Judicial Clerk Tells All in Novel?
I kind of envy Saira Rao her judicial clerking experience. While my judges were nice guys, and I learned a lot, I certainly could not have parlayed the experience into a funny novel. (Now, I may have gotten a few ideas for a murder mystery, but that’s only because there were a few people—not my judges--I wouldn’t have minded becoming victims...)
However, Saira, who clerked for a prominant Third Circuit judge, has made a huge splash with her roman à clef, Chambermaid. For obvious reasons, it has frequently been compared to The Nanny Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada. Here’s the cover blurb:
The devil holds a gavel in this wickedly entertaining debut novel about a young attorney's eventful year clerking for a federal judge. Sheila Raj is a recent graduate of a top-ten law school with dreams of working for the ACLU. When she lands a coveted yearlong federal clerkship with legal goddess Judge Helga Friedman, she cannot help but think that her life is destined for jurisprudential greatness.
But law school did not prepare Sheila for the power-hungry sociopath who greets her on her first day and insists that she is Pakistani (she's Indian), that her name is Sheba (it's Sheila), and refers to her co-clerk Laura as "the gay"; nor for Her Honor's secretaries—Roy, who moonlights as a medieval bard called Felemid McDowell, and Janet, who pets the Pound Puppies draped over her computer when she's not thumping her Bible. Only when she is assigned to a high-profile death-penalty case does Sheila realize she has to survive the year as Friedman's chambermaid—not only her sanity, but actual lives hang in the balance.
Reviews on this were mixed, with lay reviewers tending to be much more positive than legal reviewers.
As near as I can tell, Rao is not currently practicing law, but pursuing her writing career. It has occurred to me that one reason I seem to be having difficulty tracking down lawyers who write is that once they do make a splash in the literary world, most seem to abandon their legal careers.
On the other hand, it's a rare writer who earns more than the average lawyer....
