how to lose friends and alienate people a memoir

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. 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. Not that he is truly starstruck, Young says. 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. Kiss-and-tell memoir of Young's ill-fated stint as contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine.

How to lose friends and alienate people a memoir