Not just any lemonade.
After getting fired from his dream job as a writer for Vanity Fair magazine - for repeatedly embarrassing editor Graydon Carter with stunts such as sending a stripper-gram to a colleague on Take Our Daughters to Work Day and snorting cocaine with bad-boy artist Damien Hirst during a photo shoot - Young published a memoir in 2001 about his self-abuse and social stupidity titled How to Lose Friends & Alienate People.
But it didn't end there. Young continued to take his limited experiences and juice them beyond any reasonable expectation.
He created an extensive body of work based around a handful of personal misfortunes and embarrassing social interactions, back-dropped by Manhattan's gimlet swirl and peopled by vapid fashionistas, snobs and boldfaced names.
Those incidents have graced the page (in book form and dozens of newspaper and magazine articles), the stage and now the screen.
All the more surprising for a guy who invariably seems to provoke strong reactions in people he meets, who has been described in the British media as "a bold satirist" as well as a "skinny-chested opportunist with the looks of a punctured beachball, the charisma of a glove-puppet and an ego the size of a Hercules supply plane".
Via email, Vanity Fair's editor explained his surprise at Young's ability to parlay an undistinguished six-month stint at the magazine into an oeuvre.
"I can only compare it with a brief one-night stand that results in octuplets," Carter said.
Initially rejected by 22 publishers, How to Lose Friends became a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic and went on to be translated into 12 languages including Bulgarian, Mandarin and Croatian.
It was adapted into a one-man show; first in London's Soho with Jack Davenport (Norrington in the blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise) as its star and then later on the city's theatre-rich West End with Young handling acting duties himself.
Later this month, a fictionalised version of Young's tale of self-immolation will reach its widest audience yet with the release of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People the movie - an R-rated romantic comedy starring Shaun of the Dead star Simon Pegg, Jeff Bridges and Kirsten Dunst.
Perhaps the most extreme example of "failing upward" to hit popular culture in recent memory, Young frames discussion of his career trajectory around terms other than lemons and lemonade.
"I've managed to fashion gold out of base metal," he said while relaxing on a chaise lounge by the pool of a Beverly Hills hotel.
"I've somehow taken a string of really humiliating failures and turned them to my own advantage through some peculiar sleight of hand."
In the film, Sidney Young (Pegg) is the editor of a smart-alecky, celeb-bashing magazine that makes sport of mocking media bigwigs like Clayton Harding (Bridges), editor in chief of the glossy Sharps magazine.
Everything changes when Young gets hired by Harding to write the kind of fawning puff pieces about celebrities that he despises.
Undeterred, Young sets out to take Manhattan's media world by storm but winds up a casualty of his own drunk and disorderly impulses; mayhem involving a transvestite stripper, the accidental death of an ingenue's teacup chihuahua and a spectacular disruption of the Oscars ensues.
Toby Young was put on contract as a contributing editor by Carter in 1995 after he lampooned the lionised editor in his real-life literary magazine, the Modern Review.
The Oxford-educated son of an English baron, Young arrived in New York with the somewhat paradoxical intention of shaking up its media culture (mainly by needling Carter about how edgy he used to be as editor of the snark bible, Spy magazine) and infiltrating celebritydom.
But the writer's various failures were hardly a spectacular flame-out. He was never even outrightly fired; Young's contract with the magazine simply expired.
Nonetheless, he has continued to bring his story to life on ever more high-profile platforms ever since.
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People opens in New Zealand theatres on October 23.
