The Sound of No Hands Clapping: A Memoir

by TobyYoung (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2006

  $22.37

  Young is back with the eagerly awaited follow-up to his account of a hilariously failed attempt to conquer the Manhattan social and professional scene in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. All the elements that turned Toby's earlier memoir into a bestseller from coast to coast and on both sides of the Atlantic are back, too. Well, some things have changed for Toby-he has married his girlfriend from How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and now has two kids, and he has moved from the Manhattan that treated him none too kindly to London. But Toby remains Toby, and what Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair called Toby's brown thumb continues to work its magic, transforming opportunities into cringeworthy debacles and leading to situations that are classic Toby Young territory. Toby gleefully recounts such dubious journalistic assignments as posing as a patient at a penis-enlargement clinic and as a greeter at a Wal-Mart. He has misadventures in Los Angeles as a screenwriter for films that never quite get made, he's been a contestant on an abysmal reality show that absolutely no one watched, and he has acted in a one-man play that was utterly savaged by the critics. Yes, Toby has become a dutiful husband and a devoted dad, but he's as relentlessly self-sabotaging as ever, with a demonstrated knack for attracting misfortune, publicity-and devoted readers.

• Used

  Paperback
  2007

  $3.83

  When even his friends refer to him as 'a balding, bug-eyed opportunist with the looks of a beach ball, the charisma of a glove-puppet and an ego the size of a Hercules supply plane,' the odds of Toby Young scoring - in any sense - appear to be slim. But then HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS, his memoir about failing to take Manhattan, becomes an international bestseller. Now Tinseltown beckons. After receiving a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity from a Hollywood producer, Toby sets his sights anew on a high-flying career, this time on the West Coast. But it doesn't take long for Toby's self-sabotaging instincts to reassert themselves. On the home front, though, things are looking up: Toby persuades his girlfriend to marry him and move to Los Angeles - but then she decides to abandon her promising legal career in order to become a full-time housewife ...and mother. Toby's hapless attempts to pursue a glamorous showbiz career while buried in nappies will strike a chord with all modern fathers struggling to find the right work/life balance ...and with their exasperated wives. Failure - and fatherhood - have never been funnier.