What business does a 40-something-year-old have writing a nostalgia-soaked memoir about the end of an empire? Plenty, if that person is Dana Brown and the empire is the print magazine world. In the funny and dishy (but sobering) Dilettante: True Tales of Excess, Triumph, and Disaster, Brown writes from a rarified perch: he worked at Vanity Fair for a quarter century, most of those years under the wing of legendary editor and New York gadabout Graydon Carter.
In 1994, Carter hired 21-year-old Brown, a college dropout who had been working in the service industry, as his assistant. Brown, who got the job based primarily on his work ethic and humility, spent years doing menial tasks as an editorial assistant during Vanity Fair's glory days; by the time he became a deputy editor in 2012, the industry was already in trouble: "It was a perfect storm. The financial crisis, the iPhone, Facebook, Twitter: the four horsemen of the magazine apocalypse."
Brown is a red-blooded storyteller; his recollections of memorable interactions with Christopher Hitchens and a pre-politics Donald Trump are among Dilettante's sublime set pieces. Brown is also a loyalist, and readers expecting trash talk about the worker bees of 350 Madison Avenue will instead find an exposé of the overwhelmingly good behavior of Vanity Fair's staff and contributors. Dilettante is a salute to an industry and its practitioners, those who were making a meaningful cultural contribution even while they were trying their damnedest to drain Condé Nast's fathomless expense account. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer