INSPIRE YOUR OWN LIFE: BE WHOEVER YOU WANT TO BE! DROP FIFTEEN YEARS AND WORK IN PUBLISHING!

Thanks to my new exposure to streaming television (thanks,  Stan) I have just started watching a  program about women in the publishing world, “Younger”. The premise is a bit like Suits for Girls: a forty year old woman who used to be in publishing (trad-pub old-style) has been out of the workforce raising her daughter and now wants back in. Ha-Ha. Forget it. Too old! No credits for child-raising or good sense. So she has to pretend she is in her twenties and become a Millenial. Luckily she has great skin and a fabulous figure, with only a few dodgy emergent crows-feet which she can put down to her entirely fake years volunteering  among the desperate and impoverished  in India.

She spins a new identity: long streaked hair, pull-on beanies, short skirts, high boots… you follow. She gets a fake ID and claims she finished an English degree at Dartford or somewhere then spent four years volunteering and writing a novel.  This is a wholly acceptable cv. Yes!!! She gets a job for a horrible mean lady publisher, also in her forties – a kind of Meryl Streep /Anna Wintour but showing it. Liza (our heroine) has to keep up the pretence that she’s young but it’s so HAAARD! Especially when the workmates see the decorations on her lady garden in the gym ( the grey bush which she quickly trades for a landing-strip) and she’s being pursued by a super hot tattoo artist guy who says he “likes things that are old”. He’s referring to vinyl records but we know it’s really old ladies like Liza.

Well, the point of the story here is that one of her associates wants to sign up the newest hottest literary writer: they make him a relatively smooth well-dressed Swede but there’s no mistaking he’s meant to be Knausgaard.  

It’s a shame they didn’t make him even more like Knausgaard, would have been lots more room for hilarious comedy.

Haven’t got past Episode Three yet so I don’t know what’s going to happen.  Who knows, maybe Elena Ferrante will be next cab off the New York rank for our “Younger” heroine. But it’s a wry and knowing reflection on the idiocies of the contemporary publishing world. Great script so far.