Young, Toby 1963–

PERSONAL: Born October 17, 1963, in Olney, Buckinghamshire, England; son of Michael Dunlop (author and founder of Open University) and Sasha Young; married, July 21, 2001; wife's name Caroline; children: Sasha. Education: Brasenose College, Oxford, B.A. (with honors), 1986; attended Harvard University, 1987–88, and Trinity College, Cambridge, 1988–90.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Emma Parry, Fletcher & Parry, 121 East 17th St., New York, NY 10003. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Journalist. Observer, London, England, feature writer, 1985–86; Times, London, England, news trainee, 1986–87; Mail on Sunday, London, England, feature writer, 1987; Sunday Telegraph, London, England, profile writer, 1990–91; Guardian, London, England, film critic, 1991–92; Modern Review, London, England, cofounder and editor, 1991–95; Vanity Fair, New York, NY, contributing editor, 1995–98; New York Press, New York, NY, writer; Gear, staff writer, 1998–99; Gentleman's Quarterly, London, England, contributing editor; New York Times, New York, NY, columnist, 1998; Spectator, London, England, columnist, 1999, drama critic, 2001–06; Evening Standard Magazine, London, England, restaurant critic. Harvard University, teaching fellow, 1987.

MEMBER: Groucho Club.

AWARDS, HONORS: Named Young Journalist of the Year, British Press Association, 1986; Fulbright-Hays Award, 1987; British Academy Award, 1988; Trinity College fellowship, 1988–90.

WRITINGS:

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (memoir), Little, Brown (London, England), 2001, Da Capo Press (Cambridge, MA), 2002.

(With Lloyd Evans) Who's the Daddy (play), produced in London, England, at the King's Head Theater, 2005.

The Sound of No Hands Clapping (memoir), Da Capo Press (Cambridge, MA), 2005.

Contributor to The Oxford Myth, Weidenfeld & Nicholson (London, England), 1987.

ADAPTATIONS: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People was adapted for audio (abridged; four cassettes), read by Young, Brilliance Audio, and adapted for the stage as a one-man play by Tim Fountain.

SIDELIGHTS: Toby Young is a British journalist whose memoir, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, is a tell-all of his failed attempt to take Manhattan. Vanessa Friedman wrote in the London Guardian that "Fleet Street hacks who have always dreamed of cracking New York but have never had an invite will feel really, really good about their escape after reading Young's tales of the vacuous celebrity worship that is an apparent fact of life in the land of Oprah."

Young came to Gotham with a ready-made resumé. His distinguished father was the creator of the Open University and author of The Rise of the Meritocracy, and Young himself had an excellent record at Oxford, a year at Harvard, was the founder of a successful London magazine, and was well published. But it was not enough to conquer the Condé Nast empire.

Young went to work as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair in 1995, under editor-in-chief Graydon Carter, and spent the next several years annoying celebrities (and being admonished by Carter for it), lusting after beautiful women, and boosting his alcohol intake. Unaware of the social graces he should have been observing, Young's gaffes included questioning Mel Gibson as to what he had against the British on the night Braveheart won five Oscars, and asking Nathan Lane if he was gay. For "Take our Daughters to Work Day," he hired a stripper to show up at the Vanity Fair offices. Carter eventually fired Young, who then wrote for a free paper called the New York Press. It was there that he first wrote of his fall from grace at Vanity Fair. When Carter read the piece, he remarked that "If Toby had written like this when he was working for me, I never would have fired him."

Lorne Manly wrote in the New York Times Book Review that in his book, Young "rails against the insularity and phoniness of the glossy magazine lifestyle, even as he lusts after all the trappings that come with it." Janet Maslin commented in the New York Times that Young "is a rogue Englishman, proud of having induced both Robert Maxwell and Harold Evans to threaten legal action against him. Smart as he is … he loves playing the noxious clown."

"Part of the sport of reading this book is to identify Young's specific pathology," wrote John Homans for New York. "Alcoholism is definitely indicated. But Young accurately observes that drinking to excess can (the Christopher Hitchens model) enhance a career, though not (the Anthony Haden-Guest model) necessarily. In his great public self-immolation that was the closing of the Modern Review, coeditor Julie Burchill got closer to the truth when she called him a spoiled child."

An interviewer for Publishers Weekly asked Young if the alcoholism he describes might have been avoided but for the pressures of his New York experience. Young said probably not, but added, "I would never have stopped drinking if I hadn't come to New York. When the British go to America … they get completely infected by the self-improvement ethic. They join gyms, stop drinking, start eating healthily. You think when you first arrive that your cynical British attitude will withstand the puritanical political correctness, but in fact it infects you within six months."

Burchill reviewed How to Lose Friends and Alienate People in the Spectator, noting that "people have always hated Toby, and they've fastened on lots of handy alibis—his presumed politics, his undeniable pushiness, his sometimes regrettable taste in neckwear. But they've actually hated him, even if they couldn't admit it to themselves, for his talent; despite his nine-year-old's handwriting and spelling to match, he is a natural writer, supple, sinuous, and seditious, with a knack of combining gravitas and playfulness in a ceaselessly fresh and surprising way."

