Interview: Plum Sykes

I don't care what Choire Sicha says: I liked Bergdorf Blondes. I found its goofy glamour fairly irresistible, much as I found Plum Sykes to be disarmingly nice when I called her to chat about her book.

A friend of mine compared her Bergdorf Blondes experience to eating a big bag of candy from the bulk-foods store: at first, it's yummy, but then you keep eating it until it makes you feel kind of sick, and even though you really want to stop eating it, you just can't help sticking your hand back in the bag. My friend meant this as a criticism. I find it to be an apt description of this novel's particular charms.

There is nothing aspirational about Bergdorf Blondes. Its author has no illusions that her novel is anything more than a silly romantic comedy dressed up in a Michael Kors frock, and its heroine has absolutely no interest in serious introspection or personal growth. Given that most chick lit is a parable of self-improvement masquerading as entertainment, I find Sykes's lack of pretension or fake gravitas refreshing.

em>Bergdorf Blondes was, in many ways, what I hoped The Devil Wears Prada would be. Comparisons of the two books are more or less inevitable—both are accounts of the fashionable life by Vogue staffers, and the latter was re-issued in paperback just as the former was published—but the two novels are really quite different. Lauren Weisberger's fictional doppelgänger Andrea Sachs is a typical chick-lit heroine. As the assistant to the editor at Runway magazine (Weisberger is, of course, the onetime assistant to Anna Wintour), she's clinging to the edges of glamour. Moi, the otherwise unnamed narrator of Bergdorf Blondes, is, like her creator, the real deal: she's a style reporter whose best friend is a grotesquely wealthy department-store heiress. Andrea has dreams of writing for the New Yorker, and her story is that of a young woman coming into her own. Moi, on the other hand, has dreams of Chloé jeans, and her story is that of a young woman who goes in search of a husband because all her engaged friends have really incredible skin.

On the occasions when I read chick lit, I usually find that it's like flipping through women's magazines with their conflicted, unsettling mix of earnest self-help advice, faddish diet tips, girl-power boosterism, and airbrushed beauty. Bergdorf Blondes, on the other hand, is like the narrative offspring of Net-a-Porter and Page Six, a charming diversion blessedly free of mass-market wisdom and advertorial insight.