I wanted to let you know that How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, my book about the five years I spent trying to "take" Manhattan, has just been published by Little
Brown. It charts my rapid descent down the New York food chain, from an editor at Vanity Fair to a crash-test dummy for
interactive sex toys, and contains dozens of amusing anecdotes about the celebrities I met along the way. Vanity Fair's
attitude to the book was summed up by the response of Beth Kseniak, the magazine's director of public relations, when
asked for a comment by an American gossip columnist last week: "We're looking through our files and we can't find any
record of a Toby Young ever having worked here." (To be fair, I think she was joking.)
Vanity Fair aren't the only people cheesed off by the book. According to a story in the Sunday Telegraph last weekend,
the management of the Groucho Club have just discovered that I've documented a cocaine-taking incident involving Damien
Hirst and Keith Allen at the Club and have suspended me, pending an investigation. I've set up a website to promote How
to Lose Friends & Alienate People that includes a link to this story as well as the chapter that's caused all the fuss. The site also
includes a link to the relevant page at Amazon.co.uk--not to be confused with Amazon.com--in case you feel moved to
purchase a copy. (They can deliver anywhere in the world.) Rather embarrassingly, the page includes the book's "Sales
Rank" so you might want to check it out anyway for purely sadistic purposes. The address of my site is http://www.tobyyoung.co.uk/.
I realise that one sure fire way to lose friends and alienate people is to clutter up their email inboxes with unwanted
messages such as this. If you don't wish to receive any further emails from me, just hit reply, write "remove" in the
subject field and send it back to me. I'll delete you from my mailing list. However, if you don't do that expect to
receive another message in a week's time letting you know about the outcome of the Groucho's "investigation". So far, no
men in white coats have appeared on my doorstep demanding a urine sample.
--Toby
P.S. Feel free to forward this email to everyone in your Palm Pilot. Having just taken on the combined forces of the New
York glossy magazine industry AND the Groucho Club, I need all the help I can get.