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May 24th 2002

Worried about your job? Of course you are, you work in the publishing industry.

A domain where fears about actual unemployment often take a distant second place to fretting that your current job isn't good enough. Well, imagine having one of the plummiest gigs in the world -- contributing editor at Vanity Fair -- and systematically blowing it all. That's the startling -- yet strangely empowering -- career nosedive Toby Young recounts in his memoir "How To Lose Friends And Alienate People," which Da Capo Press is publishing this July. For those not "feeling it" at their current jobs, Young's book is better than Paxil.

The narrative centers on Young's career Russian roulette -- enticing a birthday stripper to strut her stuff at the Condé Nast building for a co-working, not knowing it was Take Our Daughters To Work Day; crashing the Vanity Fair Oscar party only to get dissed by Diana Ross for hogging the phone. This suite of incremental career blunders is interspersed with Young's de Tocqueville-like musing on fin-de-siècle Condé Nast corporate culture and New York media society writ large. Among the high points: a controversial portrait of Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter's career trajectory ("Spy was just a calling card, a way for Graydon and his co-editor, Hart Andersen, to let people like Si Newhouse know that they were talented magazine editors and, at the price, were available for hire.")

Like "The Mouse Betrayed" in Disney circles, Young's decidely unflattering portrait of Condé Nast has made his book -- originally published in the United Kingdom last year -- an underground hit among the Nasties. For everyone else, "How To Lose Friends And Alienate People" amounts to radical therapy for closet risk-takers. No matter what you gamble or lose at the workplace, chances are you won't trip up as badly as Toby did.