The Underminer

Book excerpt: Successful, gorgeous, and beloved by everyone you know, the Underminer remembers your every foolish ambition and humiliating mistake-and never fails to remind you. The Underminer makes you feel suicidal. But the Underminer is your friend. Mike Albo and Virginia Heffernan do us all a public service by capturing the elusive evils of an age-old archetype. To understand and resist your toxic friend, you need The Underminer. Who is the Underminer? "An insincere, name-dropping predator with a rise so meteoric that you feel like crawling into your sad little apartment and eating gallons of ice cream right out of the carton while sniffling over reruns of old Bette Davis movies."-New York Times Book Review "A character that is so malicious, so insensitive and sadistic, that we can only gape horror-struck as every venomous phrase rolls off her tongue."-Rocky Mountain News "A psychological predator of the highest order. A viper cloaked in velvet. The Shaquille O'Neal of schadenfreude."-Boston Globe "An ego-skewering, passive-aggressive blowhard of indeterminate gender, surfing annoyingly along the breaking waves of pop and consumer culture-from dot-com to New Age, from hip-hop to a yurt in Afghanistan-always on top and armed with a put-down."-New York Times "The 'friend' who somehow manages to turn every compliment into an incredibly subtle insult, thus making you wonder whether you are truly the most neurotic person in all of Manhattan-or if your friend is just, well, evil."-New York Post