(Photo: Firooz Zahedi)

Publishing can be a dreary business, as Amy Gray (Brown ’97), like so many Ivy League editorial assistants before her, discovered. At Pantheon, she spent her days typing rejection letters and taking dictation from her boss—in the bathroom! “I was so unhappy,” she recalls. So she became a spy, trading in the Bertelsmann high rise for a Chelsea loft with rat traps, and bitter, ambitious lit majors for gumshoes with outer-borough accents. “In publishing, it felt like it was all for naught,” she says, “but this was a very black-and-white world where we were the good guys catching the bad ones.” Now, naturally, she’s written all about it in Spy Girl (which a former boss at another publishing house bid on, unsuccessfully), a memoir that tells not only of chasing down CEOs with mafia ties, but of hunting for a boyfriend. “In both cases, you’re trying to figure things out about someone.” In the end, Gray found love (he forgave her for snooping around on his computer) and says she’d love to spy again. “But after this book, I don’t know how salable I am. The industry really values invisibility.”

Related:

• Archive: “New York Minute”
• Articles by Amy Larocca
• Table of Contents: September 8, 2003 issue of New York | Subscribe!