A Lady's Guide to Selling Out Read online

  A Lady’s Guide to Selling Out is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Sally Franson

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by The Dial Press, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  THE DIAL PRESS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9780399592034

  Ebook ISBN 9780399592058

  randomhousebooks.com

  Designed by Debbie Glasserman, adapted for ebook

  v5.2_r1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1: Brands, Brands, Brands!

  Chapter 2: Personal Brands

  Chapter 3: The Blue Ocean

  Chapter 4: Boys, Boys, Boys!

  Chapter 5: Angels and Demons

  Chapter 6: Game of Brooklyn

  Chapter 7: Capital Pickle

  Chapter 8: Love in the Time of Montage

  Chapter 9: When the Going Gets Tough

  Chapter 10: Containment: Impossible

  Chapter 11: What Happens in Vegas

  Chapter 12: …Doesn’t Stay in Vegas

  Chapter 13: The House of Dearth

  Chapter 14: A (Green) Room of One’s Own

  Chapter 15: A Lady’s Guide to Literature

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I guess you could say this whole thing started the day we tacked Ellen Hanks’s face to our vision board and began thinking seriously about how we could best take this incredible human being and turn her into a brand. Ellen Hanks was the face of Minneapolis’s Real Housewives franchise, and she had, just a few days before, approached People’s Republic Advertising about integrating her brand identities. PR was the best boutique agency in town, and Ellen needed our help. She’d launched a number of her own personally branded products—low-cal vodka, protein bites, and shapewear called Shape UP—but she felt these brands lacked inter-, intra-, and meta-coherence. They didn’t reflect, she said, her core values. She’d put us on retainer for what we were calling “cohesive brand management,” to not only support the growth of her consumer base but to add value to the life of each and every Ellen Hanks girl. Which is why we—Annie, Jack, Lindsey, and I, the crackerest-jack team PR had ever put together—found ourselves on that dreary March day puzzling over Ellen’s giant face and its implications.

  In fact, it was the Ides of March—I’ve always had a soft spot for days when famous guys got murdered—and I was wearing palazzo pants in the hopes of appearing more European. Despite the freezing temperatures, I was also wearing open-toed shoes in the hopes of dressing for the weather you wanted, not the weather, in Minnesota, you’d ever get. My best friend Susan once said my optimism bordered on derangement, and I told her they’d probably said the same thing about Gandhi. She’d said she doubted it, and I’d said greatness always seems deranged at first, which was something I thought about while writing in my diary sometimes, and a paraphrase of a quote I’d read on Pinterest.

  Together the four of us looked like an advertisement for the kind of glamorous urban life you could have if you went into advertising: three stylish and beautiful women, and a fetching gay. Well, it pains me to say that Annie wasn’t empirically beautiful, but when you put her with Lindsey and me you tended to, in your mind’s eye, gently round her up.

  “I am loving—” Jack said. He paused, placing one putting-the-man-in-manicured hand atop his checkered shirt, beneath his bow tie. “Loving what I’m seeing here.” He was our team’s senior art director; it was his job, in other words, to create the “visual ethos” for each branch (print, digital, film) of a brand’s campaign.

  “Uh-huh,” Annie said, nodding. “Absolutely. Uh-huh.” Annie was a copywriter, a fresh-faced twenty-three. Annie wore a lot of cardigans and was very diligent. She worked hard, much harder than the rest of us. She was talented enough to know she did not have a ton of talent; fear of unworthiness gave her a near-alarming level of commitment. But by then I’d read enough books about female leadership to know that true torchbearers ruled not by fear but inspiration, so I took Annie under my wing, complimenting her cardigans and praising her work and giving advice I don’t think she asked for but, I believed, might need someday. Annie returned this kindness with devotion, which only compounded my natural beneficence. She also didn’t mind, during long meetings, serving as an appreciative audience member for the rest of us as we waged our usual campaigns.

  “Here’s what we do,” Jack said. “Full-page glossy, put it in O and Us Weekly, we airbrush the face, add a fan to the hair, then her name at the bottom with the logo.” He blocked out the words in the air with his thumbs and index fingers. “ELLEN HANKS—”

  “Ellen Hanks,” I said. “And then the tag. ‘Housewives take no prisoners,’ or something.”

  “Casey, enough with the tags. We don’t need a tag,” Jack said. He was irritable that morning. His shih tzu, Johnny, needed eye surgery.

  “I think we might need a tag,” Lindsey said, cringing. Lindsey cringed when she said anything controversial. She’d gotten an art degree at RISD, painting tiny dolls on china saucers. A year or two after graduating, when it was clear she could not live by the bread of her Etsy store alone, she turned her saucer eyes toward advertising.

  Recently Lindsey’d gotten into what she called the Healing Arts. She drank weird glops out of mason jars and was always suggesting that I hold crystals and smell things. “Here,” she’d say when I complained of fatigue, and push a tiny brown bottle my way. “It’s for energy.”

