Don’t forget the gift bags

So here’s what you need to know about the new Lit Girls: It’s all about the dust jacket photograph. Their editors cut chapters, add chapters, rewrite entire characters, these girls could give a flying Gucci. Whatever. But call them about the photograph and omigod, it’s time for full-frontal freakout.

They want Annie Leibovitz, they want Frederick Fekkai, they want a month in which they get abdominal Botox so they can lounge in a doorway with their midriff exposed even when they’re, like, over 35 (yuck). Whatever it takes to look hip and Oprah-ready, whatever’s going to get them into a Nike ad or a Vanity Fair spread. They also are pretty much all over the book parties. In Lit Land, the caterer is almost as important as the publisher.

I should know. I’m the assistant to the assistant to the newly appointed national Lit-Lite Editrix. Chick lit, gossip lit, Capitol lit, Hollywood assistant-lit, even the short-lived lad lit, it all goes through us. Blame it on “Bridget Jones,” or “Sex and the City,” or even the “The Nanny Diaries,” but books written exclusively in the first person by young women who think e-mail is an art form and brand names are the key to illuminating a character’s soul have reproduced faster than those blond families in the Ralph Lauren ads.

After this year’s deluge -- “Bergdorf Blondes,” “The Devil Wears Prada,” “The Right Address” and “The Second Assistant” just to name a few -- something had to be done. I mean, the people were starting to confuse Plum Sykes with Cameron Diaz and that is just so wrong.

Hollywood, Park Avenue, wherever, all these books read like they were written by high school girls -- you know the ones who worked on the yearbook but didn’t run the yearbook, who never quite got over it, who never got it together to go to an exclusive liberal arts college like I did?

Believe me, this is not what I had in mind when I recently graduated from Bennington. I mean I was a philosophy major and that really meant something to me. But I have big dreams and many of them revolve around Miramax’s book division.

The Lit Lite offices are in Trump Tower because everyone’s limousine drivers can find Trump Tower and it’s so convenient for the wannabes from Conde Nast. They can just walk.

I sit in the rose marble atrium, in the official Lit Lite welcoming area where I am in charge of signing in visitors (we have a special door for Helen Fielding and Candace Bushnell), receiving unsolicited manuscripts and also handing out gift bags. This week, we’ve got Lilly Pulitzer flip-flops so you can bet I’ll be keeping a few of those back.

One of my duties is to do a short write-up on how each girl enters the office -- you know, whether they can text while they walk, if they hook their hair behind their ears the proper way, are they carrying (yuck) a briefcase. So I watch them come down the hall in their Manolos and Jimmy Choos, their Tags and their Gucci wraparounds, their Chloe jeans and Hermes, their Burberry and their Stayfree micro-thins. I can tell in a glance who’s got this season’s or last season’s or Celestial Seasons, can smell Clinique at a hundred paces, so I’m pretty good at predicting which books are going to fly and which ones are going to wind up as essays in Glamour.

Right now, I’ve got three drop-off bins and three sign-up sheets -- gossip, chick and Hollywood. Gossip lit girls tend to speak in fake British accents they picked up at the Seven Sisters and are the thinnest. Chick girls are mostly magazine assistant editors and newspaper feature writers who see the world entirely in first person and cannot cope with actual information because Google is so unreliable. Some of the “writers” producing Hollywood lit couldn’t find it on a map (I understand Hollywood isn’t actually in Hollywood though that still doesn’t make sense to me) but others are actually from there and they are easy to spot because they put their hair up using a pencil and drink Frappuccinos with whipped cream and that is so four seasons ago in New York.

The ones who are already published are pretty snotty; they don’t even look at me unless I “forget” to give them their gift bag and then they are super nice. But the new ones don’t know what’s going on so I try to walk them into the office, just so the Editrix actually sees me once in a while and so I can try to casually be saying to some Lit Girl that I really think she’s the next Edith Wharton since “The House of Mirth” was, essentially, the first chick-lit novel, although with a way downer ending.

I actually said that, even the “essentially,” and the Editrix looked at me like she didn’t know who Edith Wharton was. I’m pretty sure she went to some state school in the Midwest.

Now you would think being a Lit Girl is totally cool and completely desirable, but believe me, it’s not. The contract is totally draconian and not just because it is signed in actual blood. First, if you are single, you must remain single throughout the first three print runs, or until the book is off the bestseller list and that includes paperback. You will be given classes in party deportment by a woman we found who studied under Uma Thurman before, you know, Ethan, and you are not to consume, or at least digest, more than 1,200 calories a day; there will be weekly weigh-ins.

Also, you may be required to change your name. Tangerine is what the Editrix has in mind for the next breakout author.

My boyfriend thinks I should write my own book, which just goes to show you how completely he doesn’t get me. I don’t want to write a book, I want to sign a book contract. Preferably a multiple-book contract. The only reason I’m doing this job (philosophy major, hel-lo) is to figure out how you can completely do away with the boring part of actually typing something.

Though the longer I work in this office, the more I begin to wonder. These Lit Girls really do seem so neurotic, ordering out for lavender water every three seconds, checking the expiration date on their sunglasses every three seconds, texting their girlfriends or breaking up with their boyfriends every three seconds. They don’t seem to have a minute to themselves.

And besides, the things they write are just so mean, full of horrible, catty things about their friends or their bosses (as if they know what a terrible boss is; they should see mine, not that you ever can because she has her own suite in her plastic surgeon’s office) -- all of whom are other women. What happened to sisterhood anyway? I mean, feminism is totally three seasons ago (although Gloria still looks great, doesn’t she?), but if men wrote these books it would be like “Lysistrata” all over again. (That’s the one where the women wouldn’t put out, right? Or is that “Antigone”?)

I was telling all this to the FedEx guy and he thinks I should just stay cool and wait for the Editrix to say something wrong at some party or just come apart at her many seams. Then I’d be the assistant and I wouldn’t have to live on hand-me-down couture samples and the really lame movie premieres. Then I would get my own cubicle and I wouldn’t have to keep a log of accessory trends (Lit Girl beauty tip: Tina Fey development-girl glasses are about to go totally last season).

But I’d still want to be in charge of the gift bags. Because you shouldn’t surrender power, not even for art.

Amber Wavesofgrain is the nom de plume of Times staff writer Mary McNamara.