Lessing, Stephanie

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Lessing, Stephanie

PERSONAL: Married; children: one son, one daughter. Education: Boston University, graduated 1983.

ADDRESSES: Home— Demarest, NJ.

CAREER: Writer. Mademoiselle magazine, began as copywriter, became copy chief.

WRITINGS

NOVELS

She’s Got Issues, Avon Books (New York, NY), 2005. Miss Understanding, Avon Books (New York, NY), 2006.

Also author of an unpublished book of essays, A Girl’s Guide to Girls. Contributor to a tribute anthology honoring author Judy Blume. Contributor to periodicals, including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, and Mademoiselle. Contributing editor to Vogue, Glamour, Vanity Fair, and Mademoiselle. Author of an advice column.

SIDELIGHTS: Stephanie Lessing began her writing career as a copywriter for Mademoiselle magazine, and her popular first novel, She’s Got Issues, drew on her experiences in the world of fashion journalism. The novel grew out of an unpublished collection of essays, A Girl’s Guide to Girls. When that book failed to find a publisher, Lessing reworked some of her essay material into fiction. “I chose one essay, ‘Girl Boss,’ and decided to see what it would be like to interview with the type of woman I describe in that essay,” Lessing said in an interview for Gothamist.“Once I sent Chloe, the heroine of She’s Got Issues, on her first interview, the book was as good as written. She became a human being as soon as she sat down in the reception area and I became fascinated by the way she reacted to the other girls around her. I just kept following her around and mimicking her. She wrote the book. I had nothing to do with it. I was nothing more than an observer with a pen throughout the entire process.” Chloe Rose, who works at a fashion magazine called Issues, is a naive character who means well, but constantly finds herself getting into problematic situations and then telling little lies to get out of them. Sue Waldeck, a reviewer on the Road to Romance Web site, wrote: “Chloe is a sweet, naive, honest girly-girl who is charming and ditzy yet brilliant in her own way. I fell for her instantly.”

Chloe’s sister Zoe is the focus of Lessing’s next book, Miss Understanding. Unlike Chloe, Zoe is quite intelligent, yet she remains “strangely clueless,” according to Lisa Davis-Craig in Library Journal. She is hypochondriacal, obsessive-compulsive, and lacking in fashion sense. A former columnist for a publication called The Radical Mind, Zoe seems an unlikely choice to take over the editorship of Issues, yet so she does. Before long, however, Zoe begins the process of changing the magazine—renamed Miss Understanding—into a serious, feminist publication. One of her goals is to illuminate the reasons that women are sometimes so mean to each other. Yet Zoe is soon caught up in the sort of female power struggle she abhors, as members of her staff resist her plans to change the magazine in various ways. To complicate matters further, Zoe becomes pregnant, and so must endure her staff’s mutiny while dealing with the many side effects of her condition. Reviewing Lessing’s novel for Booklist, Aleksandra Kostovski found that it was overcrowded with strange characters and plot twists, but appreciated the author’s “weird and unique take” on life in the modern workplace.