Story of My Life by Jay McInerney

Story of My Life by Jay McInerney published 1988 This short sharp book will take you back to the 1980s, if you were around then. You don’t have to have been in NY, but you were probably aware of the way the city worked then. Jay McInerney was one of the set of writers – the literary bratpack - who were chroniclers of young people back then: his big moment was Bright Lights, Big City (1984): written in the annoying second person, featuring a fact-checker at New Yorker magazine who went out a lot and took drugs. I wrote about one of his contemporaries in this post – Slaves of New York by Tama Janowitz JayMc is mentioned in my piece along with Bret Easton Ellis and Michael Chabon. Those two were both great favourites of mine, with several Chabon novels on the blog, and Ellis included in this look at the key eras: A Fake Rock Group, & stories of the 70s and 80s The vibe of the times. I have a deep suspicion of a very common style of NY books, which I describe as: ‘we went uptown and we…