The highly anticipated sequel to the best-selling-and laugh-out-loud funny How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.
When even his friends refer to him in print as "a balding, bug-eyed opportunist with the looks of a beach ball, the charisma of a glove-puppet, and an ego the size of a Hercules supply plane," the odds of Toby Young scoring-in any sense-appear to be slim. But then How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, his account of the five years he spent trying (and failing) to take Manhattan, improbably catapults Toby to bestsellerdom, and his book is translated into twelve languages, including American.
Now Tinseltown beckons.
After receiving a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity from a big Hollywood producer, Toby sets his sights anew on a high-flying career, this time on the West Coast. But it doesn't take long for Toby's fabled "brown thumb" and self-sabotaging instincts to reassert themselves. On the home front, though, things seem to be looking up: Toby manages to persuade his girlfriend to marry him and move to Los Angeles-but then she decides to abandon her promising legal career in order to become a fulltime homemaker . . . and mother. Toby's increasingly hapless attempts to pursue a glamorous showbiz career while buried in diapers will strike a chord with all modern fathers struggling to find the right work/life balance . . . and with their utterly exasperated wives.
Failure-and fatherhood-have never been funnier.
In 1995 high-flying British journalist Toby Young left London for New York to become a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Other Brits had taken Manhattan - Alistair Cooke then, Anna Wintour now - so why couldn't he? But things didn't go quite according to plan. Within the space of two years he was fired from Vanity Fair, banned from the most fashionable bar in the city, and couldn't get a date for love or money. Even the local AA group wanted nothing to do with him. How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is Toby Young's hilarious account of the five years he spent looking for love in all the wrong places and steadily working his way down the New York food chain, from glossy magazine editor to crash-test dummy for interactive sex toys. But it's more than "the longest self-deprecating joke since the complete works of Woody Allen" (Sunday Times); it's also a seditious attack on the culture of celebrity from inside the belly of the beast. And there's even a happy ending as Toby Young marries - "for proper non-cynical reasons," as he puts it - the woman of his dreams. "Some people are lucky enough to stumble across the right path straight away; most of us only discover what the right one is by going down the wrong one first."
