"Those who think they are playing to an unseen audience often find that they are abruptly on stage without a sticth. 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"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 BrandoWe all relish a good scandal-the 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 classic-revenge, betrayal, ambition, madness-though the pitfalls are ones we negotiate daily. After all, every one of us is a potential scandal in the making: failed self-knowledge and colossal self-deception-the necessary ingredients-are 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 transgression-as long as it's someone else's head on the block. Read Less