How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior
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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 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 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 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. The New York Times - Susan Dominus …Laura Kipnis delivers consumers of high and low culture that rare twofer, taking material that self-respecting people are supposed to resist and treating it with such smarts that the reader feels nothing short of enlightened. Her book is filled with sensational subjects (Eliot Spitzer, Linda Tripp, James Frey and that notorious astronaut with the diaper), but Kipnis delivers all the thrills…Ostensibly about scandal, her book is most memorable as a convincing case for the ultimate unknowability of the self.
Introduction 1PART I DOWNFALLS1 The Lovelorn Astronaut 252 An Unreasonable Judge 68PART II UPROARS3 The Whistle-Blower 1134 An Over-imaginative Writer 152Epilogue 192Bibliography 199Acknowledgments 207
