From The New York Times
October 2, 2005
“One of Rakoff’s gifts is his ability to cut the overly self-aborbed down to size. When he is introduced to Karl Lagerfeld at that Paris fashion show, he notes that the designer “looks me up and down and dismisses me with the not super-kind ‘What can you write that hasn’t been written already?’ ”

What an invitation! Rakoff gleefully takes him up on it. “He’s absolutely right, I have no idea,” he writes. “But I can try.” Here’s what he comes up with about Lagerfeld: “Not yet having undergone his alarming weight loss, and seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby . . . muffin overrisen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children.”