A bit of summer reading..

I just finished reading the book Everyone Worth Knowing by Lauren Weisberger, who is also the author of the book The Devil Wears Prada. It was a really fun and entertaining book, about a woman named Bette, who is fired from her dreadful banking job. Her Uncle gets her a job working at the hottest PR Firm in NYC, and Better is thrust into a fabulous world of fashion, partying, and most stressful of all, her new job and her new life.

While I was reading the book, I questioned the validity of the PR Firm that Bette worked at. For instance, some parts of the book were extremely accurate, at least to my knowledge. Scenes depicted Bette sending out press releases, taking phone calls with the media, and scoping out locations for events. However, other parts of the book made me question its validity. For instance, Bette was encouraged to go out every single night of the week until 4 in the morning, only to make it work by 8 am, cheery? I don't think so.

Another thing that I found quite ridiculous was when Bette was photographed with a celebrity, and the tabloids produced the picture with a caption about this PR Firm's newest associate. At the first mention, Bette's boss was thrilled with the publicity, but soon the photographers were writing mean, crude things about Bette, yet her boss encouraged her to keep hanging out with this celebrity, so they could keep getting publicity. I know that all publicity is good publicity, but isn't that taking things a bit too far?

Also, and this may or not really exist in PR Firms, but something that I personally just think is so cool, was what the book called 'The List.' 'The List" was a database with the name of every media person (which I know many PR firms have), every celebrity, anyone remotely connected to a celebrity, their likes, dislikes, who they travel with, their agent's name, their manager's name, all cross referenced under categories. 'The List' was probably the books PR Firm's claim to fame.

If you have read this book, what do you think? Do you think it depicts a real PR Firm? I personally enjoyed the book, but needed to step back and remind myself that it was just a work of fiction.