"My friend Anna"

Barbara Amiel, currently fulminating against all leftish tendencies in the safe confines of Maclean's, also writes for the Daily Telegraph in London. And nowhere is her maintenance of her view of the world and her defence of her friends more in evidence than the recent article about The Devil Wears Prada, the film based on a novel hatcheting a barely disguised Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue. If the magazine, the book, the movie and Meryl Streep's performance are satires, surely the article is, in its way, an unintended satire on the Amielian style. Here are a couple of sample paragraphs:

Since time immemorial, people of limited or average ability and energy have consoled themselves that they understand the more important values in life, such as relationships and intimacy, as though these things were not available to energetic, talented people. This is a literary convention that fuels many a work on stage and screen as well as between covers. One of the commonest ways by which this is done is to depict these powerful and successful beings as human failures.

She goes on...

If you are famous or notorious, you simply have to put up with being caricatured or portrayed, sometimes by very silly people, sometimes by vicious ones. It goes with the territory. Anna, being very famous, gets Streep, an A-list actress, to play her. I, being barely notorious, get Lara Flynn Boyle, who has just completed a television movie covering my own life [Shades of Black: The Conrad Black Story, made by CTV in Canada and to be screened in the autumn]. But then again, as Anna pointed out when we were discussing what to wear to the premier of the films about ourselves, Boyle is nearly 30 years younger than I am and Streep is nearly five months older than Wintour. You can't have everything.