How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (memoir) to sue him) and "Vanity Fair"'s own Graydon Carter. Young also describes awkward run-ins with American celebrities including Nathan Lane, Mel Gibson and Diana Ross. Throughout the book, Young describes being tormented by his friend "Alex de Silva" (speculated to be Sacha Gervasi), a former colleague of Young's who manages to succeed in America in every way that Young does not. The title of Young's book is a parody of the title of Dale Carnegie's 1937 perennial bestseller, "How to Win Friends and Influence People"; a parody by Irving Tressler titled "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People" was also
How to Win Friends and Influence People lack of attention in academic circles, "How to Win Friends and Influence People" was written for a popular audience and Carnegie successfully captured the attention of his target. The book experienced mass consumption and appeared in many popular periodicals, including garnering 10 pages in the January 1937 edition of "Reader's Digest". The book continued to remain at the top of best-seller lists and was even noted in the New York Times to have been extremely successful in Nazi Germany, much to the writer's bewilderment. He wrote that Carnegie would rate "butter higher than guns as a means of winning friends"