A Sneak Peek at a Fashionista Socialite's Important New Novel
Stephanie LaCava, the young Vogue writer and lit society socialite, has penned a "novel" about a rich girl spending high school in Paris. Someone's slipped us a draft. Let's take a look...
It's about a girl named Madeleine "Maddy" Stephens, a self-described East Coast "blue blood" with a father in the Foreign Service and a painter/heiress mother. She lives in a WASPy house and has a handsome, popular, but vaguely troubled older brother named Gallagher (I surely must have just missed the watermelon smashing chapter, it's gotta be in there somewhere). They call him Gal—like he's an old farm dog who dies while saving children. Well, that's Past Maddy. Present Madeleine is—surprise!—a fashion writer living the glitzy life in Manhattan, with a friend named Issy. Anyway, the stories converge when a dark figure named JP emerges out of the shadows and makes her remember her old life. You see, she spent some of her high school years as a trotting expat in Paris. JP's making a documentary about all those crazy days. Because they're all so fascinating. But it's maybe exploitative? Problems ensue. At the end she writes a memoir called The Curation of Madeleine Stephens. Because everyone's a museum and an art gallery and is special. If they're rich.
The New York Post's Page Six tells us that the book has a publisher and Hollywood is already interested. Of course.
Now, we don't know for sure that this was even written by Ms. LaCava. There was no author on the manuscript. But we can tell, using our amazing computer savvy, that the document was created on a copy of Microsoft Office registered to Advance Magazine Group. Which could mean Condé Nast. Which could mean Vogue. So.
Here are some selections: