How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young

From Barnes & Noble

He's young, he's British, and he's come to our shores intent on making a name for himself at Vanity Fair magazine. He's Toby Young, and this hysterical account of his (failed) attempt to "take Manhattan" will have you rolling in the aisles.

From the Publisher

In 1995 high-flying British journalist Toby Young left London for New York to become a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Other Brits had taken Manhattan - Alistair Cooke then, Anna Wintour now - so why couldn''t he? But things didn''t go quite according to plan. Within the space of two years he was fired from Vanity Fair, banned from the most fashionable bar in the city, and couldn''t get a date for love or money. Even the local AA group wanted nothing to do with him.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is Toby Young''s hilarious account of the five years he spent looking for love in all the wrong places and steadily working his way down the New York food chain, from glossy magazine editor to crash-test dummy for interactive sex toys. But it''s more than "the longest self-deprecating joke since the complete works of Woody Allen" (Sunday Times); it''s also a seditious attack on the culture of celebrity from inside the belly of the beast. And there''s even a happy ending as Toby Young marries - "for proper non-cynical reasons," as he puts it - the woman of his dreams. "Some people are lucky enough to stumble across the right path straight away; most of us only discover what the right one is by going down the wrong one first."

Toronto Globe & Mail

Achingly funny.

Elle.com

Delicious.

New City Chicago

[The book] reads so snappily and is so self-effacing you can't help but commiserate.

Village Voice

Full of amusing dish on the media world.

Salon.com

A very funny book.

Wall Street Journal

Young recounts his experience with wit, a flair for comedy, self-deprecation, and a goodish bit of sociological insight on the side.

San Francisco Chronicle

[Young's] sharp humor, fluid style, and inside dish make his tale a gossipy confection.

GQ

A gimlet-eyed insider's account of the status-obsessed, celebrity-beholden glossy magazine mafia.

New York Post

Destined to become the most talked-about summer read in town.

Young unsuccessfully chases his dream to become a Manhattan mover and shaker, but successfully catalogues his experience into an excellent book.

Wall Street Journal

Mr. Young ... recounts his experience with wit, a flair for comedy, self-deprecation and a goodish bit of sociological insight on the side.

People

Hilarious lifestyles of the rich and shameless.

Tatler

Hysterical.

FHM

It'll make you feel a whole lot better about your own miserable career.

Courier Mail

Reads like a cross between Bonfire of the Vanities and an episode of 'Seinfeld.'

Guardian

A feel-good book. Really.

Sunday Times

As career moves go, Toby Young's were the worst since Abraham Lincoln booked theatre tickets. But they make a magnificent read.

GQ

Wildly funny.

Time Out

Hugely enjoyable.

Publishers Weekly

Seemingly unable to keep from offending everyone he comes in contact with, British-born Young is a misfit in the New York publishing world. He isn't attractive (he calls himself a Philip Seymour Hoffman look-alike, but with bad teeth), he's socially inept without alcohol and, most importantly, he's consumed with the desire to "be somebody." His memoir is a hilarious and scathing insider's view of the world in which Young wishes so badly to fit. Hired by editor Graydon Carter to work at Vanity Fair ("Basically I forgot to fire Toby Young every day for two years"), Young is shocked to find that his journalist colleagues are more awed by celebrity than news and are more likely to cuddle up with publicists than with a smoke and a shot at the local watering hole. The saving grace of Young's tale of his own downward spiral is his ability to lambaste himself along with the New York publishing world. Young's crisp reading of this memoir is highly entertaining and bitter, yet guileless and funny. His hilariously screechy imitations of some of the female heavy hitters of the publishing world (such as Tina Brown and Peggy Siegal) bring out his knack for hyperbole and his boyish, prankster style. Simultaneous release with the Da Capo hardcover (Forecasts, June 10). (July) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Kiss-and-tell memoir of Young's ill-fated stint as contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine. When we first meet our hero, he is desperately attempting to gain admittance to the 1994 Vanity Fair Oscar party, the most exclusive ticket in Hollywood on the night of the Academy Awards. Not that he is truly starstruck, Young says. No, he has adopted this attitude in response to his British circle's sham indifference to celebrities: "I hammed up my obsession with A-list stars as a way of letting my friends know I found their pretence at insouciance totally unconvincing." This contrary attitude coupled with romantic notions about Algonquin Round Table journalism eventually delivers Young, the son of towering English intellectuals, to the New York offices of Vanity Fair, where he attempts, mostly unsuccessfully, to make a splash. Editor Graydon Carter is unimpressed with his story pitches; a barroom brawl results in Young's name being removed from the masthead; and an uninformed Young hires a stripper to come to the office on "Bring our daughters to work day." In between detailing his own failures, Young dishes his friends and colleagues (for some reason, Anthony Haden-Guest is given a particularly rough time of it), moans about what serious wankers his workmates are (the Vanity Fair offices are compared to an accounting firm), and brings Tocqueville's observations about Americans to bear on contemporary culture. This skewering of celebrity worship at the nation's leading "upscale supermarket tabloid" bears a distinct resemblance to shooting fish in a barrel; nonetheless, Young's language is energetic and engaging, making one wish (along with his father, apparently) that he'd find a worthiersubject. Enjoyably bitchy specifics of Conde Nast culture, buried beneath tedious social analysis and self-deprecation.

