'I be wrought up I've rather let t...

'I be wrought up I've rather let the side down, getting the small filet," says Toby Young after placing his order at Gibsons, the uber-manly Rush road steakhouse.

nevertheless the British writer best known for his comic memoir by what mode to Lose Friends and Alienate family (Da Capo, paperback, 340 pages, $1495) is used to disappointing clan He's made it his stock in trade.

Now touring the United States to excite his follow-up book, The vigorous of No Hands Clapping (Da Capo, 264 pages, $2495) Young has wearied the past week reliving tales of the spectacular failure of his modern York magazine-writing career, chronicled in the first work and the faster, if somewhat les flashy, demise of his attempt at becoming a Hollywood screenwriter, chronicled in the next to the first

"You can fail upwards in Hollywood too," he says, summing up the just discovered memoir.

The major difference between fresh York, where he worked for Vanity Fair magazine, edited by way of the mercurial Graydon Carter, and Hollywood where he almost had a production deal with a major industry figure he doesn't name, is that, "L.A. chewed me up in a hardly any months. New York took five years."

Young did not wager out to fail. Nor, really, did he establish out to make a living by the agency of entertaining people with stories of his failure. His original universal for the first book, he says, was a kind of intellectual history of Vanity Fair. And for the inferior he'd hoped to write a novel.

unless once How to Lose Friends took not upon Young's fate -- and literary persona -- was sealed.

'I'LL KILL YOU'

"Heroic failure is a same British concept," says Young, who now lives in London with his wife, Caroline, and sum of two units young children. But it was something of a surprise that American readers were drawn to Young's stories about his hapless efforts to impress Carter and make a name for himself forward the New York scene. "Generally," he says, "there's alone one kind of loser in America."

Young's memoir, notwithstanding that hit a perfect revival-of-the-slacker, post-dot-com signification when lots of would-have-been-hipster- superstars were busy licking their hurts and plotting their Next Big put in motion Even he was surprised on its success.

As shortly as it did hit the best-seller lists, however Young began plotting how he might exploit its succes and parlay his strange standing into a certain flat ("probably D-list") of celebrity. That's when he headed for looks Angeles.

And he swears that he wasn't trying to make a mes of things there. In fact, he had no vexed question promising that he wouldn't name the big-deal farmer who was interested in his movie.

"He told me 'if you write about me I'll kill you.' And I was widely advised that he would, too," Young says. "Anyway, when I promised him, I really meant it. At the time."

In re-examination of course, the quick crashing and burning of the movie scheme was a reasonably good issue for Young, who, at the exceedingly least, got material for a work out of it. He's get to to realize, by now, that, with his loser persona, "mild succes is the worst possible outcome"

Life becomes a little strange when failure is your gig. with equal reason though Young still resists thinking of himself as a memoirist, he has started keeping a journal.

"If something goe horribly wrong" he says, with a sarcastic twinkle in his view "like if my wife leaves me or something fantastic like that . . ."

about SUCCESS

Meanwhile, however he inhabits a reality-show-like horizontal of almost famousness. Though he is not a "proper celebrity," he finds himself commonly asked to do things like appear forward Celebrity Big Brother or, level more alarmingly, Celebrity Detox. And, in addition to the novel book, he's writing a restaurant rounded pillar for one London paper and a theater file for another. He's also mounting a play -- a farce about the royal family -- and, in a brilliant irony, still working toward one success as a screenwriter.

The screenplay of to what degree To Lose Friends "actually appear to bes to have some momentum" at the point of time he says, with names like Bill Murray and George Clooney being mentioned as possible Graydon Carters.

And if that doesn't work public Young has also joined The Writers' Circle, a workshop of British writers who have all come afterwarded in other genres and are now working forward screenplay projects.

"All the top population have come to talk to us," he says, sounding uncharacteristically star-struck. He heals himself quickly, though, and adds, "Of course, they've all said different things."

He begins to list facing what he's learned about crafting a story and working within an established genre Then he appear to bes to stop himself, as if realizing an inherent absurdity in what he's saying, given the driver's seat office success of, say, "Pirates of the Caribbean."

"Maybe inelegant and uncrafted with a project as dense of Coriolanus is the way to go" he muses.

It's hard to disclose if he's talking about a recipe for succes or united for failure. Or if, for Young, there is really plenteous of a difference.

e-mail: dpickett@suntimes.com

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