Join us Wednesday, January 29, for our first author event of the season.
7 p.m. Wednesday, January 29
A "Creative Life" conversation/Q&A with novelist Jay McInerney and WAMC’s Joe Donahue
The Linda, WAMC’s Performing Arts Studio
339 Central Ave, Albany NY 12206
Registration required: https://mcinerney.eventbrite.com
Here is an advance story from the Times Union, reprinted with permission
McInerney reflects on ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ at 40
Author Jay McInerney to discuss his decade-defining 1980s-era NYC novel
By Jack Rightmyer
Thursday, January 16, 2025
Originally published in the Albany Times Union on
In the early 1980s, Jay McInerney was one of the many struggling writers living in New York City with the dream of one day writing a novel. He even dared to hope that the novel might receive some good reviews and hopefully allow him to find a job as a college writing instructor.
His first book, Bright Lights, Big City, was published on Aug. 12, 1984, as a trade paperback with a first printing of 7,500 copies. Almost immediately it exploded into popularity, taking McInerney by surprise as well as turning heads in the publishing industry.
“It’s hard for me to realize that book came out 40 years ago,” said McInerney, who still lives in New York City. “I was very dismayed at the time that it came out as a paperback, but my editor felt this was my best chance to find an audience.”
Jason Epstein, who was running Random House at the time, told McInerney that he had written a really good novel but to not expect much from it. “He said that ‘people your age don’t read anymore’ and ‘nobody reads literary fiction.’ Happily, he turned out to be wrong.”
That debut novel tells the story of an ambitious young writer adrift in New York, grieving the dissolution of his marriage by partying every night at nightclubs and using cocaine to escape his sadness and loneliness. Since the publication of his book, it has emerged as the decade-defining novel of 1980s-era New York City.
As part of a 40th anniversary celebration of the bestselling book, McInerney will join WAMC’s Joe Donahue at The Linda for a public conversation on Wednesday, Jan. 29. The talk is being presented by the New York State Writers Institute in collaboration with WAMC Northeast Public Radio. Registration is required.
“The success of that book was overwhelming for me,” said McInerney. “Nothing can really prepare you for such immediate success. That doesn’t happen too often to a novelist. Politicians and actors are a bit more likely to find sudden fame, not so much with a writer. The Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal generation all had great success, but it was a long time before another writer had that crossover popularity.”
There was a time when he resented the novel’s success. “People would come up to me and say things like, ‘I read your book,’ and I wanted to say, ‘Which one? I’ve written five.’”
Through the years, however, he has come to appreciate the benefits that book brought to him. “It allowed me to become a full-time writer,” he said. “It gave me a lot. I know plenty of excellent writers who publish frequently but have never had that kind of success. There have also been other writers who have written one good book and nothing after. It’s funny, people refer to that book as the defining novel of the 1980s and yet I was just writing about the world around me at the time.”
McInerney admits that much of the book is autobiographical. “I did go to a lot of parties at the time and stay up late at night. In fact, the opening line of the book was said by me late at night in a bar while I looked at myself in a bathroom mirror.”
The opening line is this: “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.” Following that moment of clarity in the mirror, McInerney says, “I scribbled down those lines when I got home, and four or five months later I came across that scrap of paper … (I) thought it was much more original than anything else I had written at that time. I took that line and just kept running with it, keeping it in the second person, and twelve hours later I had written a short story.”
He sent that story, titled “It’s Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?” to The Paris Review, which published it. “The story caused quite a stir upon publication,” McInerney says. “I received calls from agents and publishers, so I decided to take that short story and expand it to find out why this guy was so messed up. I continued writing it in the second person.”
His original editor tried to talk him out of using that style. “I actually tried to write it in the first person, then the third person, but something drained out of the narrative,” he explains. “It wasn’t so immediate, and not as funny. I went back to writing the novel in the second person, knowing I would not be able to keep that up for 400 pages. Readers have told me how much they liked that style, and that it worked perfectly for my flawed narrator.”
In the novel, the main character gradually acknowledges the superficial nature of the life he’s living, along with the fact that his wife was the wrong person for him. Knowing that his life of partying must come to an end, he comes upon a delivery driver in the early hours of a Sunday morning and decides to trade his expensive sunglasses for a bag of warm bread. The novel reaches its memorable conclusion as he eats his bread, thinking “And I will learn everything all over again.”
“That literally happened to me,” McInerney says. “It was in downtown Manhattan, but it was a bag of croissants, not bread. It also mimics the ending of Raymond Carver’s short story ‘A Small Good Thing.’ Carver was a mentor to me at Syracuse University and right up to Bright Lights, Big City, he read everything I wrote and commented on it sentence by sentence. We spent a lot of time together, and I miss him very much. Before I found my own writing style, I often wrote in his style — so I think a little bit of Ray is in that book.”
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