Taking Any Excuse to Press Dawn Powell
Upon You, the Reader

Alex Kuczynski takes a closer look at "gossip lit" for the Times Sunday Styles section, pegging a genre that encompasses The Nanny Diaries, The Devil Wears Prada, and Bergdorf Blondes, which she describes as Plum Sykes' "minimally disguised memoir," with a withering assessment from Sykes' ex-beau to bolster the argument:

Mr. Loeb said he had read a few chapters of Bergdorf Blondes before it was published. "I was not overjoyed," he said. "The things that are fictionalized no one is going to believe are fiction. And then there are details that I thought were private, and when you are in a relationship with someone, assume will remain private." He said he had no plans to read the entire book.

Sykes makes her own case for distinguishing her novel from the others, which she says should properly be described as "assistant lit." In which case, then, one might propose that the nanny diarists et alia are treading a path blazed by, among others, Kate Christensen in In the Drink and Jeremy Thrane. On the other hand, Bergdorf Blondes might also be the more genuine example of Kuczynski's "gossip lit," an antecedent of which she finds in Capote's Answered Prayers, to which I would add Dawn Powell's The Locusts Have No King, widely held to include a thinly veiled portrait of Clare Booth Luce. This would certainly be my take, based on my (unfinished) reading of Blondes, though Powell never quite got so directly into her characters' heads, as I recall.