I first picked up Stephanie Clifford’s debut novel because the cover was aesthetically appealing. Yes, sometimes I am guilty of judging a book by its cover; this one was kelly green and pink, and had pretty cursive writing. I had briefly heard of Everybody Rise from what I might call a less-than-reputable source, but I flipped to the back cover anyway. It was Clifford’s own life story—a top-of-her-class Harvard graduate and an award-winning journalist for The New York Times—that convinced me to buy her book. I mean, she’s basically a real-life Rory Gilmore, and if Rory Gilmore is going to write a book, I am going to read it.
What I found inside the pretty cover, and beyond the impressive biography, was sharp, witty, and biting commentary on what it’s actually like to “make it,” in the sense of perfectly photoshopped magazine clippings, bloggers with wardrobes more expensive than a house and the #getgifted posts on the Kate Spade Instagram account. Clifford’s writing tears the pretty packaging off of the charmed life and lets the reader in on the well-kept secrets of the wealthy, who so expertly wrap themselves up and finish it off with a bow (and pearls).
Poised right before the break of the 2008 financial crisis, Everybody Rise ends before I’m ready, but so expertly shows the immorality of the elite that Clifford doesn’t need a crisis. Clifford’s book is about the fall and rise of a single woman—her protagonist, Evelyn—and not about the woes of coming from “old-money” during America’s financial ruin. The product of a mildly-successful father and a socially-obsessed mother, Evelyn is perpetually on the outskirts of the New York elite, until she finds herself the recruitment officer for a new social networking company aimed at the “elite’s elite.” We see Evelyn struggle with her new role and the unfortunate reality that “making it” in New York is not just a makeover and a new, fabulously gay friend away.
In many ways, Everybody Rise is an amalgamation of stories we’ve seen before—the tearing down of the magical, the beautiful, the perfected, to reveal a dark and twisted underbelly of struggle, where it’s not about what you can do but rather about how many people you’ll screw over in the process of doing it. In many other ways, Clifford’s freshman work is completely new in the way that it never assumes the packaging to be as good as what’s inside, and her heroine dives in head first anyway. Everybody Rise is, at its core, a smart and observant commentary on what happens when we forget to leave high school behind.