(2018-05-17) How Tucker Max Went From Chronicling His Drunken Sexual Conquests To Ghostwriting Tiffany Haddishs Memoir

How Tucker Max Went From Chronicling His Drunken Sexual Conquests to Ghostwriting Tiffany Haddish’s Memoir. “I fucking love #MeToo,” said Tucker Max... He’s now 42 years old, married, with two young children. He also happens to have co-written The Last Black Unicorn, the best-selling memoir published in December by Tiffany Haddish, breakout star of Girls Trip and beloved comedian known for her confident raunch. News of this collaboration was met with reliable surprise, given Max’s previous work

Max knows his reputation and resents it. The mere suggestion that he might personally have anything to reckon with during this widespread cultural accounting about sexual misconduct makes him very mad

Though he’s sworn off fratire, he still detests those who judged his actions back when he dared to write stories about his life and continue to judge him today.

This feels like it gets at the crux of his general aggrievement: a frustration that, even now that he has a wife and kids and impassioned opinions about the monsters of #MeToo, he’s still facing down a world that is suspicious of his voice. “The only people who can tell offensive jokes now are people like Tiffany,” he said, “because a black woman can tell almost any joke she wants.”

Being “Tucker Max” has been very profitable for Tucker Max. When he started writing in the early 2000s, he said, “the entire social justice warrior movement didn’t exist.” He calls it “authoritarian” and “anti-American.” He describes Lena Dunham—“the anti-me”—as if she were its living embodiment. “She got a $6 million advance for her book, and it was a complete bomb,” he said. “I had a massive groundswell of support, massive book sales, and everyone in media hated me.”

he spent a few years as a kind of self-styled dating expert, cranking out a podcast called Mating Grounds and a swaggering guide called Mate: Become the Man Women Want before deciding that persona had run its course, too.

*They had their first child in 2014 and were married soon afterward. “He’s done a lot of personal growth,” she said.

A lot of this personal growth came via Freudian psychoanalysis. For four years, Max saw an analyst four times a week.*

Book in a Box, the company he founded in 2014, makes perfect sense as a Maxian venture. It conveniently merges his disgust with the cultural elite, his image of himself as a kind of populist crusader, and his belief in the magical self-branding power of books

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Max couldn’t resist broadcasting his role. “My first new book of short stories in years is out,” he wrote on Facebook. “No, I did not transition to become a black woman. … I was the co-writer for Tiffany Haddish’s book.”

“Haddish is the golden goose, she is incredible, this book is saving jobs, and the Jezebel piece freaked everyone out,” said someone who works in publishing but asked not to be named for fear of professional retribution. “Tucker didn’t know how to be a ghostwriter because he didn’t know how to share the spotlight,” the source said. “There’s always an agenda there, and right now it’s leveraging Tiffany to build up on Book in a Box and make a billion dollars.”

If any of this—the relentless entrepreneurial agenda, the showboating rhetoric, the bulldozer defensiveness, the elite-bashing, the victim complex—sounds familiar, he’s clear that this is a comparison he deplores. “I would say Trump and I are direct opposites,”

But as Max talks about his own evolution, it also feels like one reason he got tired of fratire is that he became disgusted with a chunk of his fans—specifically, the Red Pill and incel types who lionize him. “Most of those dudes are fucking toxic, creepy weirdos,” he said. There was always an element of his audience, he explained, “that are people I can’t stand.” He hates being conflated with “manosphere” guys.


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