How to Become a Scandal : Adventures in Bad Behavior

by Kipnis, Laura

• ISBN13: 9781429930659
• ISBN10: 1429930659
• Copyright: 2010-08-31
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co

Summary

We all relish a good scandalthe larger the figure (governor, judge) and more shocking the particulars (diapers, cigars)the better. But why do people feel compelled to act out their tangled psychodramas on the national stage, and why do we so enjoy watching them, hurling our condemnations while savoring every lurid detail? With "pointed daggers of prose" ( The New Yorker), Laura Kipnis examines contemporary downfall sagas to lay bare the American psyche: what we desire, what we punish, and what we disavow. She delivers virtuoso analyses of four paradigmatic cases: a lovelorn astronaut, an unhinged judge, a venomous whistleblower, and an over-imaginative memoirist. The motifs are classicrevenge, betrayal, ambition, madnessthough the pitfalls are ones we all negotiate daily. After all, every one of us is a potential scandal in the making: failed self-knowledge and colossal self-deceptionthe necessary ingredientsare our collective plight. In How to Become a Scandal, bad behavior is the entry point for a brilliant cultural romp as well as an anti-civics lesson. "Shove your rules," says scandal, and no doubt every upright citizen, deep within, cheers the transgressionas long as it's someone else's head on the block.

Excerpts

“Those who think they are playing to an unseen audience often find that they are abruptly on stage without a stitch. Why do they need this validation and why do we so much enjoy providing it? In How to Become a Scandal Laura Kipnis investigates the dirty habits of the heart and illuminates the secret places of the psyche, speculating brilliantly and amusingly about the trouble to which people will go to get themselves exposed.”
—Christopher Hitchens, author of Hitch-22    “Laura Kipnis is scarily smart and enviably funny, and with How to Become a Scandal she emerges as a Tocqueville for the age of Gawker. You'll never read Page Six in the same way again.”
—Rebecca Mead, author of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding   “Read Laura Kipnis's new book if you're hoping to become the object of a media feeding frenzy. Read it if you're hoping to avoid one. This is cultural criticism of a high order.”
—Jacob Weisberg, author of The Bush Tragedy   “An extremely smart, funny, acid, and beautifully written meditation on a scary truth that we all try desperately to ignore: we are deeply divided animals, and we are drawn to the creation of our own demise.”
—David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto   “Excruciatingly fascinating and as fun to read as all the tabloid fodder we pretend we're not following, How to Become a Scandal deftly reveals our halls of infamy to be halls of mirrors. Laura Kipnis has written another fabulously intelligent book.”
—Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances   “In the future, historians will have to read How to Become a Scandal if they want to understand this bizarre century. Laura Kipnis writes about the central conflicts in our society, the great comedies of manners, with the profound wit and broad sympathy that we used to find only in ambitious novels.”
—Michael Tolkin, author The Return of the Player   “Laura Kipnis has the rare ability to keep her wits about her even as she treads into areas where most nice people would not go. As Kipnis so astutely observes, each epoch gets the scandals it most needs, but at their root is just the inexorable, inexpungible, humiliating fact of being human.”
—Keith Gessen, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men    “Kipnis delivers all the lurid, lowbrow pleasures of scandal-voyeurism redeemed by the Apollonian grace of wit and intellect.”
—Jim Holt, author of Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes   “A brilliant original analysis of our culture's addiction to scandal. Kipnis illuminates her subjects with such wit and perception that she raises the art of critical writing to new heights. Brava.”
—Patricia Bosworth, author of Marlon Brando   “‘Know thyself’ the ancient Greeks commanded. Far easier commanded than obeyed, as Laura Kipnis demonstrates in this incisive, hilarious look at four exemplary modern American scandals. In ways as delicious and disturbing as the transgressions themselves, she tells us why we love this stuff.”
—Daniel Menaker, author of A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation   “Who knew it could be worth revisiting national bad dreams like Linda Tripp’s smile or Oprah’s diets?  Kipnis unpeels meaning the way Freud would have, if he’d had a sense of humor.”
—Jonathan Arac, author of Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel   “Not only is this enormous fun, it is also a very smart book, rich in insight and psychological truth. How to Become a Scandal probes into our self-destructive impulses and our delight when others play them out. . . Very satisfying and rewarding.”
—Peter Brooks, author of Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature   “How many times have you watched the latest scandal unfolding on TV and said, ‘How could he be so stupid’? Laura Kipnis gives you the answer and, along with it, a theory of why scandal, like rock and roll, is here to stay.”
—Stanley Fish, author of Save the World On Your Own Time   “No one should resist the latest adventure in bad behavior from professional provocateur, Laura Kipnis. While Against Love needled us with uncomfortable truths about marriage, relationships and love fatigue, this new work convinces us that ‘scandal watching’ in the U.S. is a spectator sport. With this book, as with others by Kipnis, you may love it, you may hate it, but you MUST read it.”
—Judith Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity   “American culture has produced so many juicy, delicious scandals in recent years—it’s a scandal that we don’t have an adequate theory of scandals to account for them. Just in time, Laura Kipnis arrives to scandalize us all, not only by providing riveting accounts of mind-boggling national scandals but also by explaining (with snark and sympathy, as circumstances dictate) just why these scandals boggle our minds, time after time after time. For anyone who’s ever asked, ‘What were they thinking?’, Laura Kipnis has the strongest answers available without a prescription.”
—Michael Bérubé, author of The Left at War