How to Become a Scandal:Adventures in Bad Behavior

From a writer hailed as "a younger, more libidinal Susan Sontag,"* a dazzling, revealing, and fiercely funny dissection of our love of scandal and what it says about us

We all relish a good scandal—the larger the figure (judge, president!) and the more shocking the details (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 gory scrap?

With "pointed daggers of prose,"** Laura Kipnis examines contemporary downfall sagas to lay bare the American psyche: what we condone, what we punish, where we draw the line, and why. She delivers virtuoso analyses of four paradigmatic cases: a lovelorn astronaut, an unhinged judge, a venomous whistleblower, and an overimaginative 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 every upright citizen, deep within, roars his approval—as long as it's someone else's head on the block.

*The Philadelphia Enquirer **The New Yorker