Caroline Palmer was telling the story of how she got hired at Vogue in 2001 when a waitress at Tierney’s Tavern plunked two pints of beer and a pile of glistening onion rings on the table between us.
There was something incongruous, almost subversive, about discussing the heyday of fashion magazines at a dive bar in Montclair, N.J., where Palmer lives.
“The women I worked with were smart. They worked hard. They had your back,” said Palmer, who found her way to Vogue with the help of a childhood friend’s co-worker’s sister, an editor there. “But there were times where some would get to go to the ball, and the Cinderellas would stay home.”
Palmer writes about this dynamic in her debut novel, “Workhorse,” which came out on Oct. 14. Equal parts roman à clef and coming-of-age tale, the 554-page book joins a bevy of recent books exploring the decline of glossy print media.
They include Graydon Carter’s memoir, “When the Going Was Good,” reflecting on the halcyon days of Vanity Fair; Amy Odell’s biography of Anna Wintour, longtime editor of Vogue, who last month handed over the reins of the American edition to Chloe Malle; and Michael Grynbaum’s “Empire of the Elite,” tracing the influence of Vogue’s parent company, Condé Nast.
All this is to say: The magazine industry is having a moment. Call it nostalgia; call it rearranging the Eames chairs on the Titanic. A certain strain of status-curious reader keeps coming back for more.
“I’d seen the glamorization of it, but I hadn’t seen the grit,” Palmer said, projecting her voice over a soundtrack of the Yankees and the thwack of saloon doors.
What distinguishes “Workhorse” from the pack (and from its obvious forebear, “The Devil Wears Prada”) is its focus on the era when attention shifted from pages to screens — “post 9/11, pre-Lehman collapse,” said Megan Lynch, Palmer’s editor at Flatiron, who bought the novel in a bidding war. The book zeros in on the lower rungs of the masthead, and the way underpaid entry level staffers fueled the machine that shaped our culture, from fashion to fitness to home décor.
“There’s no editor in chief; that was done already,” Palmer said, referring to Miranda Priestly, the fearsome leader created by Wintour’s former assistant, Lauren Weisberger, and immortalized by Meryl Streep, in “The Devil Wears Prada.” “This story isn’t about superior to subordinate, it’s peer to peer. It felt important to me to keep the action there.”
Palmer divides editors at her unnamed magazine into two categories: “the privileged (Workhorses) and the super-privileged (Show Horses).” Not since the 1980 publication of “The Official Preppy Handbook” has an author summed up an elite subset so deftly.
A Workhorse, Palmer writes, is “(most often) a white girl who hails from a thriving public school system in a tidy little corner of suburbia who has been promised that, with enough hard work, she will be eligible for some variation of upward mobility.” She owns a pair of skis, knows her way around a tennis court and is responsible for her own finances.
A Show Horse, on the other hand, is an “Ivy League-educated (or appropriately Ivy League adjacent, e.g., Kenyon, Colby) white girl who was born into some variation of generational wealth (nannies, trust funds, private schools, an emotional understanding of Maine).” Unconcerned by matters like health insurance and 401(k) contributions, her presence burnishes the reputation of the magazine as an arbiter of good taste.
Palmer, who grew up in Bucks County, Pa. and graduated from the University of Delaware, identifies as a workhorse.
“I wore Nine West shoes,” she said, deadpan, distinguishing herself from former colleagues who teetered around the fabled garlic-free Condé Nast cafeteria in Louboutin stilettos. “My parents took us to New York two times growing up: Once to see ‘Les Mis,’ once to the Hard Rock Cafe.”
She took a swig of her I.P.A. “Actually, those might have been the same visit.”
Palmer’s protagonist, Clodagh Harmon, is a Workhorse with Show Horse aspirations. To this end, she befriends Davis Lawrence, a Princeton grad whose mother is an aging sitcom star.
Clo, as she’s known, will go to any lengths to achieve her colleague’s level of je ne sais quoi, even if it means sidelining Davis.
“I wanted to write a woman that you like, and relate to, who’s driven by forces that make her do bad things,” Palmer said.
She added, “We never question whether is ambition is reason enough for a man to be cutthroat.”
Palmer got her start at Seventeen, where she earned less than $25,000 and lived with a revolving door of roommates in the late 1990s. She worked at Vogue in two stints, ultimately serving as editor of the magazine’s website for seven years. She left in 2014, moved to Amazon Fashion for four years and then to a company that did supply chain work for the fashion industry. Palmer exited that job when Montclair schools were closed during the pandemic.
“I was like, This isn’t working with my three kids in a room together watching TV,” Palmer said. “That was the first time I ever didn’t have a job.”
She started waking up at 4 o’clock in the morning to write.
“Workhorse” began as a television pilot, then morphed into a novel. Palmer didn’t share her manuscript with anyone, including her husband, Estep Nagy, who is a writer.
Garth Risk Hallberg, another novelist and a friend of Palmer’s, said he knew she was working on a book but that she never asked for advice. “That’s how I knew she was a writer,” Hallberg recalled. Palmer didn’t talk a lot about craft; she just did the work.
Hallberg said he admired how Palmer captured “the insecurity, the competition at the expense of everything else, the absurd bubble the characters are living in and kind of detest but don’t know how to stop.”
Full disclosure: I, too, spent many years working at magazines, and I laughed out loud at Palmer’s litany of rules for an assistant. Chief among them: “You do not complain. You do not explain. You don’t point out when you’re being treated unfairly.”
Also: “You don’t chew gum. You don’t eat hot sandwiches. You don’t wear flats. You don’t slouch. You don’t carry around a plastic water bottle.” The list goes on for three pages.
Palmer was quick to point out that, while the Show Horses landed coveted invitations, “they worked really hard too. They weren’t pampered.”
She denied any connection between the character of Davis and Chloe Malle, Vogue’s new editor, whose mother Candice Bergen starred in the ’90s sitcom “Murphy Brown.”
“Chloe’s mother is a delight and Davis’s mother is dark and evil,” Palmer said. “Chloe is great. She shows up. She has no airs. She feels very genuine.”
The two first crossed paths when Palmer interviewed Malle for a job at Vogue in 2011. In an interview, Malle described “Workhorse” as “well done and well framed.”
She said of Davis, “It never occurred to me that she had anything to do with me.”
According to Malle, the world that Palmer describes has changed considerably. “The 25-year-old fashion writer is wearing Wales Bonner Adidas, ambling along the carpeted hallways,” she said. “There’s a shift in sensibility.”
As for Palmer, she doesn’t romanticize the stress of the old days, but she has fond memories of the sisterhood she found there.
“Some of the girls I met as assistants are still my closest friends,” she said. “I’ve never worked with such an impressive group of people ever again.”
Elisabeth Egan is a writer and editor at the Times Book Review. She has worked in the world of publishing for 30 years.
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