If you had asked a young Megan Angelo what she wanted to be when she grew up, she could have provided you with a very specific answer: She wanted to work for Condé Nast publications, the company behind a myriad of glossy magazines that have beckoned from newsstands and supermarket racks for decades. “I was obsessed with Vanity Fair,” she says. And Angelo, who’s now basking in the glow of a well-reviewed debut novel, has Josh Hartnett to thank for that obsession. She can recall heading to her job as a bus girl at an Italian restaurant as a teenager when she spied a hunky Hartnett staring back at her from the cover of Vanity Fair. But, after she took a look inside, she realized there was much more substance to the publication beyond its beefcake actor cover star. “It ended up being this very serious journalistic magazine,” says Angelo. “From then on I was hooked.”
That’s not to say Angelo’s encounter with a 2-D Josh Hartnett was the moment her writing aspirations took hold; those roots run much deeper. Angelo was raised in the Quakertown area with her parents and two younger brothers. “I have very happy memories, just driving around with my friends,” Angelo says. “It just seemed like a really sweet and simple place to grow up.” She also has memories of crafting her very first narratives on her parents’ typewriter, stuffing scrap paper into the machine and pounding away on the keys. “I wrote very creepy, tragic, dark stories when I was young,” she says with a laugh.
The budding author says she received a lot of encouragement from teachers at St. Isidore elementary school and Quakertown High School. All the while, she was thinking about the next step: college and internships. Angelo enrolled at Villanova University in 2002 and credits an internship she served with The Intelligencer in Doylestown with teaching her the bones of journalism. Then came another internship: a coveted spot with Condé Nast, working on a magazine supplement called “Fashion Rocks.” Angelo admits, fashion has never been her forte. But what did it matter? She was bunking at New York University and getting her first taste of life in the Big Apple. “I just fell in love with the place,” she recalls.
Megan Angelo
After Angelo graduated from Villanova in 2006, she moved to New York City and landed an editorial assistant job with Condé Nast’s new business magazine, Portfolio. Angelo was 22 years old, living in one of the most exciting cities in the world, and advancing steadily along the career path she had envisioned for herself. “Those were some of the happiest years of my life,” she says. “It felt like, ‘OK, I’m here, I just have to stay here for the next 35 years.’” It seemed like everything had fallen into place; unfortunately, life—or more specifically, Condé Nast—had other plans. The publisher gave Portfolio the ax in 2009, just two years into its shelf life. “We were all out on our butts,” Angelo says. “We were all scared.”
And so began Angelo’s solo, freelancing career, whether she was ready or not. But, it seems Angelo rebounded quite handily from the untimely demise of Portfolio; over the next few years, her writing would appear in a smattering of respected publications like The New York Times, where Angelo says she helped to launch the paper’s city comedy coverage. It was an interest born out of a fortuitous union of geography and economy. Angelo’s apartment was right around the corner from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, founded by the improv and sketch comedy group of the same name, and she found comedy shows to be much more budget friendly than some of the city’s other entertainment options. “[When I first moved to New York City] I thought I would be fancy, I’d go to the ballet,” she says. The salary of a young writer dictated otherwise. And so, Angelo was able to shine a spotlight on up-and-coming comics like current Saturday Night Live writer and cast member Michael Che, as well as Broad City creators and stars Abbi Jacobsen and Ilana Glazer.
Another career highlight for Angelo: becoming a regular contributor to glamour.com, and then being named a contributing editor at the magazine itself in 2015. “It was another moment where I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to be OK,’” she recalls.
By this time, Angelo’s personal life had undergone a dramatic transformation. She was no longer the single gal living in the big city. Angelo married her husband, Eric, a high school classmate with whom she reconnected down the road, in 2010. The venue was Historic Hotel Bethlehem, a place that Angelo describes as the “pinnacle of glamour.”
She has fond memories of visiting her grandparents in the Christmas City while she was growing up. The couple settled there in 2012, and welcomed the first of their three children two years later.
Megan Angelo
Followers by Megan Angelo
All the while, Angelo was working on various writing projects on the side, everything from sketch comedy scripts to an attempt at a sports movie. “So many scripts die in development, and that’s what I was going through,” she says. It would be a simple journal entry, of all things, that would launch her into a new literary stratosphere.
Angelo recalls writing in her journal sometime after her first child was born. She was writing in cursive, and her mind was wandering—would penmanship still matter when her child or even her future grandchildren were old enough to read her entries? Would cursive handwriting even be a part of elementary school curriculum? “I thought it would be really interesting to write a book that was half based in the future,” Angelo says. The end result is Followers, an exploration of the dark side of social media that shifts between alternating narratives set in both 2015 and 2051. Buzz about the book started building well ahead of its January 2020 debut. Publishers Weekly called Followers a “spectacular debut.” Entertainment Weekly said it’s a “scathing, razor-sharp take on the future of humanity and social media.” Broad City co-creator Jacobsen called it “pure gold.” Angelo herself describes the book this way: “It’s a touch of sci-fi, a touch of dystopia, but it’s ultimately about women, mothers and friendship.”
The story of Followers is also the story of how Angelo brought the book to fruition after that initial idea rooted itself in her mind. Angelo says it took a year and a half to write, review and revise the draft that ultimately went out to publishers. During that time, she was toiling away wherever she could, whenever she could. She recalls getting up in the middle of the night to feed one of her babies, and then just staying up to write. She banged out the copy all over Bethlehem, holing up inside places like the public library, the Moravian Book Shop and The Joint coffee shop. All of the blood, sweat and tears would be validated when she got the news that Followers would be acquired by publisher Graydon House in a six-figure deal. Says Angelo: “I remember [my agent] told me to sit down. And it was a good thing that I sat down.”
Angelo celebrated with a bottle of bubbly and a cake from The Cup in Bethlehem. She’s already working on new ideas that could translate into books number two and three. For right now, though, it seems Angelo has everything she needs. “I feel very lucky,” she says. “I feel very happy.”
