'Prada' nips at author Lauren Weisberger's heels USA Today by Olivia Barker The devil may wear Prada, but the devil's creator, Lauren Weisberger, wears simple jeans and a sweater. (OK, so the sweater is Diane von Furstenberg.) The heroines of Weisberger's latest fictional Manhattan lark might be Chasing Harry Winston — the source for marble-size engagement baubles — but the newly married novelist jokes that she snagged a "Harry Weinstein, on 47th Street," a reference to New York's far less glamorous diamond district. She may have three books, two $1 million advances and one blockbuster movie in her bag. (OK, it's Louis Vuitton rival Goyard.) But Weisberger seems humble, if not still a little shell-shocked, five years after the explosive success of The Devil Wears Prada, a No. 1 USA TODAY best seller. Of course, Prada's red-hot pitchfork cast a long shadow. "I'm nervous about this coming out," says Weisberger, 31, referring to her third chick-lit novel, Chasing Harry Winston (Simon & Schuster, $25.95), on sale this week. It's about three ambitious, beautiful best friends nearing 30, two of whom make a vodka-gimlet-fueled pact to overhaul their lives over a year: One vows to limit her man-quests to one committed relationship, the other promises to ratchet them up. (The third already has a rock.) It's a younger Sex and the City, minus one character. "I have no idea how it's going to be received, and I don't mean by the critics. I mean by the readers," Weisberger says over scrambled eggs at Florent, a downtown institution that's on its last diner-stool legs, thanks to the nightclubbing gentrifiers who populate her books. Weisberger gained fame as an outsider, a New York na•f who dared to pillory one of the pillars of the fashion industry. The Scranton, Pa., native turned a year-long stint as an assistant to infamously icy Vogue editor Anna Wintour into a juicy roman ˆ clef. Prada the hit book begot Prada the hit movie starring Meryl Streep as the Wintour-like figure and Anne Hathaway as Weisberger's doppelgänger. Weisberger didn't write the script, but she calls the movie "pitch-perfect." With Prada the book, for which she received $250,000, Weisberger thought she had written a fun and frothy read that her parents and friends would buy before its red cover faded into obscurity. "I was just blissfully clueless," she says. "One of the things I think is funniest is when people say, 'It was so brave of you to write that book! It was so brave of you to go up against the fashion world!' It wasn't brave, it was stupid! I was 25. I had no idea what I was getting into. If I had known, if I had experienced what came of it (the hype, positive and negative), I probably wouldn't have been able in hindsight to have done it." She emphatically does not talk to anyone from her Vogue days. "It's just totally different circles," says the writer, who has traded parties and benefit-hopping for "the ordering-in-on-a-Friday-night type thing." If she ever ran into Wintour (she hasn't), "she would have no idea who I am." But publishers paid attention. After Prada became a phenomenon, Weisberger snagged a new publisher and a million-dollar advance for her second book, 2005's Everyone Worth Knowing, about the party scene behind the velvet ropes and the headset-caged publicists who control it. Chick lit grows up Despite lukewarm-to-chilly reviews and muted buzz, it became a best seller, peaking at No. 48 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list. Everyone Worth Knowing has 1.3 million copies in print (compared with nearly 4 million for Prada), the publisher says. Which means Weisberger's editor isn't nearly as anxious as the author is about Harry Winston. "We have the evidence that she isn't a one-hit wonder," says Marysue Rucci of Simon & Schuster. Considering that Everyone Worth Knowing did "as well as it did with as little attention as it got, that's quite a statement about the loyalty of (Weisberger's) fan base," says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly. Harry Winston makes its debut at a time when the industry is entering "chick lit 2.0," Nelson says. "The definition of chick lit has expanded to include some things that are a little more accomplished and grown-up and literary than what that term used to mean. At the same time, there's lot of that same old boy-meets-girl kind of thing." Unlike Prada, Harry Winston is embracing its namesake publication. Starting Saturday, all of the company's U.S. stores will mount Harry Winston window displays. And though Harry Winston hasn't been optioned by a studio (Weisberger says there's interest), its cover pays intentional homage to Prada's iconic film poster, featuring a stiletto heel that, instead of being crowned by a pitchfork, spears a trio of multi-carat diamond rings. Was Weisberger worth the multimillion-dollar investment? "Oh, absolutely," Rucci says. No matter that early reviews for Harry Winston are mixed. Publishers Weekly called it a "hilarious, silly" romp. Entertainment Weekly said, "The fluffy fun bits are lost in a blobby mess of a narrative." Prada taught Weisberger not to read her press. "I care too much. I take it in too much, and I obsess over it and think about it, and it's just not a good idea," she says. Back when she would read about herself — the New York blogosphere was particularly unkind — "it's all kind of sinking in, and it's all swimming around in your head as you sit there. … The pressure after Prada was astounding." It's a familiar predicament. "Once you're a resounding success as a first-time novelist from something that maybe comes out of left field, you face that pressure, and that can be crippling," Rucci says. (Remember Citizen Girl, the sophomore book from the duo behind The Nanny Diaries? Probably not.) Armed with the relative success of Everyone Worth Knowing, tackling Harry Winston was "not a particularly horrifically stressful" experience, Weisberger says. She did make some changes to her style, however. For the first time, she dropped the first-person and told the story in the third, from three different perspectives: Leigh's, Adriana's and Emmy's. She loved the shift in point of view. "I found it very freeing," she says. "And it's harder for people to attach author to narrator, which I'd struggled with very much for the first two, everyone just assuming that they're one and the same. There's a little more distance." Weisberger swears no character is wholly plucked from her orbit. She has cobbled together bits and pieces from what she has seen and heard among her friends, "often against their will." Take an early scene, when Emmy announces she has been dumped by her boyfriend for his personal trainer — whom Emmy has been paying for. "That actually happened" to a friend of a friend. "Nightmare. Nightmare," she says. A writerly couple Sometimes she has to fight over material with fellow writers, including her husband, Mike Cohen, 35, whom she met two years ago and married April 5 in Anguilla. Even though his bailiwick is more literary than commercial (he's working on his first novel), "every now and then something will come up that just has us both on the floor cracking up, and it's a matter of who calls it first. It's usually him." Still, the couple have their divergent reference points. One night Weisberger, Cohen, Rucci and Cohen's agent headed out to the Waverly Inn, the of-the-moment West Village restaurant where, not so coincidentally, the Harry Winston heroines hatch their pact. "We sit down, and one of them was like: 'Jessica Simpson. Three o'clock. No idea who she's with.' And I'm like, (sigh) 'Ken Paves, her hairdresser. He's in Us Weekly every two weeks.' And they were horrified." Not surprisingly, a celebrity hair stylist, Gilles, pops up in the book. Weisberger has her own, Kyle White. "He's much more fabulous than Gilles." Not exactly 'a stretch' There are a few other meta moments in Harry Winston, à la Prada. Like her creator, Leigh is a Cornell English graduate who works in publishing, although on the other side of the pen, as an editor. And Leigh's neurotic behavior, Weisberger concedes, "wasn't a stretch" to write. Leigh even mounts a defense of chick lit to the highbrow literary wunderkind she's editing, decreeing it "witty, clever and fun to read" and praising Bridget Jones's Diary and The Nanny Diaries. "All different kinds of people read these kinds of books to be entertained, to relax and unwind," Weisberger says. "Or because they find that they hopefully relate to the characters" — their Barneys budgets notwithstanding.