Falling Out of Fashion

March 19, 2007
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."