Status Anxiety: Who’s afraid of Michael Wolff?

In the current issue of GQ, the writer Michael Wolff has rather an amusing piece about his predilection for feuding with his friends. ‘My longest feud was 15 years,’ he writes. ‘At that point, I met my feuding companion on Madison Avenue and we immediately took up where we left off. Feuds are, in a sense, a courtship. Even a seduction: has my absence, my resistance, my resolve, impressed you — or worn you down?’

The subject of the piece is his latest feud, which happens to be with me. I first met Michael in New York when I was working at Vanity Fair. I’d read his book about his stint as an unsuccessful dotcom entrepreneur — Burn Rate — and wrote him a fan letter. He responded by inviting me to lunch at Michael’s, his favourite restaurant (which he no longer goes to because he’s feuding with the owner). It wasn’t love at first sight, but we had lunch again in Los Angeles and this time we bonded. What changed between our first and second meetings is that I’d been fired from Vanity Fair and he’d started working there. We now had a subject we could both talk about for hours: Graydon Carter, the magazine’s egomaniacal editor-in-chief. Our mutual fascination with Graydon became the basis of a firm friendship.

One of the things that made being friends with Michael such fun is that we had to conceal our friendship from his boss. Since the publication of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, I’ve been persona non grata at Vanity Fair. Graydon goes bananas if you so much as mention my name in his presence — he refers to my book as an ‘unauthorised biography’ — and being seen in public with me is a surefire way to get sacked.