  “So’s this,” I’d say, and glug down an entire Americano.

  “We don’t need a tag,” Jack said impatiently. “All we’re doing is creating brand recognition.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “Yeah, but people won’t understand what the ad is for.”

  Jack put his hands on his hips, too. “So we’ll put the names of her product lines at the bottom.”

  While we bickered, Annie looked back and forth between us like a cat trying to keep track of a laser pointer, bless her. When she watched, the part of me that felt I needed an audience to exist was, in that moment, satisfied. Jack and I went on like that for a while, more for sport than anything. Boredom crept into our edges like blackness on those old-timey photographs. It was important for our mental health to keep it on the periphery.

  “We can’t just use her face, Jack,” I said. “Her face alone doesn’t mean anything.”

  “What are you talking about?!” Jack said. “Her face is her entire brand identity!”

  Finally Lindsey interjected. “You guys,” she said, cringing. “Seriously, let’s chill for a second.”

  “Fine. Take it to the windows!” I flounced in that direction.

  People’s Republic took up the entire top floor of a downtown building, and the first thing people usually noticed were the floor-to-ceiling windows, complete with window seats and decorative pillows. “Take it to the windows,” in PR speak, meant to take a break from whatever earthly problem or disagreement you were wrestling with. There were little shelves of organic snacks by the windows, and at the end of the day we often kicked back there with a gl
ass of wine from the well-stocked Sub-Zero. The refrigerator and pillows and snacks—not to mention the couches and dartboards and graphic prints on the wall (my favorite one said I LIKE YOU), plus the sound of people bouncing tennis balls, deep in thought, on the concrete floor, and the whimsical doodles on the whiteboards—were all of a piece that added up to this whole idea that we should feel at home while we were at work. Or really that there was no difference between home and work—that work was fun! This is what we loved to brag about to our friends the most, friends who were stuck in less exciting jobs, slogging through Excel spreadsheets or legal briefs or outdated software at a nonprofit that had seemed noble at twenty-two but at twenty-eight seemed poor and sad. We got to go to work wearing artfully ripped jeans and scribble on Post-its and stick pictures of reality TV stars to movable felt walls! And we got paid for it! In fact, we got paid quite a lot!

  Lindsey, Jack, and I made jokes about being sellouts when we went out drinking after work, which happened frequently: the joking and the drinking. I guess we wanted to prevent someone else from saying it first, something we all feared. For me, that someone was my best friend Susan. We’d both been English majors in college, where we met, and even now, almost six years after graduation, I could feel her accusations boring into my skull. This? she’d say with her relentless blue eyes. This? We stayed up till three every night talking Marxist-feminist theory, and you’re writing campaigns for slimming underpants?

  Susan was the kind of friend where all she had to do was say “underpants” a certain way and I would double over laughing. I loved Susan more than anyone else in this world. Before I met her, I’d spent my whole life feeling a few clicks on the dial away from everyone I knew. Not that you could tell necessarily—I was popular and all that growing up, lots of friends, guys buzzing around like big horseflies—but there was this static in the air when I was around other people. Sometimes I’d even cancel plans, feigning illness, in order to stay home and read novels and fiddle with the antenna in my brain, trying to get a clear signal. Sometimes I’d go days, weeks, without it, the dull hiss unceasing. The static only seemed to stop, or my brain could only tune in to the world properly, when I was taking walks or reading novels. In other words, when I was alone.

  Oh well, I’d thought then, sucks for me I only get clarity by myself, everyone else seems to be getting on fine. Weirdo. Probably best to pretend that static doesn’t exist. That was right around the time I started partying, and exercising all the time.

  But when I met Susan I swear I could hear a low hum from somewhere deep below her rib cage that precisely matched the one in mine. I was eighteen years old, and it was the first time I understood what it meant to be kept company. From the inside out, I mean, not just a warm body thing. I feel sad when I think about that sometimes, that it took so long, that my whole life I’d been lonely and didn’t even know it. But there’s joy in that too, a kidlike joy, like when you run home crazy thirsty after playing outside all afternoon and glug down a glass of water. You think, Jesus Christ, why’d I let myself get so thirsty in the first place? And also: what a relief.

  “I bet Ellen’s a bitch,” Jack said. He was lying on his back on a window seat, knees knocking, his hands resting on his stomach like a Buddha. “On the show she’s such a bitch.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “She’s not a bitch. She just doesn’t suffer fools!”

  “I don’t think they’re fools. They’re lost, you know?” Lindsey said. She sat cross-legged on a bright blue ottoman, opening a fresh bottle of kombucha. “Like, in the culture.” She took a sip. “Wait, she’s the one from New Jersey?”

  Annie’s face brightened because she knew the answer. “Uh-huh. She came here because her ex-husband got a job as CEO at—”

  “Blah blah blah,” I said impatiently. “And they got divorced, there was a prenup so she didn’t get any money, but thanks to her hard work and beauty and brains she managed to claw her way back up from nothing.” I didn’t know how anyone could not know the story of Ellen Hanks. Besides the minor celebrities who stuck around after going to rehab at this glitzy place outside of town, there weren’t that many ambitious people in this city. I should know. In my work at PR I’d tried to curry favor with all of them—and foist myself on more than a few.

