Whoa! They're making a movie out of my favorite book!

[Dreamer128]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455538/

How to lose friends and alienate people, by Toby Young, my personal hero. The man has absolutely no shame, nerves of steel and must be the most cynical person ever to walk on American soil. After having failed in every possible way, his biography became a massive hit. Anyway, this is what USATODAY writes about it:

'How to Lose Friends' and gain readers
By Jessica James, special for USA TODAY

Perhaps the only journalistic success Toby Young has had is writing his highly acclaimed memoir.

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People is Young's humorous account of his failures as a British journalist who travels to America. His goal: to relive the early-20th-century fantasy of crusading American journalists such as those featured in the films The Front Page and It Happened One Night.

But living out his fantasy isn't as easy as he thought. Young, an Oxford and Cambridge grad, is bowled over by the ritzy lifestyles of New Yorkers. Instead of working on his reporting and writing, he pays more attention to networking and getting past the "clipboard Nazis" of VIP parties.

It all starts when Graydon Carter, editor in chief of Condé Nast's Vanity Fair, offers him a job. Young leaves London to become someone important but discovers that his self-indulgent goals are no match for the elitism of the publishing empire's "Condé Nasties."

Young mortifies anyone he tries to impress, offending them with his uncouth assertiveness, such as the time he tries to "out" a celebrity during an interview for Vanity Fair. "Toby's a piece of gum that stuck to my shoe five years ago and that I still can't get off. ... I basically forgot to fire Toby Young every day for two years," Carter says in the book. Inevitably, Young gets fired from several prestigious publications.

And Young soon learns that journalists aren't as heroic as the '30s movies made them out to be. As one publicist tells him, "I have no respect for writers. They never make money. They're like poor people looking in the windows."

Young goes on to embarrass celebrities, crash an Oscar party and strike out in every attempt to find romance. His failure to blend in with Manhattan's unique panache and success-driven mentality brings a heaping dose of humor to this memoir. He vividly captures others' annoying viewpoints of him and offers firsthand accounts of his relationships with celebrities such as Hugh Grant, Sylvester Stallone and Anne Heche. Those encounters give the memoir a gossipy appeal.

But what works for this book also hurts it. Name-dropping of celebrities is interesting, but the book becomes a bit bogged down with names of publicity people unknown to most readers. Throughout it all, though, Young deftly describes what it is like for a typical nobody to try to live in a celebrity culture.

Although his failures echo through every page, Young's determination and persistence are possibly the only traits that lead him to overcome defeat and find himself as a writer. And, after all, he did get a successful book out if it.