesthetic I’m excited to slowly bring to life, but I’m making good on my initial thought. I’m showing up as who I wanted to be with and in this space.
Well, on most days, anyway.
