Dear Mr. Young,
I too was a New York loser-journalist guiltily-smitten with celebrity, though I worked at the Village Voice, and my celebrities were not as Brad Pittish as yours.
The Voice is not Vanity Fair, but the high-school cliques were the same. Most everyone at the Voice was younger than me (I was around 40 at the time), so I didn’t get invited out to lunch much (ever, in fact). Also, I was married and had a kid; that was a problem (I think the world is divided into those who have kids and those who don’t). And the political correctness was probably even more obnoxious than Vanity Fair’s—in the fact-checking room, for example, workers protested because a supply box was labeled “colored paper.” On another occasion, a fact-checker angrily insisted I change the word “freshmen” to “freshpeople.”
Still, the Voice—it was under John Larsen in those days, half of one of those power couples you write so disturbingly about at the end of your book—published serious stuff: about politics, the environment, public schools, even if the pieces were sometimes a little long-winded and boring.
So even though I enjoyed your book, read it straight through (one of the few books recommended to me lately that I haven’t forced myself to finish—more on that later), I was inwardly laughing that the people you write about are from a caste stratospherically different from the vast majority of drones who make this city run.
Not that I’m saying you didn’t bring up issues that I thought and thought about even when I wasn’t reading your memoir—classless America vs. aristocratic England, political correctness in journalism (I shudder what would happen to Mencken were he alive), money and beauty and getting laid (obviously, you were dating before Craig’s List—being a writer, you would have scored many, many times).
Above all, I took the book to be a love letter to Graydon Carter. Seriously. I can’t imagine anyone—and I’ve read a few reviews to this effect—thinking this was a nasty portrait. He came off as so infinitely patient, even fatherly, towards you, that anyone suggesting otherwise must be nuts.
As for everyone else, I marked one passage in your book that struck me:
…Time and again during the five years I spent in Manhattan, I had a sense of encountering people who weren’t quite human…as if they all came off the same production line; they lacked the divine spark that makes all human beings unique.
You could say thee same for almost all white-collar jobbers. (You might read Andrew Sullivan’s essay on homosexuality in America, about this drive towards diversity, but only if the members of each group are Americanized and homogenous). I find no tolerance for bad jokes, bad dressers, bad haircuts, less-than-perfect hygiene, incorrect language (or, God forbid, bad spelling). Words that are banished one year—“chick,” “babe,” “broad,” “girl,” “negro”—are magically resurrected the next. Freedom-of-thought wise, it sucks.
I have also been thinking a lot about what you wrote because I have a special needs friend. He is smart, but he doesn’t fit in. He is the opposite of your friend Alex. He is way more socially inept than even you (by the way, I think you overdo the self-deprecation thing a tad—yes, it made you more likeable and thus your critiques more believable, but sometimes you were straining. I mean how socially-inept can you be if your roommate is Sophie Dahl?). Anyway, I am pissed as hell that someone with a pure heart, who cannot lie, who forgives his tormentors, spends his life alone because people are so fucked-up. He won’t make anyone’s A list.
Speaking of good-looking, politically-correct people, just before your book, I read The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. Yeah, it was an interesting treatise on the Indian caste system, but the prose was preciously self-conscious, and if I read one more novel with an adult-rendered-mute-because-of-childhood-trauma, I will rip out what’s left of my hair. Anyway, I think another reason—aside from the preciousness—the novel won the Booker Prize, is because Roy is so damn good-looking. She taught aerobics, right? She’s got saucer eyes and luscious lips, right? She’s a South Asian Zadie Smith, right? Are there any ugly, best-selling authoresses in England?
Oh well, it must feel good knowing that everyone back at VF is reading your book, pissed they weren’t mentioned.