I am experiencing a kind of existential whiplash: something I wrote in my 20s is not only still relevant, but somehow…trending again. The Devil Wears Prada hasn’t faded into a respectable backlist existence. It has persisted—quoted, memed, rebooted, reimagined, turned into a movie, a musical, and now a sequel—like a glamorous ghost that refuses to leave the building.

When I first started writing The Devil Wears Prada, as an essay for a workshop, I was 23, an age when you are wildly observant and completely unqualified to interpret what you’re observing. I was not trying to write a cultural phenomenon. There was no master plan. No vision board labeled “global franchise.” No quiet moment of prophetic clarity where I thought, Yes, this will one day become shorthand for toxic workplaces and also be quoted by teenagers who have never used a landline. It wasn’t an attempt to take anyone down or exact some sort of revenge; I was just writing something that felt true to my experience as an assistant in very close proximity to a powerful woman—one who filled me with abject terror—before I had the distance or the maturity or the sense of self-preservation to round off the edges.

The book became an instant bestseller, and the attention that followed, some of it flattering, plenty of it vicious, was not something I was prepared for. Over the next couple years I learned better how to navigate it, but by then the film had arrived and transformed my story into something glossy, kinetic, and wildly entertaining. The first movie gave my characters beautiful faces, voices, fabulous clothes, and, most notably, scale. I discovered countless women had had similar experiences. At readings and book signings, I heard so many stories of tyrannical bosses, I could have written a Devil Wears Prada for each of them. Turns out, Miranda is not unique to fashion; she’s just better dressed.

There is a moment, as every author who’s had something adapted knows, when you realize the story is no longer yours. Others aren’t merely interpreting it; they’re owning it. Suddenly, people were quoting it back to me, correcting me on details, dressing up as the characters with a level of commitment I frankly did not have when I created them. And the merch! What began with canvas totes and slogan tanks has expanded, thanks to the studio marketing machine, into everything (and I do mean everything) from tweezers to vodka to $300,000 cars. It all feels both flattering and deeply unsettling, like running into an ex who’s thriving and loudly rewriting the story of your relationship.

I’m often asked whether I still recognize myself in Andy Sachs. The answer is yes, but in the way I recognize myself in an old photograph: the features are familiar, the outfit is questionable, and I feel a strong urge to explain my choices. Andy lived in a moral universe of very clean trade-offs. She stepped into a version of herself she didn’t entirely like and then stepped right back out again, unchanged. I admire her confidence. I also now understand that life doesn’t work that way. Adults do not lose themselves in a single dramatic moment. We adapt—incrementally, even reasonably—until one day we look up and think, Huh. Interesting set of priorities I’ve assembled here.

If I wrote Prada today, it would undoubtedly be different. Not softer, necessarily, but more layered. I have more empathy now—for the assistants and the bosses, for the 20-somethings trying to prove themselves, and for those who already have. That kind of understanding comes only with time, experience, and a few hard-earned recalibrations. Still, the version of me who wrote that book had something I cannot easily access now: unfiltered honesty. There is a boldness that comes from being young and outraged. You’re less careful, less diplomatic, not as concerned with the consequences. And there is real power in that.

For more than two decades, people have been meeting the early 20s version of me. Meanwhile, I have written eight more novels (a ninth is on the way), gotten married, raised two children who are now teenagers—alarmingly close in age to who I was then—and evolved into someone a little more nuanced and a little less certain. Andy feels very far away.

And yet.

When the call came about a The Devil Wears Prada sequel all these years later, it felt both surprising and inevitable. Of course these characters still have something to say. Of course the world they inhabit still exists in some form. If anything, the core dynamics of the story—power, identity, compromise—feel more relevant now, filtered through a different cultural lens. We talk more openly about boundaries, about toxic work environments, about the cost of ambition.

There is a small detail I have omitted from every interview and public appearance I’ve made recently, probably because I feared the backlash, the comments about my choices, my privilege, or something else entirely. But here goes: I moved onto a trawler.

This is not, historically, a very Vogue-coded life choice. During COVID, my husband and I sold our house in Connecticut, took our kids out of school, and spent three years living aboard—traveling, homeschooling, catching dinner, and wearing almost exclusively rash guards. Not long ago, anchored somewhere remote, I found myself trimming my hair with kitchen scissors and thinking, This does not feel like a natural extension of my stint at Vogue.

I’m writing this Vogue piece from the boat, nearing my 90th straight day at anchor in a remote part of the Bahamas. I spend mornings on edits, emails, Zooms with agents, conversations with producers, and compulsively tracking developments related to The Devil Wears Prada 2 like a normal, well-adjusted person. Then I shut it all down and pass the afternoons scrubbing the galley, spearfishing, or failing to help my eighth grader with algebra. I used to obsess over the perfect shoe or bag; now I’m fixated on finding a vegetable that has not been canned or frozen. This is, objectively, a strange evolution. But in the words of Nigel from the West End musical (another surreal, delicious development): “Got a job, my dreams, a partner I love, and a life that fits like a Lagerfeld glove.”

I have learned I don’t get to control how something lives and grows in the world. I only get to be the person who started it. If the book has endured—and clearly, it has—it’s not because of the clothes or the setting or even the characters. We keep returning because the questions at its center are universal, ones we are still trying to answer. What is the cost of the life you want—to you, to the people around you? And, after you achieve exactly what you want, are you still the same person who wanted it in the first place?