How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
I’m lounging on the patio of a Venice Beach boardwalk restaurant, reading, writing, and sipping on a local Los Angeles pale ale. You’re at work right now, so I’m having a better time than you. I’ll be in L.A. for two days before losing my money/sanity/dignity in Las Vegas with three friends from college. I don’t want to lose those friends, but I am reading How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.
The author, Toby Young, is better known for this book than for the half-hearted writing career the book was based on. In it, he unveils the waspy drama associated with working for the glossy, celeb-centered magazine Vanity Fair. Originally from Britain, he becomes disillusioned by New York’s inevitable indebtedness to the rich and famous. This wasn’t always the case—Toby had aspirations of hard-hitting journalism beholden to no one, much less the wonton vapidity of the upper echelon.
Is this a surprise to anyone who has ever opened a magazine nowadays? The memoir is 330 pages, half of which I found myself saying no shit. The guy worked for a powerful, wealthy, glamorous, and well-connected company and then was shocked by their soullessness.
I did enjoy the tidbit about celebrities’ wariness to eat in public for fear of being photographed. Toby claims that on Oscar night, a hangry line of A-list stars pack the McDonald’s drive-thru in their limousines (Young, 105). Roll the window up, sir, I need to scarf down a Big-Mac alone in the dark while sporting an evening gown (which let’s get real, sounds amazing).
In all, the book is 90% uninteresting fluff, 10% comic relief. You get a keen sense that Toby is fumbling through life, making one irrecoverable mistake after another. That’s fine—I just ordered some fireball on tap and have suffered acute regret ever since. But watching a guy not play his cards right career-wise isn’t automatically hilarious. Just as Roger Ebert says, throwing a fat guy in a movie doesn’t make the movie funny…the fat guy needs to do something funny goddamn it! I’m gonna need more than just a few sporadic chuckles in a memoir that claims it is funny.
In Toby’s defense, he expressed a few thoughtful insights. For instance, he gave a brief but scathing review on “political correctness” within the American liberal education system based on his experiences at Harvard. He went on to condemn America’s version of meritocracy; we think that we are successful because we earned it and we deserve it. We falsely convince ourselves that all of us start on an even playing field and we revere a strong work ethic above all, snubbing those below us because “they’re just not working hard enough”. Toby notes that social mobility in Britain is more fluid and Brits who benefit from the aristocratic system are more likely to recognize their class-advantages and donate to the less fortunate than Americans who assert that the poor remain poor by sheer lack of willpower.
Unfortunately, these insights comprise only a very small portion of the memoir. I would much rather hear more about those ideas and less about how Anna Wintour wears sunglasses indoors. Overall, Toby is an honest guy, eager to throw everyone he worked with under the bus (including himself), but it doesn’t quite move past the realm of superficiality. As a result, I give it 2 out of 5 flames. There are some tiny pellets of potential, but don’t waste your time.
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