Semi-Gloss: Magazines, Motherhood, and Misadventures in Having It All

Former beauty and fashion editor Cullen pulls back the curtain on the “glossy façade” of the magazine world in these entertaining essays. More den mom than The Devil Wears Prada’s Miranda Priestly, Cullen traces her life and lengthy career in the beauty industry, from her days as a 16-year-old in 1990s Sydney longing to appear on a magazine masthead (“I knew all the different mastheads individually and thought of them as my friends,” she writes in “Editor’s Letters”) to landing at the very top as Elle Australia’s editor-in-chief in 2013—a glamorous role that proved so grueling she left five years later. As she breezes through exotic locales and extravagant media lunches where “PRs try to outdo each other with money-can’t-buy experiences,” she brings to dazzling life the excessiveness of print media as it was being chipped away by digital competitors. While readers will relish her recollections of sipping cocktails in Christian Dior’s family home and attending Paris Fashion Week, equally intriguing is her candid chronicling of the slow “extinction” of beauty editors, a casualty of advertising’s pivot to social media that, she writes, led beauty industry investments to dry up “faster than you could say ‘smoky eye tutorial.’ ” By turns frank and funny, this provides an intimate look at the grit beneath the glamour of a fast-evolving industry. (June)