Story of My Life [Paperback]

Jay McInerney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 28, 1989

In his breathlessly paced new novel Jay McInerney revisits the nocturnal New York of Bright Lights, Big City. Alison Poole, twenty going on 40,000, is a budding actress already fatally well versed in hopping the clubs, shopping Chanel falling in and out of, lust, and abusing other people's credit cards. As Alison races toward emotional breakdown, McInerney gives us a hilarious yet oddly touching portrait of a postmodern Holly Golightly coming to terms with a world in which everything is permitted and nothing really matters.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Jay McInerney has proven himself not only a brilliant stylist but a master of characterization, with a keen eye for incongruities of urban life.

-- the New York Times Book Review

"[McInerney's] talent for capturing the nuances and idiosyncrasies of our culture[ in Bright Lights, Big City] is even more powerful evident in Story of My Life... Underneath Alison's hip, party-girl exterior and flippant vernacular is McInerney's disturbing depiction or a young woman caught in the traumatic reality of her times." -- San Francisco Chronicle

McInerney's Story of My Life is quite as brilliant as Bright Lights, Big City and a lot funnier."

-- the Sunday Times (london)

From the Inside Flap

In his breathlessly paced new novel Jay McInerney revisits the nocturnal New York of Bright Lights, Big City. Alison Poole, twenty going on 40,000, is a budding actress already fatally well versed in hopping the clubs, shopping Chanel falling in and out of, lust, and abusing other people's credit cards. As Alison races toward emotional breakdown, McInerney gives us a hilarious yet oddly touching portrait of a postmodern Holly Golightly coming to terms with a world in which everything is permitted and nothing really matters.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 2nd printing edition (August 28, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679722572
• ISBN-13: 978-0679722571
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #811,491 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jay McInerney is the author of Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, Story of My Life, Brightness Falls, The Last of the Savages, Model Behaviour, How It Ended and The Good Life. He lives in New York and Nashville.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Unglamorous Glamorous Life, April 6, 2006

By 

Notnadia (Currently upstairs.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Story of My Life (Paperback)

This book is often trashed by reviewers of a certain literary persuasion, but I found myself pulled to its rapid-fire prose and tales of excess and figurative (and literal) nosedives in 1987 New York City. The main character here is a would-be actress named Alison Poole (later purloined by Brett Easton Ellis in some of his novels) and she is a twenty-year-old "postmodern girl" whose tragic flaws and self destructive impulses are to an extent offset by her absolute honesty in the way she tells us about herself and her friends. As in Mcinerney's earlier Bright Lights, Big City, cocaine in all its alabaster glow is never made to seem so unappealing. Here we see the toll it takes on its user and the way it seems to extract the soul from Alison and many of those who are in this novel with her. In Story of my Life, we trail Alison through a few weeks in the year 1987, as she takes acting classes, serially sleeps with men, drinks, snorts, smokes and downs pills of every stripe and description, and screams at us about her frustration with why exactly (she can't seem to put her finger on it) her existence is so miserable. She is from a rich family, but financially needy, neglected by her divorced parents and in a state of constant competition with her sisters. Alison offers us some stinging and very accurate observations about life and her culture, but yet she misses huge facts even as they stare her in the face. ("Story of my life..." she'll say over and over about things that puzzle or anger her.) She and her cohorts, girls with names like Didi, Francesca and Jeanne, get their thrills from drugs, from stealing one another's boyfriends, and from a vicious preppie version of the old slumber party game Truth or Dare. Along the path between the covers, Alison swindles men out of money by claiming they've impregnated her and she needs funds for an abortion. She also, for all these somewhat disgusting flaws, gives us a rare view into the mind of a woman of her time and social class, and entertains us with bitingly apt observations and speculations, and more than a few times she gives up accidental wit that one probably wouldn't find in any book not authored by Jay Mcinerney. This is a weak novel in some ways (it lacks a solid plot) but a fine dose of satire that will keep the era in which it is set on life support for many decades to come.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sex and Drugs and the City, October 26, 2006

By 

Edward Aycock (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Story of My Life (Paperback)

Halfway through reading this book, I had to remind myself that I was reading a novel by Jay McInerney and not a female author. McInerney captures the voice, personality and hang-ups of Alison Poole so well that it's as though the novel is a transcription of an audio tape. Very few authors have been able to pull a feat like this off so convincingly (I'm thinking Wally Lamb's "She's Come Undone") but then, McInerney is also the guy who made me love a novel written in the second person, so I shouldn't be too surprised.

McInerney's characters are believable and his New York singles scene still resonates after nearly twenty years. Sure people have cell phones now, but that doesn't mean Alison wouldn't face just as many answering machines (or voicemails) today as she did then; she'd just be calling a lot more and things would be even more frustrating. Story of her life. I'm surprised that this novel hasn't received better press; I hadn't even heard of it until I spotted it in a bookstore but it sure goes against the popular myth that McInerney was just a one hit wonder. "Story of My Life" is a worthy follow-up.

One complaint: I think that the ending of the novel is a bit too abrupt and somewhat of a cop-out, as though the author had written himself into a corner and wasn't quite sure where to go from there. Up until then, I was so into Alison and her crazy world that when she reaches a dead end, I was let down. Don't let that deter you from checking out this novel though; it's a look into an urban scene that's in the past but at the same time hasn't really changed at all.

27 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Witty, entertaining, and yet not shallow..., October 24, 2000

By 

"[e-mail]" (san jose, california USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Story of My Life (Paperback)

I recall reading McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City" due to all then hype around it, and hating it. The main tragi-stupid, silly and self-destructive character simply got more on my nerves with every page. Thus, when one day, for some reason while listening to the radio I heard a review of this book, I was somewhat doubtful, yet decided to check it out. What followed was total inability to put the book down until I finished it, cover to cover. It is very readable. It's jazzy rhythm, with hilarious fast-paced passages interrupted by a more introspective brief slow adagio, is simply brilliant. Witnessing an intelligent person that struggles to defeat her capacity for introspection while entertaining us with the wittiest insights and wordplay is captivating. It does not have the pretense to be a masterpiece, and yet I find it one of the best books I have ever read. Bravo, Jay McInerney.