Bright lights,
Brit loser

>> Toby Young paints an odious portrait of
New York media and himself in
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

by JULIET WATERS

Toby Young’s memoir, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, will remind many readers of Bright Lights, Big City. Young is the ’90s version of that novel’s doomed, self-sabotaging anti-hero. In 1995, a promising London cultural critic, he was hired by Graydon Carter to work at Vanity Fair and went on to become the highest-paid writer in the history of the magazine. That is, if you count his earnings per word before he was fired. During a contract period in which he was paid over $80,000 (U.S.), he managed to publish only 3,000 words. He also managed to develop a reputation as the most obnoxious, drunkest, sexist and offensive journalist New York had ever seen.

But the ’80s bestseller that kept coming to mind as I read this was Perfume, the historical thriller about a man born with no odour but a genius sense of smell. He goes on a virgin killing rampage, hoping to extract from the corpses a smell that will make him seem irresistibly innocent.

How to Lose reads like such a concocted but alluring smell. The only statement of Young’s I don’t doubt is that he’s been cursed with some kind of negative charisma. “I only had to walk across a crowded room in which I knew nobody and nobody knew me and already I’d made 10 enemies.” Cloaked in the self-deprecating charm of his writing, he is tolerable-barely. Yet as the book progresses, he becomes irresistibly compelling. It’s like every time he sinks his teeth into another high-powered American media personality, he sucks up some of their charm.

As he systematically shames the “glossy posse” of Conde Naste, painting them as a gang of humourless, junket jaded, nasty elitists, you have to keep pinching yourself to keep in mind that Young is no babe in the woods himself. He was cofounder of The Modern Review, an influential pop culture magazine that launched the careers of Will Self and Nick Hornby. Before working at VF, before he’d even turned 30, he’d been sued for libel by Elizabeth Hurley and Robert Maxwell (who, fortunately for Young, fell off his yacht before the suit came to court). The feud Young started with his cofounder Julie Burchill, when he suddenly closed down MR without warning, received more press in London that week than the war in Bosnia. “The only thing worse than being talked about,” he claims, poaching the famous Oscar Wilde quote, “is being Toby Young.”

Notoriety, however, is Tony Young’s oxygen. He claims Carter fired him after an item about Young getting into a scuffle over an unpaid bar bill appeared in the New York Post’s Page 6 column. But, according to Jared Paul Stern, who writes the column, Young phoned the item in himself.

Young’s entire career in New York, as he goes from being fired from VF to being fired from Gear (about the only place that didn’t fire him was the New York Press), reads like a brilliant literary hoax. It’s as though he had Dave Eggers on a secret cell phone, giving him pointers on what would drive Americans most over the edge while Mike Myers was on another line coaching him on how to behave.

To some extent Young’s failure has paid off, though the results have been mixed. The book was a British bestseller and Young has since become a correspondent for GQ and the theatre critic for the Spectator. The film rights were sold to England’s Channel 4, but recently the film production arm shut down, and the project is in limbo. As for success in the U.S., Young did a nude photo shoot for the New York Observer. “The bad news,” according to a friend who described the results to him over the phone, “is you look like you’ve got a really small dick... The good news is it’s on Page 1.” :

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, by Toby Young, De Capo, hc, 332pp, $36.50