How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

October 7, 2002
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).