Toby Young
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Toby Daniel Moorsom Young (born 1963) is a British journalist and the author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, the tale of his failed five-year attempt to make it in the U.S. as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine, as well as The Sound of No Hands Clapping, a follow-up about his failure to make it as a Hollywood screenwriter.[1] His obnoxious wit has earned him almost as many enemies as admirers and the title of "England's heterosexual Truman Capote".[2] As the son of a baron, he is entitled to use the title the Honourable, but declines to style himself as such.
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 Brasenose College, Oxford (gaining a first in PPE), as well as Harvard and Trinity College, Cambridge. At Oxford he started a magazine named The Danube, discovering his interest in journalism.[3] After leaving Oxford in 1986 he joined The Times but was later fired.[4] He then left for Harvard as a Fulbright scholar where he worked as a teaching fellow in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and became a devoted reader of Spy, the satirical magazine co-edited by Graydon Carter. From 1988-90 he worked as a teaching assistant at Cambridge in the Social and Political Sciences Faculty.
In 1991, Young founded and edited the Modern Review with Julie Burchill and her then husband Cosmo Landesman. Its motto was "low culture for highbrows". In 1995, with the magazine close to financial ruin, Young decided to close it down, angering his principal financial backer Peter York.[5] This decision led to a fierce public battle with Burchill and her then lover, Charlotte Raven, a writer at the magazine.[5]
Young moved to New York shortly afterwards to work for Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair. How to Lose Friends and Alienate People describes his cack-handed attempts to "take" Manhattan and chronicles his many faux-pas, such as hiring a strippergram to come to Vanity Fair's offices on Take Our Daughters to Work Day. He has boasted of his "negative charisma" and his appearance has been likened to a "peeled quail's egg dipped in celery salt" (Private Eye).
Back in London now, Young is an associate editor of The Spectator and a regular contributor to the Evening Standard and The Guardian. He has performed in the West End in a stage adaptation of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and, in 2005, co-wrote (with fellow Spectator journalist Lloyd Evans) a sex farce about the David Blunkett/Kimberley Quinn scandal and the 'Sextator' affairs of Boris Johnson and Rod Liddle called Who's the Daddy?.[6][7] It was named Best New Comedy at the 2006 Theatregoers' Choice Awards.
Toby competed in the Channel 4 TV series Come Dine With Me.
British producer Stephen Woolley and his wife, Elizabeth Karlson, lead production on the film verson of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, in conjunction with FilmFour. Simon Pegg has been cast as Young.[8]
Young is married to Caroline Bondy with whom he has three children.
[edit] References
- ^ Listen to Young reading the Introduction
- ^ Jonathan Frey "Pegg to Lose Friends", Joblo website citing Variety magazine. Retrieved on 23 June 2007.
- ^ Alberto Amendariz "A Worm in the Big Apple: British Bad Boy Toby Young Takes on Vanity Fair", New York Review of Magazines, Spring 2002. (Columbia University School of Journalism website) Retrieved on 23 June 2007.
- ^ Toby Young "Opinion: Toby Young on failure", The Guardian, 30 September 2006. Retrieved on 23 June 2007.
- ^ a b Lynn Barber "Forever Young", The Observer, 3 September 2006. Retrieved on 23 June 2007.
- ^ Sarah Lyall "A very British 'documentary farce'", International Herald Tribune, 25 August 2005 reprinting a New York Times article. Retrieved on 23 June 2007.
- ^ Full Text of Who's the Daddy?
- ^ "Simon Pegg is Toby Young in How to Lose Friends adaptation", Empire, 14 August 2006. Retrieved on 23 June 2007.
