In the fall 2001, Conde Nast shuttered the magazine Mademoiselle, the lady's lifestyle magazine helmed by Mandi Norwood. After a 66-year-history, the magazine fell to the wayside thanks to titles like Sassy and Jane (both shaped by Jane Pratt), which ushered in the notion of "transparency," where a magazine's editors talked with you, not at you.

Now, seven years later, the magazine gets the appropriate postmortem, with the book Thin Is the New Happy, from former mastheader Valerie Frankel.

We'd like to think that part of Frankel's book publicity machine makes it required to have the most scandalous tidbits fed in morsels to the press, like this weekend's Page Six item about how staffers competed with each other in the blood sport of starvation. But the book is called Thin Is the New Happy, and you can probably judge this one by its skeletal cover.

"There was tremendous pressure to look the part, or, as hires were told by the human resources staff, to represent the magazine in our personal appearance. Our work ethic: Get thin or die trying."

To live up to those standards, "Self-starvation was a competitive sport. At staff lunches, the girl who ate the least won," Frankel writes. "During downtime, we'd sit in our offices smoking cigarette after cigarette (to quell hunger) and talking about who ate what, the calorie counts of our lunches, the latest dieting trends, who on the staff looked heavy."

Frankel says to curb her own appetite, she snorted "hillocks of cocaine," sometimes in the office, and did "more blow in my first two years at Mademoiselle than in college, when I lived with a coke dealer." She says while it helped her stay a size 8, her female boss, whom she doesn't name, slammed her behind her back as "the frizzy-haired fat Jew," as well as "brutally mocking my clothes and big boobs."

Shocking? Not entirely. Perhaps a little dramatized? Likely. But for what it's worth, Conde Nast says it has "no comment" whether being thin was a matter of policy at Mademoiselle. Just as they have no comment about official unwritten policies at Vogue.