Toby Young
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Toby Daniel Moorsom Young (born 1963) is a British journalist, author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, the tale of his disastrous five-year attempt to make it in the U.S. as a contributing editor at Conde Nast Publications' Vanity Fair magazine. His style of obnoxious wit has earned him almost as many enemies as admirers and the title of "England's heterosexual Truman Capote."
Young's father was Michael Young, a Labour life peer and pioneering sociologist who invented the term "meritocracy." His mother was the novelist, sculptor and painter Sasha Moorsom. He was educated at Oxford (gaining a first in PPE at Brasenose) as well as attending Harvard and Trinity College, Cambridge. At Oxford he started a magazine named The Danube, discovering his interest in journalism. After university he joined The Times but was sacked after six months. He then left for Harvard as a Fulbright scholar, encountering Graydon Carter's satirical Spy magazine there.
Returning to London, Young founded and edited The Modern Review with Julie Burchill, with its motto "low culture for highbrows". It caused a sensation in the publishing and celebrity worlds. In 1995, with the magazine close to financial ruin, Young decided to close The Modern Review. The decision led to a fierce public battle with Burchill and her lover, Charlotte Raven, a writer at the magazine, who accused him of being a spoiled child and compared him to Hitler.
Young moved to New York shortly afterwards to work for Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair. His book outlines his doomed struggle to get noticed amid the self-absorbed world of the city's style elite and his many faux-pas at the expense of the rich, famous and powerful. He has boasted of his "negative charisma" and been likened to a "peeled quail's egg dipped in celery salt"(Private Eye).
Back in London now, Young is the drama critic of the Spectator, restaurant critic of ES Magazine and a regular contributor to the Guardian. He has performed in the West End in a stage adaptation of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and cowritten (with fellow Spectator writer Lloyd Evans) a sex farce, about the David Blunkett/Kimberley Fortier scandal and the 'Sextator' affairs of Boris Johnson and Rod Liddle, called Who's the Daddy?
British producer Stephen Woolley and his wife, Elizabeth Karlson, are currently producing a film of How to Lose Friends in conjunction with FilmFour.
Young is married with two children and has published a second volume of memoirs, The Sound of No Hands Clapping.
