Read Any Revenge Lit Recently?

Getting even is the ultimate daydream of a beleaguered employee ground underfoot by the whimsical commands of a megalomaniac boss. And in the past two years a new literary trend has proven the popularity, therapeutic value and high commercial returns of thinly disguised backlash books. The motive is humiliating revenge crafted adroitly to avoid punitive action. The plot reveals hitherto secret, darker than night characteristics of a person in power. And in the end it is David not Goliath who walks away with the pushy agent and the six-figure book deal. The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Krauss was a surprise New York Times bestseller in 2002. But what really captured the attention of manicured moms were its hilarious descriptions of detached Park Avenue parents. Both authors are latter day Mary Poppins, and despite their disclaimer, the truth was too close to the homes of many, to have been born entirely in the realm of great ideas.

Similarly, 2003’s The Devil Wears Prada had Anna Wintour acolytes gasping for oxygen. Written by the Vogue editor’s former assistant Laura Weisberger, it describes the travails of a magazine assistant whose duties include chauffeuring the newly neutered dog of an emaciated fashion editor with all the charms of a shrivelled prune. For her disloyal tattling Weisberger received a $250,000 advance from Doubleday, and sold film rights to Fox for $600,000. Similarly, in former InStyle copyeditor Lynn Messina’s debut novel Fashionistas, the unhappy protagonist dreams of destroying her mean boss, but is left instead to juggle being a lowly assistant by day and New York’s secret “It” designer by night. While Messina insists the story is fiction, she has become a pariah to her former employer. But who cares? Fashionistas the film will star the host of this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, actress Lindsay Lohan, and is due for release in 2005.

And when it comes to settling scores, no office is too high for rebuke. After former White House counter terrorism chief Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror reminded us why the world loathes George Bush, a new book Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terrorism, under the nom de plume Anonymous, blames intelligence officials for bin Laden’s unnerving obsession with the US. Believed to be written by Michael Scheuer, head of the bin Laden desk at the CIA from 1996 to 1999, the book roundly rebukes his superiors, who, among other things, described him as “myopic” for anticipating a terrorist threat from Al-Qaeda pre-9/11.

But the volume that most skillfully bit the hand that fed it is Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story From Hell on Earth by UN workers Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thomson. This graphic tale not only describes the complete collapse of numerous UN peacekeeping missions, it also details a string of orgies and excesses by mission workers from Cambodia to Bulgaria. Oddly enough, the UN is threatening to fire both Postlewait and Thompson (Cain opted out earlier).

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However, being keen to reveal can sometimes do more harm than good as former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair found out. After years of creative plagiarism ended his career and that of two top editors, Blair decided to cash in with a six-figure advance from New Millennium Press, for 2004’s Burning Down My Master’s House: My Life at The New York Times. Unfortunately for this literary liar, no one believed him. Sales of his turncoat tale proved disappointing, Blair was deleted from the media radar, and has been deemed unemployable.

Makes you want to put down that pen? Didn’t think so.