Product Details

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Chapter 1

“Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.”

It was the afternoon of June 8, 1995, when I finally got the call.

“This is Dana Brown from Graydon Carter’s office. Is this Toby Young?”

“Er, yes.”

“One moment please.”

Pause.

“Toby? It’s Graydon. How’d you like to come hang out for a month?”

This was it, the one I’d been waiting for. Ever since the night of the Vanity Fair party fifteen months earlier, I’d been assiduously cultivating the magazine’s editor. I’d written three pieces for him at this stage and whenever I bumped into him on one of his regular jaunts to London I’d done my best to charm him. The fact that he was offering me no more than a month’s work was largely academic. It was a one-month trial and, provided I didn’t screw up, it would lead to a full-time job. I felt like Boot, the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, being summoned by The Daily Beast.

To me, Vanity Fair wasn’t just another glossy, New York magazine. It was a link to Manhattan during its golden age, the era of the Algonquin Round Table. During Vanity Fair’s first incarnation, from 1914–36, its contributors had included Dorothy Parker, Edmund Wilson, Robert Benchley, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Colette, Cocteau, Herman J. Mankiewicz ... the list is endless. Even Houdini had written for Vanity Fair. It had been resurrected in 1983 by S. I. Newhouse Jr., the billionaire owner of Condé Nast, and from 1984–92 it had been edited by Tina Brown, formerly at the helm of Tatler. Tina was thirty when she received the call from Si, as he’s known, and she went on to edit The New Yorker, the most prestigious job in American magazine journalism. Under Tina, Vanity Fair had become the monthly bible of the Jet Set, an eclectic combination of Hollywood glamour, high society and true crime that Tina referred to as “the mix.” It wasn’t exactly the highbrow, literary magazine it had been, but it was still a damn sight more sexy than any of its British rivals.

I first met Graydon in 1993 at a Sunday Times lunch in London about a year after he’d succeeded Tina. I was twenty-nine at the time and had already worked for a wide cross-section of British publications, from The Literary Review to Hello!, but I’d never encountered a magazine editor quite like him. With his threadbare, Savile Row suit and dog-eared Jermyn Street shirt, not to mention his eccentric hairstyle, he had a slightly raffish air, more reminiscent of The Spectator than one of the glossies. When he spoke, though, he sounded like a Chicago newspaperman of the old school, spitting out one-liners like a character in The Front Page.

For instance, after a few glasses of wine I suggested that Vanity Fair should run a photographic feature on “literary London” featuring headshots of Britain’s most distinguished authors in their favorite pubs. The idea was to illustrate the connection between alcohol and London literary life.

“What, are you kidding?” he responded. “It’d look like a fucking dental textbook.”

The impression he gave was of a man who’d gone to a great deal of trouble to cultivate a particular image—a faintly bohemian Wasp with literary aspirations—but was only too happy to contradict it the moment he opened his mouth. As far as I could tell, his stream of seditious wisecracks, punctuated by expletives, was a way of letting you know that he was on your side even if he appeared to be a member of the Establishment.

I hoped it was true.