It's hard to escape conversations about scandal. From Bernie Madoff to Tiger Woods to Mel Gibson, Americans relish a good scandal and an opportunity to talk about ethics, psychology, human nature, and the mysteries and torments of sexual desire. Scandal has become so prominent in our culture that one no longer has to be a celebrity. Between lust, hypocrisy, greed, and resentment—the usual human traits—there are thousands of ways that pretty much anyone can find to become a scandal.

About the book:
With "pointed daggers of prose" (The New Yorker) 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—in How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior she investigates why people feel compelled to act out their tangled psychodramas on the national stage, and why the public so enjoys watching them, hurling condemnations while savoring every gory scrap.

Kipnis delivers virtuoso analyses of four paradigmatic cases from the last two decades: a lovelorn astronaut, an overimaginative memoirist, an irrational judge, and a venomous whistle-blower. Each of them dramatizes some intractable existential dilemma, a trouble spot in the social contract that no form of progress is likely to eradicate anytime soon—the revenge imperative, the flimsiness of irrationality, the stigma of ugliness, the hollowness of redemption. And each of them gives us an understanding of what human beings are really like.

With wit, acerbic judgment, and psychological brilliance, Kipnis presents scandal as a dynamic relationship between the scandalizers and the audience and makes readers think twice about their own self-knowledge.

About the author:
Laura Kipnis is the author of Against Love: A Polemic and The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability, which have been translated into 15 languages. She is a professor in the Department of Radio, Television and Film at Northwestern University; has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation; and has contributed to Slate, Harper's, The Nation, and The New York Times Magazine. She lives in New York and Chicago.