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Lauren Weisberger, author of the bestselling, sophisto-chick-lit novel The Devil Wears Prada, then the not-so-successful Everyone Worth Knowing and the just published Chasing Harry Winston, is indulging in the least sophisticated, least urban, least classy pleasure in modern life: She is smoking a cigarette.

Mind you, she's doing it on the roof patio of Toronto's Spoke Club, halfway house for buoyantly knowing women and louche, fashionably harried young men, all of whom would feel comfortable, or claim to, in the rarefied Manhattan world she has successfully parlayed into a considerable fortune ($1-million advances on each of her last two novels and a blockbuster film version of Prada).

Fabulousness is a relatively new experience for her. Born in 1977, she was raised in suburban Pennsylvania, BA in English from Cornell University. She backpacked through Europe, the Middle East and Asia, then landed a first job as assistant to Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue. Writing classes in her spare time paid off with that first novel, based, loosely or not, on her time at Vogue. She became rich and famous, is thin and beautiful and just 31 years old, which may explain why she's been referred to more than once as someone you love to hate.

She's on tour promoting Chasing Harry Winston, her second experiment with title-as-product-placement. (Harry Winston is a luxe jewellery store - sorry, salon - famous for draping starlets in diamonds on Oscar night.) The story (an homage, intentional or not, to Sex and the City) tracks the lives of three Manhattan friends with man problems (not enough men, too many, or the wrong one) and I wondered whether chick lit (a term to which she doesn't object) had developed in ways that might parallel developments in the feminist movement.

"I'm not a sociologist," she says, "so it wouldn't be appropriate for me to comment on the status of women, but I look back to Rona Jaffe's novel The Best of Everything, published in the fifties, and that's the story of a young girl graduating from college, moving to the big city and her first job and first apartment, and navigating the dating waters, and we're still writing about those things today. There hasn't been a huge change. The primary things women think about are trying to find balance with their careers and their romantic relationships and their family and friends, and I can't imagine that changing much over the years.

"For me, and the women in my life, those are the things we pretty much focus all of our energy on."

That focused energy has paid off, at least romantically. She married recently (fairy-tale style, on the Caribbean island of Anguilla, to Mike Cohen, also a writer), and though she hasn't fully planned her next novel, she says, "I'd like to avoid the classic path of chick-lit authors - from the young, single, dating, fabulous-life-in-your-20s novel, then ... the novel about getting married and the novel about having babies, and then the novel about balancing work and motherhood. I'd like to do something a little bit different."

In any case, she says, her own life isn't much about fabulousness and glamour (though her books certainly give readers what she calls "an inside glimpse into a closed world.") When a new book comes out, there's a short period of media attention and then, "it's back to my apartment, and jeans and a T-shirt, and ordering in sushi and watching American Idol with my husband.

"I'm not part of the scene in New York that I write about. I'm a homebody. Big crowds and working the room - it's just never been my thing. ... And anyway, in my novels glamour is fun and sexy and adds a little bit of edge, but if the plot and characters don't stand up, aren't something the reader can get invested in, I don't know how far glamour can take you - especially now, after all those years of Sex and the City and Manolo Blahniks becoming a household word."

She and her husband live in Manhattan's Tribeca neighbourhood, but hope to move this summer to the Village. They don't have a second home, their apartment isn't large and they share it with two Maltese dogs ("fluffy embarrassments," she calls them). One is named Mitzi "because she looks like an old Jewish lady," and the other Stella, who "looks like an old Italian lady." She and her husband have managed in close quarters, even though they both work at home (he's writing his first novel) - but they did have to put up a wall in the living room to create separate work spaces.

"We wake up," she says, "have our coffee and our cereal, and then say goodbye for the day."

She describes herself as neurotic, with noise issues and a dislike of crowds, but copes - like many a New Yorker - by transforming life's little vagaries into very good stories. She remembers, after her Vogue stint, doing some journalism and getting to write a piece for Playboy's 50th-anniversary issue.

"I'd written an article about romance in the workplace, and had to get an author's photo taken, and the photographer, even though I was wearing a button-down, jeans and a blazer, I remember him being, like, 'Okay, honey, can you lean forward and twinkle for me?' and the makeup artist, before I went in, saying, 'Oh, I can't tell you how relieved I am not to have to do full-body makeup today.' "

Stories are easy to tell, but hard to write. The piece of advice she gives every aspiring female writer is "to carve out a chunk of time for yourself that's only for writing, every single week. Three to four hours, every week, to work on writing. For me, when I was writing Prada, it was every Friday night. I wouldn't go out, and there were no exceptions."

And that embarrassing cigarette? She smoked a pack a day for 11 years, quit two years ago (the character Leigh in her latest novel seems to survive on Nicorette), says she probably has one or two a month now, usually under the influence, she jokes, of bad people. She seems happy to have met a few in, of all places, Toronto.