Jay McInerney
Encyclopedia
John Barrett McInerney Jr. (icon; born January 13, 1955 in Hartford, Connecticut
) is an American
writer
. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City
; Ransom; Story of My Life
; Brightness Falls
; and The Last of the Savages. He edited The Penguin Book of New American Voices, wrote the screenplay for the 1988 film adaptation
of Bright Lights, Big City, and co-wrote the screenplay for the television film Gia
, which starred Angelina Jolie
. He was the wine columnist for House & Garden
magazine, and his essays on wine have been collected in Bacchus & Me (2000) and A Hedonist in the Cellar (2006). His most recent novel is titled The Good Life
, published in 2006, and since April 2010 he is a wine columnist for The Wall Street Journal
.
and once worked as a fact-checker at The New Yorker
. He achieved fame with his first published novel Bright Lights, Big City. Published in 1984, the novel was unique at the time for its depiction of cocaine culture in second-person narrative
. The title is taken from a 1961 blues song by Jimmy Reed
. The novel established McInerney’s reputation as part of a new generation of writers. Labelled the ‘literary brat pack
' in a 1987 article in the Village Voice, McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis
and Tama Janowitz
were presented as the new face of literature: young, iconoclastic and fresh. Five novels followed in rapid succession: Ransom, Story of My Life
, Brightness Falls
, The Last of the Savages and Model Behavior.
After the success of Bright Lights, Big City
, publishers started looking for similar works about young people in urban settings. Ellis's Less Than Zero, published in 1985, was promoted as following McInerney’s example. McInerney, Ellis and Janowitz were based in New York City and their lives there were regular literary themes, chronicled by New York media.
Ellis used McInerney's character, Alison Poole (Story of My Life), in his novels American Psycho
and Glamorama
. McInerney revealed that the character of Alison Poole is based upon his former girlfriend, Rielle Hunter
, then known as Lisa Druck. He described the character as "cocaine addled," and "sexually voracious" but also treated her with some sympathy. McInerney's roman a clef
opened a prescient glimpse into the notorious horse murders
scandal, which did not become known to the public until 1992, when Sports Illustrated
magazine published a confession from the man who had murdered Lisa Druck's horse at her father's behest, in order to claim the insurance on its life.
McInerney also has a cameo role in Ellis's Lunar Park
, attending the Halloween party Bret hosts at his house. It was later revealed that McInerney was not pleased with his representation in the novel.
Throughout his career McInerney has struggled against the strong, almost indelible, image of himself as both the author and protagonist of Bright Lights, Big City. He recently appeared at Williams College as the Commencement speaker for the Class of 2010.
.
His third marriage was to Helen Bransford. In 2006, he married Anne Hearst
.
Hartford, Connecticut
Hartford is the capital of the U.S. state of Connecticut. The seat of Hartford County until Connecticut disbanded county government in 1960, it is the second most populous city on New England's largest river, the Connecticut River. As of the 2010 Census, Hartford's population was 124,775, making...
) is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City
Bright Lights, Big City (novel)
Bright Lights, Big City is an American novel by Jay McInerney, published by Vintage Books on August 12, 1984.- Plot :It is written about a character's time spent caught up in, and notably escaping from, the mid-1980s New York City fast lane. It is one of the few well-known English-language novels...
; Ransom; Story of My Life
Story of My Life (novel)
Story of My Life is a novel published in 1988 by the American author Jay McInerney.-Plot and characters:The novel is narrated in the first-person from the point of view of Alison Poole, "an ostensibly jaded, cocaine-addled, sexually voracious 20-year old." Alison is originally from Virginia and...
; Brightness Falls
Brightness Falls
Brightness Falls is a 1992 novel written by Jay McInerney. His fourth novel, it tells of a couple named Russell and Corrine Calloway who meet in college. Their story continues in McInerney's 2006 novel The Good Life, which follows them into middle age....
; and The Last of the Savages. He edited The Penguin Book of New American Voices, wrote the screenplay for the 1988 film adaptation
Bright Lights, Big City (film)
Bright Lights, Big City is a 1988 drama film starring Michael J. Fox, Kiefer Sutherland and Phoebe Cates, based on the novel of the same name by Jay McInerney. It was the last film directed by James Bridges before his death in 1993.-Plot:...
of Bright Lights, Big City, and co-wrote the screenplay for the television film Gia
Gia
Gia is a 1998 biographical television film about the life of model Gia Marie Carangi starring Angelina Jolie, Faye Dunaway, Mercedes Ruehl, and Elizabeth Mitchell. It was directed by Michael Cristofer and written by Cristofer and Jay McInerney...
