A Lady's Guide to Selling Out: A Novel - Hardcover

Franson, Sally

 
9780399592034: A Lady's Guide to Selling Out: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0399592032 ISBN 13: 9780399592034
Verlag: The Dial Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

With “elements of The Bold Type, Mad Men, and The Devil Wears Prada” (Entetainment Weekly), a young woman navigates a tricky twenty-first-century career—and the trickier question of who she wants to be—in this savagely wise debut novel

Casey Pendergast is losing her way. Once a book-loving English major, Casey lands a job at a top ad agency that highly values her ability to tell a good story. Her best friend thinks she’s a sellout, but Casey tells herself that she’s just paying the bills—and she can’t help that she has champagne taste.

When her hard-to-please boss assigns her to a top-secret campaign that pairs literary authors with corporations hungry for upmarket cachet, Casey is both excited and skeptical. But as she crisscrosses America, wooing her former idols, she’s shocked at how quickly they compromise their integrity: A short-story writer leaves academia to craft campaigns for a plus-size clothing chain, a reclusive nature writer signs away her life’s work to a manufacturer of granola bars.

When she falls in love with one of her authors, Casey can no longer ignore her own nagging doubts about the human cost of her success. By the time the year’s biggest book festival rolls around in Las Vegas, it will take every ounce of Casey’s moxie to undo the damage—and, hopefully, save her own soul.

Told in an unforgettable voice, with razor-sharp observations about everything from feminism to pop culture to social media, A Lady’s Guide to Selling Out is the story of a young woman untangling the contradictions of our era and trying to escape the rat race—by any means necessary.

Praise for A Lady’s Guide to Selling Out

“Bitingly funny . . . [Sally] Franson’s snappy debut nimbly skewers the high-flying world of advertising and romance in the age of social media. . . . Franson’s irresistibly flawed heroine holds her own as she strives to find honesty, meaning, and even love in a demanding world, resulting in an addictive, escapist novel.”—Publishers Weekly

“A high-spirited heroine loses herself in a vortex of modern striving in this debut novel. . . . Come for the hilarious narration, stay for the whirlwind plot, luxuriate in the satirical gleam.”—Kirkus Reviews

“A wry, observant take on career success and ambition.”—New York Post

“A book lover is torn between a cushy gig and . . . well, her soul, basically.”—Cosmopolitan

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sally Franson grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, and was educated at Barnard College and the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Best American Travel Writing, and on NPR, among other places. She lives in Minneapolis.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1 BRANDS, BRANDS, BRANDS!  
  

I guess you could say this whole thing started the day we tacked Ellen Hanks’s face to our vision board and began thinking seriously about how we could best take this incredible human being and turn her into a brand. Ellen Hanks was the face of Minneapolis’s Real Housewives franchise, and she had, just a few days before, approached People’s Republic Advertising about inte- grating her brand identities. PR was the best boutique agency in town, and Ellen needed our help. She’d launched a number of her own personally branded products—low-cal vodka, protein bites, and shapewear called Shape UP—but she felt these brands lacked inter-, intra-, and meta-coherence. They didn’t reflect, she said, her core values. She’d put us on retainer for what we were calling “co- hesive brand management,” to not only support the growth of her consumer base but to add value to the life of each and every Ellen Hanks girl. Which is why we—Annie, Jack, Lindsey, and I, the crackerest-jack team PR had ever put together—found ourselves on that dreary March day puzzling over Ellen’s giant face and its implications. In fact, it was the Ides of March—I’ve always had a soft spot for days when famous guys got murdered—and I was wearing palazzo pants in the hopes of appearing more European. Despite the freez- ing temperatures, I was also wearing open-toed shoes in the hopes of dressing for the weather you wanted, not the weather, in Minne- sota, you’d ever get. My best friend Susan once said my optimism bordered on derangement, and I told her they’d probably said the same thing about Gandhi. She’d said she doubted it, and I’d said greatness always seems deranged at first, which was something I thought about while writing in my diary sometimes, and a para- phrase of a quote I’d read on Pinterest.

Together the four of us looked like an advertisement for the kind of glamorous urban life you could have if you went into adver- tising: three stylish and beautiful women, and a fetching gay. Well, it pains me to say that Annie wasn’t empirically beautiful, but when you put her with Lindsey and me you tended to, in your mind’s eye, gently round her up.

