How to Lose Friends and Alienate People: A Memoir

by Toby Young

Book Overview

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, Tina Brown, Anna Wintour--so why couldn't he?But things didn't quite go 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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0306812274
• ISBN13: 9780306812279
• Release Date: June 2003
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

hilarious, shallow, deep...

This book had me in stitches. It's a hilarious look at the interior world not just of a deceivingly high-concept New York-based supermarket fashion and culture magazine, but at the culture of New York society in general. Young's biting and witty prose show both why he was kicked off the magazine, and why he was hired in the first place - he's devilishly insightful and never boring.This book is for the rich-snob-hating, social-climbing bourgoisie in all of us (and if you didn't know you had a part of that in you, you'll know after laughing through the pages of this book). Young cuts fiendishly through the carefully built facades of famous editors, writers, and supermodels, and yet, you may be surprised at what you find at the end.I guess what I'm saying here is: buy this book. You will not be disappointed. It's an enjoyable read, and delightfully illuminating.

toby young can be my friend

I found this book a blast to read--a delightful peek inside the world of glamour from the perspective of someone who (like most of us) never quite belonged there. Through his experiences, Young reveals just what makes us worship at the altar of celebrity, then is vicious in tearing it down. I don't fault him for many of the criticisms that the book has received--that he's hypocritical about his love/hate relationship with all that glitters. These are obvious--what the author gives us is a look at his life and the lure of fame without a shred of self preservation. Don't buy this book as a treatise on meritocracy, but for its delightfully candid narrator and his exceptionally witty writing style.

Bitter, sad, occasionally hilarious but never boring

It is very rare these days that I find a book engrossing enough to read in one sitting and which also makes me laugh out loud. Toby Young, who has an unerring ability to focus on his own shortcomings, does an excellent job of explaining exactly how not to get on in New York. His waggish personality, a healthy appetite for drink and a large stock of off-colour jokes -- all attributes which would serve you well as a journalist in London -- ensure he makes a total mess of pretty much everything he does in Manhattan, the mothership of all that is politically correct in the United States. Indeed, when Vanity Fair boss Graydon Carter fires Young, he tells our hapless hero that he has a brown thumb. "Everything you touch turns to ****," he explains with a laugh. Young is the squarest of pegs in a world where all the holes are round and to make matters worse, a friend of his who went to Los Angeles at the same time strikes immediate and lucrative success. Young is also very funny about his total lack of success with American women, largely because they quickly realise he is broke (and has quite a few complexes, as well as an impressively large collection of appalling pick-up lines). Two-thirds of the way through, the book suddenly becomes more serious as Young realises he has hit rock bottom and starts groping for a way out. To say much more would give too much away but it's well worth sticking through to the end.

Plausible, cunning, literary: Brit humor at its driest

What a clever book. Ignore the provocative title - Brits are trained from birth to jettison friends and loved ones and skilled alienation is in their DNA. (I think it's also stipulated in the Magna Carta).This is the witty memoir to jolt us out of Alertness Fatigue and all the government-induced 9/11 jitters essential to keep us focused on Saddam-bashing.Here's this self-effacing Brit arriving in the Big Bagel to take Condé Nast by storm and canoodle with the celebs - and he totally flubs it on every front. Any self-respecting dude would pack up and go sell matches down Nacogdoches way, but not them blue-bloods. The Honorable Toby Young pauses only to fire up the word processor and - shazam - he's got a hot book out of it that also wreaks hilarious revenge on those who rejoiced in his downfall in the first place. The book amuses wherever it falls open: the list of words banned by the Canuck airforce brat editor of 'Vanity Fair', Graydon 'Powerstrut' Carter; Young's brilliant idea for an profile of ubiquitous partygoer Jay McInerney as a notorious recluse à la Salinger or Pynchon; belletrist GW's winning way with the "clipboard Nazis" at the Bowery Bar; the major babes in the C-Nast elevators, sizing each other up "with the cold-blooded hostility of professional athletes", pouncing on any perceived fashion disaster with disapproving comments ranging "from the fairly mild - 'Aggressive choice!' - to the outright rude - 'It ain't working, honey.'""Alienate" abounds in such gems, delivered with a sure pen and sharpest ear and with that killer diffidence that makes your upper class Oxford type so dangerous to turn one's back on.Nor is it just a catalog of TY's pathetic inability to bed any of this great country's Grade 1 beauties. Just when you think he's clowning, out comes Tocqueville from the bottom of the deck and it's spot-on stuff - like that famed observation that "I do not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America." Ouch, but also let him try mouthing that around the 'Lonely Pines Grill & Bar' ... Don't take my word for it: check out "HLFAP" at the library or your local brick n mortar and see if you can stop browsing or grinning. Nice one, Mister Young.

gossip and philosophy, all in one fun read

Toby Young manages to combine gossip, farce and social commentary in one terrifically well written book. While he makes sport of many famous media folk, he doesn't spare himself. This book reads like a primer on how NOT to behave in media circles, with many laugh out loud passages detailing Young's spectacular social and professional blunders. If you are extremely politically correct, this is not the book for you. And if you take offense at any critiques of the American way of life, you won't exactly see eye to eye with Young. I found the book insightful and refreshing, especially during this period of too often blind patriotism. Young writes about Graydon Carter and Alexis deTocqueville with equal facility, and manages to make all of it interesting. You start out thinking Young is a big jerk, but by the end, he's won you over.