How to Cause a Scandal
Laura Kipnis
'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 Cause 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'Laura Kipnis is scarily smart and enviably funny, and with How to Cause 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'A deliciously flippant tone serves the reader the juicy details we savor so about scandal, while tossing in some timeless questions and speculations about the deeper meaning of it all ...This is a dead serious book that is anutter lark to read.'
(Publishers Weekly)We 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 condemnation while savouring every lurid detail?
With ‘pointed daggers of prose’ (The New Yorker), Laura Kipnis examines contemporary downfall sagas to lay bare our 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 whistle-blower, and an over-imaginative memoirist. The motifs are classic — revenge, betrayal, ambition, madness — and 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-deception — the necessary ingredients — are our collective plight. In How to Cause a Scandal, bad behaviour 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.
'How to Cause a Scandal is a must-read for anyone unable to look away from another’s fall from grace ... reading her clever book is like sitting in a front-row seat at Scandal Theory 101 — and serves as a cautionary tale for those tiptoeing on the edges of indignity.'
Tina Brown Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Beast'Kipnis's book is stuffed with such witty apercus .. But for the most part, she treats her subjects with remarkable compassion, using their failings to illustrate our own potential to do the same.'
Susan Dominus (The New York Times Book Review)'This is the thinking person's glossy ... with juicy, witty, razor-sharp analysis of the unconscious forces driving those who scandalise and those who feed on these fiascos ... The result is as compulsively readable as the glossies but much more satisfying.'
(The Age)'A hilarious, well-written and surprisingly serious book about the nature of scandal in the modern world'
(Sydney Morning Herald)'Kipnis...is a frequently funny, gossipy and self-effacing writer. How to Cause a Scandal is a florid romp though the most embarrassingly self-destructive impulses of the human psyche.'
(MC Reviews)Laura Kipnis
Author photo
Julie Kaplan
Laura Kipnis is the author of Against Love: a polemic and The Female Thing: dirt, sex, envy, vulnerability, which have been translated into 14 languages. She is a professor in the Department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University, has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has contributed to Slate, Harper’s, The Nation, Playboy, and The New York Times Magazine. She lives in New York and Chicago.
Buy from Readings
Extent: 224pp
Size: 210mm x 135mm
ISBN (13): 9781921640827
RRP: $29.95
Pub date: October 2010
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