“I am loving—” Jack said. He paused, placing one putting-the-man-in-manicured hand atop his checkered shirt, beneath his bow tie. “Loving what I’m seeing here.” He was our team’s senior art director; it was his job, in other words, to create the “visual ethos” for each branch (print, digital, film) of a brand’s campaign.

“Uh-huh,” Annie said, nodding. “Absolutely. Uh-huh.” Annie was a copywriter, a fresh-faced twenty-three. Annie wore a lot of cardigans and was very diligent. She worked hard, much harder than the rest of us. She was talented enough to know she did not have a ton of talent; fear of unworthiness gave her a near-alarming level of commitment. But by then I’d read enough books about fe- male leadership to know that true torchbearers ruled not by fear but inspiration, so I took Annie under my wing, complimenting her cardigans and praising her work and giving advice I don’t think she asked for but, I believed, might need someday. Annie returned this kindness with devotion, which only compounded my natural beneficence. She also didn’t mind, during long meetings, serving as an appreciative audience member for the rest of us as we waged our usual campaigns.

“Here’s what we do,” Jack said. “Full-page glossy, put it in O and Us Weekly, we airbrush the face, add a fan to the hair, then her name at the bottom with the logo.” He blocked out the words in the air with his thumbs and index fingers. “ELLEN HANKS—”

“Ellen Hanks,” I said. “And then the tag. ‘Housewives take no prisoners,’ or something.”
“Casey, enough with the tags. We don’t need a tag,” Jack said. He was irritable that morning. His shih tzu, Johnny, needed eye surgery.

“I think we might need a tag,” Lindsey said, cringing. Lindsey cringed when she said anything controversial. She’d gotten an art degree at RISD, painting tiny dolls on china saucers. A year or two after graduating, when it was clear she could not live by the bread of her Etsy store alone, she turned her saucer eyes toward advertising. Recently Lindsey’d gotten into what she called the Healing Arts. She drank weird glops out of mason jars and was always sug- gesting that I hold crystals and smell things. “Here,” she’d say when I complained of fatigue, and push a tiny brown bottle my way. “It’s for energy.”

“So’s this,” I’d say, and glug down an entire Americano.

“We don’t need a tag,” Jack said impatiently. “All we’re doing is creating brand recognition.”
I put my hands on my hips. “Yeah, but people won’t under- stand what the ad is for.”

Jack put his hands on his hips, too. “So we’ll put the names of her product lines at the bottom.”
While we bickered, Annie looked back and forth between us like a cat trying to keep track of a laser pointer, bless her. When she watched, the part of me that felt I needed an audience to exist was, in that moment, satisfied. Jack and I went on like that for a while, more for sport than anything. Boredom crept into our edges like blackness on those old-timey photographs. It was important for our mental health to keep it on the periphery.

“We can’t just use her face, Jack,” I said. “Her face alone doesn’t mean anything.”

“What are you talking about?!” Jack said. “Her face is her entire brand identity!”

Finally Lindsey interjected. “You guys,” she said, cringing. “Seriously, let’s chill for a second.”
“Fine. Take it to the windows!” I flounced in that direction.

People’s Republic took up the entire top floor of a downtown building, and the first thing people usually noticed were the floor- to-ceiling windows, complete with window seats and decorative pillows. “Take it to the windows,” in PR speak, meant to take a break from whatever earthly problem or disagreement you were wrestling with. There were little shelves of organic snacks by the windows, and at the end of the day we often kicked back there with a glass of wine from the well-stocked Sub-Zero. The refrigerator and pillows and snacks—not to mention the couches and dart- boards and graphic prints on the wall (my favorite one said i like you), plus the sound of people bouncing tennis balls, deep in thought, on the concrete floor, and the whimsical doodles on the whiteboards—were all of a piece that added up to this whole idea that we should feel at home while we were at work. Or really that there was no difference between home and work—that work was fun! This is what we loved to brag about to our friends the most, friends who were stuck in less exciting jobs, slogging through Excel spreadsheets or legal briefs or outdated software at a non- profit that had seemed noble at twenty-two but at twenty-eight seemed poor and sad. We got to go to work wearing artfully ripped jeans and scribble on Post-its and stick pictures of reality TV stars to movable felt walls! And we got paid for it! In fact, we got paid quite a lot!
Lindsey, Jack, and I made jokes about being sellouts when we went out drinking after work, which happened frequently: the joking and the drinking. I...

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Verlag
The Dial Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0399592032
ISBN 13 
9780399592034
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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