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 went downtown and then it was
Thanksgiving’ – a long list of not very interesting activities in too much
detail. Story of My Life is in that tendency, but is just about saved by
being funny, and short, and also because it IS impressive the way the author takes
on the persona of a very young woman. She, Alison Poole, is on the loose with
too much money, too many drugs, and not a hugely strong personality. She goes
to nightclubs, on dates, to people’s apartments. She has women friends,
flatmates, sisters who are (and it hardly seems possible) even more heading for
chaos than she is. The men in her life are not appealing. She has
unsatisfactory parents, wants to be an actress, and seems incapable of
committing to anything. She uses the title phrase a lot. You quite hope she is
going to do better in her life after the end of the book…
But then, weirdly, she is going to turn up also in not one
but two (2!) books by Bret Easton Ellis. The two writers were obviously
sort-of-friends and Ellis, particularly, was full of this kind of post-modern
nonsense.
And that’s not all: there are some real-life links with the
book. Alison is based on an actual former girlfriend of McInerney’s who later
in life was a major player in one of those US sex scandals that explode in the
lives of potential presidential candidates. In this case, she is Rielle Hunter
(that wasn’t always her name), he is John Edwards – who remembers either of
them, let alone the scandal? I was working for a US magazine that covered the
story, and I still had to remind myself of the details – easily found on
Wikipedia.
And in addition, Alison in the book brings up a weird story
about a dead horse (yes, honestly) and an insurance scam - which again was a real-life
story that broke publicly some years later, and was connected to Rielle Hunter.
This may be too much weight on what is quite a slim
entertaining volume. You might compare it with Bridget Jones in the UK (and I
suppose it is always being suggested that Mark Darcy in that originated in recent
(!) prime minister Keir Starmer, so we have our own issues), though I’m sure
McInerney is (wrongly) taken more seriously than Helen Fielding.
But the book certainly has its moments. I liked the
flatmates discussing a shared division of rent money: ‘Jeannie and the higher
math. She never even heard of fractions until she started buying eighths and
quarters from Emile.’ [ie drugs]
Her friend Francesca is nothing like as skinny as the other
girls (it’s not a bad thing that the fear of fat-shaming has put an end to all this) – she
turns up in green sequins and talks about food. Then: ‘she kisses Dean, then
me, then like a big green cruise ship she casts off her lines and steams away,
blowing a kiss.’
There is a game of Truth or Dare later where everything is
going to fall apart, and all of this relies on the fact that Alison has
convinced us that she cannot tell lies. But I was surprised that the question
‘did you really have an abortion?’ wasn’t part of the problem, it seemed a
missed opportunity.
I hadn’t remembered that there are two very familiar tropes
here: the ‘three lies everyone tells’, and the story of the actress so bad in a
play about Anne Frank that the audience shouts to the Nazis ‘she’s in the
attic’ – JayMc doesn’t name her, but back then it was specifically Pia Zadora. I
don’t know if I first came across these items when I read this book first time
around, and I don’t know if they originated here.
The book survives, perhaps because McInerney is not apparently making fun of Alison, he isn’t quite trying to get into her mind in order to judge her as a fool. I have said before, I have a particular dislike for authors who choose traits for their characters in order to despise them: JayMc does not do that. And his ear for dialogue is excellent – he should have been writing scripts.
No option but to look for old Ralph Lauren adverts for the illos...
Old
Ralph Lauren Adverts — 1986
Old
Ralph Lauren Adverts — 1991
Old
Ralph Lauren Adverts — 1991
Old
Ralph Lauren Adverts — 1987
Old
Ralph Lauren Adverts — 1994
Ah, yes, the Edwards case. I hadn't thought of that in years, Moira! And I think those other real-life links are interesting, too. I can see how this might be an entertaining story in its way. Just from the bits you shared, I got a sense of the wit in the writing style. It does 'feel' very 1980s...
ReplyDeleteYes, I liked that it was so very much written at the time, no benefit of hindsight.
DeletePerhaps Bridget Jones was more relatable because her flaws were things most of us struggle with - awkwardness, bad romantic entanglements, work disasters - rather than drugs and nightclubs, and Fielding made it funny whereas McInerney and Ellis take themselves so seriously . . . I remember when a friend in London sent me Bridget Jones's Diary and I was quite pleased to have read and enjoyed it before it became a bestseller here.
ReplyDeleteThe reappearance or I guess I should say "origin story" of Rielle Hunter sounds interesting. I hate when politicians I like turn out to have feet of clay.
Constance
To be fair, I would say McInerney & Ellis are both very funny at times, though not to be compared with Helen Fielding.
DeleteI was a very early adapter to Bridget Jones, and then gave the book as a present to many people. And - took it to America with me!
Rielle Hunter's story is long and winding, very interesting.
Ah, the eighties, the era of big hair, big clunky costume jewellery, big shoulders, big everything really. Not a decade I remember fondly. Not sure this is for me, even though it does sound entertaining. Chrissie
ReplyDeleteyes indeed, though NY was not much like the UK at that time. But some things crossed over...
DeleteI was interested because I could remember reading it at the time so interested to see how it wouls stand up