Story of My Life: A Novel

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Open Road + Grove/Atlantic, Mar 12, 2010 - Fiction - 208 pages
A “brilliant” novel of a party girl in 1980s Manhattan, by the author of Bright Lights, Big City (The Sunday Times).

Twenty-something aspiring actress Alison Poole is well versed in hopping the clubs, shopping Chanel, falling in and out of lust, and abusing other people’s credit cards. As she traverses nocturnal New York with her coterie of coke-addicted friends—and races toward emotional breakdown—the author of Brightness Falls and other acclaimed works of fiction gives us a funny, poignant portrait of a postmodern Holly Golightly coming to terms with a world in which everything is permitted and nothing really matters.

“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 powerfully evident in Story of My Life�.�.�. Underneath Alison’s hip, party-girl exterior and flippant vernacular is McInerney’s disturbing depiction of a young woman caught in the traumatic reality of her times.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Story of My Life is quite as brilliant as Bright Lights, Big City and a lot funnier.” —The Sunday Times

Contents

Getting in Touch With Your Child
1
Scenes for One Man and One Woman
18
SenseMemory
37
Truth or Dare
52
Care of the Social Fabric
76
Two Lies
100
Just Contact
119
Scenes for One Man and Two Women
139
Derby Day
150
Truth or Dare II
163
Hunters and Jumpers
175
Good Night Ladies
190
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About the author (2010)

JAY MCINERNEY is the author of seven novels including Bright Lights, Big City and Brightness Falls. He has also published a collection of short stories, How It Ended, and two books on wine. He is a regular contributor to New York Magazine, the Guardian Weekly, and Corriere della Serra. He lives in New York City and Water Mill, New York.

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