  Ellen, however, was an exception, maybe because she was often flying to New York or L.A. or wherever it is people jet off to when they’d rather live somewhere else. I never saw her around town, which bummed me out, because after watching two seasons of her show I’d developed what I guess you’d call a girl crush on her, that weird feeling of wanting to touch another woman’s hair and press her cheek to your cheek and tell her all your secrets while maybe kissing her a little, just maybe, or maybe even more than that, maybe even smushing your face in her breasts, but then again, maybe not, I dunno, it was hard to say.

  “You know, you guys kind of remind me of each other,” Jack said. He was scrolling through Facebook, absentmindedly “liking” this post and that.

  “Hello,” I said, “you just called her a bitch!”

  “You’re a bitch too,” he said. I gasped, though I was not in the least offended. He craned his neck to look at me. “Lovable bitch,” he explained.

  “Couldn’t you guys see Casey on TV?” Lindsey said. The kombucha was reviving her. She sat up a little straighter on the ottoman.

  “Oh my God,” Annie said. “Totally.”

  “You guys, stop it,” I said, but they all knew I meant continue please.

  “Seriously!” Lindsey said. Lindsey loved saying nice things to people. It was one of her best qualities, but also weirdly the most irritating. I think she thought it would make us love her better—she’d had a difficult childhood, bad stepdad and whatnot, and seemed to think her full-time job was to try to make the rest of us happy. Sure, I liked all the little presents and handwritten cards, the affirmations on the hour, every hour, but sometimes they were exhausting. Sometimes I wanted to pull her aside and tell her: it’s okay, don’t you see we love you a whole lot already? But you couldn’t say that sort of thing to Lindsey. She crumpled easily.

  “Seriously,” she said again. “You’re both super funny, super sexy, super, like—”

  “Oh, I don’t know about all that,” I began.

  “Bitchy,” Jack interjected.

  “I was going to say driven,” said Lindsey. She took another delicate sip of kombucha.

  * * *

  —

  We didn’t come up with much else to tell Ellen before she arrived that afternoon. It didn’t matter, though. We were in new territory—a person, not a company, asking us for branding advice—and the most important thing was to make Ellen feel comfortable. For her to get to know us, and for us to get to know her. How could we create a brand campaign for a person if we didn’t even know the person? Or anyway, that’s the sort of thing we told ourselves while we snacked and gossiped and tumbled around the Internet checking Facebook/Twitter/Instagram, avoiding work and taking what I liked to call the modern cigarette break. I didn’t make that up, I stole it from somewhere, but I didn’t tell people that because it was nice to feel like you were the person with all the good ideas.

  Celeste Winter, my boss, and the founder of People’s Republic, tended to like my ideas. I was considered, not unbitchily, to be one of her favorites. Which was, I thought, also not unbitchily, fine by me, seeing as this favoritism was the direct result of my hard work, not to mention raw talent. Celeste was one of those bosses who was notoriously difficult to please, and who took pleasure in this fact. She’d been a hot young public relations girl in New York in the early nineties before cocaine got the better of her. She’d come here for rehab, then stuck around here to relaunch her career.

  The fact that Celeste was hard to please only made me want the job more. I chalked this up to my childhood. People my age were very interested in their childhoods. Our
parents shouldered a lot of blame. We worked through our childhoods and against our parents using therapy, self-help books, and light-to-medium Buddhism from apps and meditation tapes. From my own journey of self-discovery I came to understand that even though my mother, Louise, wasn’t an alcoholic, her mother was, and this stuff trickles down in families like water in old buildings. For example: when my grandmother wasn’t drinking, she’d get so obsessed with cleaning that she made my mother tiptoe on the edges of carpeted rooms so as not to mess up the vacuum lines. My mother wasn’t that bad, but every Saturday morning she’d still haul me out of bed for chores and make me clean for hours until the house was up to her specifications. Which is how I learned that a large chasm exists between a child’s skill and a mother’s specifications—a chasm that, so far, had yet to improve with aging.

  I’d applied for this job right out of college. When Celeste sat back in her chair during my interview, arms crossed, her face primed for disappointment before I’d so much as opened my mouth, I wasn’t surprised; I felt right at home. Mama! It’s like that experiment I read about in Psych 101. When baby chimps, removed from their mothers at birth, are given bare wire hangers in the laboratory with bottles attached, they automatically turn the wire hangers into mothers. It’s pretty cute, actually—they snuggle the hangers at night, play little games with them, et cetera. But the funny thing is, even when scientists remove the bottles from the wire hangers and attached them to other, more comfy, cloth-covered hangers, the baby chimps always prefer the wire hangers. In fact, they prefer them so much that they basically starve to death.