In his memoir, Young laments the passing of the New York journalist of the past, "a harum-scarum roustabout whose status is 'somewhere between a whore and a bartender,'" and who, Young says, "has been replaced by a clean and sober careerist with a summer house in the Hamptons." Salon.com critic Michelle Goldberg stated: "That innocence works for the book, making it a kind of parable of the American media world during the last six or seven years, with all its market-driven credulousness, slavering celebrity obsession, and smug sense of entitlement. Young's insight is about the way the American myth of total class mobility and equal, endless opportunity—apotheosized in the anointing of the famous—justifies 'abhorrent levels of inequality' and ensures that anyone who's not materially successful will be viewed as defective."

Goldberg commented that "in escaping this world, Young achieves a kind of salvation." Goldberg called Young "part of a cultural backlash against the garish plutocratic values of the 1990s." She continued, saying that How to Lose Friends and Alienate People "attacks the entire cultural and intellectual milieu that Vanity Fair and magazines like it are a part of. Young imagines himself a beer-swilling, coke-snorting lad mag Tocqueville, and occasionally, that's just what he is." A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that "the self-portrait is rarely flattering and sometimes repellant, but carries a startling ring of truth…. What keeps readers on Young's side is his courage to keep fighting."

In Young's 2005 follow-up, The Sound of No Hands Clapping, the reader "finds him once again madly pursuing fame and riches, worshiping the same false celebrity gods, and in general making an absolute fool of himself," observed New York Times contributor William Grimes. "For readers, this is very good news. Mr. Young's pain is their gain." In his second memoir, Young chronicles his efforts to pen a screenplay for a hotshot film producer, with predictably disastrous results. "Young is a babe in the woods—less naive than he makes out to be, almost certainly, but still unused to Hollywood and its ways," wrote Gregory McNamee in the Hollywood Reporter. "He is quickly brought up to speed. Although an entertaining storyteller—and this memoir of Hollywood machinations is nothing but entertaining—Young confesses to having known almost nothing of the art, science and craft of scripting a movie." Interwoven with this narrative are the author's recollections of his marriage, the birth of his two children, and his successful debut as a dramatist. According to Grimes: "The domestic chapters … present a softer, almost endearing version of the author, who searches for but does not find flip comic material in his children."

Not all reviewers were as complimentary as Grimes, however. A critic in Publishers Weekly deemed The Sound of No Hands Clapping an "unfocused memoir," and a Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked that the author "sticks a little too closely to the structure and style that made his previous book such an enjoyable read." "The brutal honesty and self-abnegation of Young's writing are what give it possibility, and in more able hands, such material could be mined to hilarious effect," noted Heather Havrilesky on Salon.com. "But Young doesn't have the wisdom or the skill as a writer to draw us in, get us on his side, and make us love him despite—or because of—his flaws." For the most part, however, The Sound of No Hands Clapping received strong reviews. According to Zenga Longmore, writing in the New York Times Book Review: "Every anecdote is unbelievably humorous," and Booklist contributor Brad Hooper commented that the work "will appeal to anyone who has ever tried to accomplish anything—and that amounts to all of us."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Young, Toby, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, Little, Brown (London, England), 2001, Da Capo Press (Cambridge, MA), 2002.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 1, 2006, Brad Hooper, review of The Sound of No Hands Clapping, p. 5.

Bookseller, April 1, 2005, "Toby Young Relives His Failures," review of The Sound of No Hands Clapping, p. 9.

Guardian (London, England), November 17, 2001, Vanessa Friedman, review of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.

Hollywood Reporter, August 14, 2006, Gregory McNamee, "The Sound of No Hands," p. 13.

Insight on the News, June 24, 2002, Robert Stacy McCain, review of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, p. 29.

Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2006, review of The Sound of No Hands Clapping, p. 452.

New Statesman, June 17, 1988, Clive Davis, review of The Oxford Myth, p. 42; October 29, 2001, William Georgiades, review of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, p. 54.

New York, July 22, 2002, John Homans, review of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.

New York Times, July 11, 2002, Janet Maslin, review of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, p. B8; July 19, 2006, William Grimes, "Learning to Succeed as a Loser, on Two Continents," review of The Sound of No Hands Clapping, p. E6.

New York Times Book Review, August 11, 2002, Lorne Manly, review of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, p. 4; August 13, 2006, Hugo Lindgren, "The Abasement Tapes," review of The Sound of No Hands Clapping, p. 1.

Publishers Weekly, June 10, 2002, review of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, p. 52, interview with Young, p. 53; May 1, 2006, review of The Sound of No Hands Clapping, p. 50.

Spectator, November 3, 2001, Julie Burchill, review of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, p. 53; September 16, 2006, Zenga Longmore, "How to Succeed as a Failure," review of The Sound of No Hands Clapping.

Time International, November 19, 2001, Lauren Goldstein, review of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, p. 70.

ONLINE

Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/ (June 17, 2002), Michelle Goldberg, review of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People; (August 1, 2006), Heather Havrilesky, "How to Lose More Friends and Alienate More People," review of The Sound of No Hands Clapping.

Toby Young Home Page, http://www.tobyyoung.co.uk (February 9, 2007).