, which starred Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie is an American actress. She has received an Academy Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards, and was named Hollywood's highest-paid actress by Forbes in 2009 and 2011. Jolie is noted for promoting humanitarian causes as a Goodwill Ambassador for the...
. He was the wine columnist for House & Garden
House & Garden (magazine)
House & Garden was an American shelter magazine published by Condé Nast Publications that focused on interior design, entertaining, and gardening....
magazine, and his essays on wine have been collected in Bacchus & Me (2000) and A Hedonist in the Cellar (2006). His most recent novel is titled The Good Life
The Good Life (novel)
The Good Life is a 2006 novel written by Jay McInerney. A sequel to his 1992 novel, Brightness Falls, it takes place immediately before, during, and after the events of September 11, 2001.-External links:*****...
, published in 2006, and since April 2010 he is a wine columnist for The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
.
Life and work
McInerney studied writing with Raymond CarverRaymond Carver
Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. was an American short story writer and poet. Carver is considered a major American writer of the late 20th century and also a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s....
and once worked as a fact-checker at The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
. He achieved fame with his first published novel Bright Lights, Big City. Published in 1984, the novel was unique at the time for its depiction of cocaine culture in second-person narrative
Second-person narrative
The second-person narrative is a narrative mode in which the protagonist or another main character is referred to by employment of second-person personal pronouns and other kinds of addressing forms, for example the English second-person pronoun "you"....
. The title is taken from a 1961 blues song by Jimmy Reed
Jimmy Reed
Mathis James "Jimmy" Reed was an American blues musician and songwriter, notable for bringing his distinctive style of blues to mainstream audiences. Reed was a major player in the field of electric blues, as opposed to the more acoustic-based sound of many of his contemporaries...
. The novel established McInerney’s reputation as part of a new generation of writers. Labelled the ‘literary brat pack
Brat Pack (literary)
The expression "literary Brat Pack" refers to the three young, East-coast American authors, Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney, who emerged in USA in the 1980s...
' in a 1987 article in the Village Voice, McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis
Bret Easton Ellis
Bret Easton Ellis is an American novelist and short story writer. His works have been translated into 27 different languages. He was regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack, which also included Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney...
and Tama Janowitz
Tama Janowitz
Tama Janowitz is an American novelist and a short story writer. The 2005 September/October issue of Pages magazine listed her as one of the four "brat pack" authors, along with Bret Easton Ellis, Mark Lindquist and Jay McInerney.-Life:Her parents, a psychiatrist father, Julian Janowitz, and...
were presented as the new face of literature: young, iconoclastic and fresh. Five novels followed in rapid succession: Ransom, Story of My Life
Story of My Life (novel)
Story of My Life is a novel published in 1988 by the American author Jay McInerney.-Plot and characters:The novel is narrated in the first-person from the point of view of Alison Poole, "an ostensibly jaded, cocaine-addled, sexually voracious 20-year old." Alison is originally from Virginia and...
, Brightness Falls
Brightness Falls
Brightness Falls is a 1992 novel written by Jay McInerney. His fourth novel, it tells of a couple named Russell and Corrine Calloway who meet in college. Their story continues in McInerney's 2006 novel The Good Life, which follows them into middle age....
, The Last of the Savages and Model Behavior.
After the success of Bright Lights, Big City
Bright Lights, Big City (novel)
Bright Lights, Big City is an American novel by Jay McInerney, published by Vintage Books on August 12, 1984.- Plot :It is written about a character's time spent caught up in, and notably escaping from, the mid-1980s New York City fast lane. It is one of the few well-known English-language novels...
, publishers started looking for similar works about young people in urban settings. Ellis's Less Than Zero, published in 1985, was promoted as following McInerney’s example. McInerney, Ellis and Janowitz were based in New York City and their lives there were regular literary themes, chronicled by New York media.
Ellis used McInerney's character, Alison Poole (Story of My Life), in his novels American Psycho
American Psycho
American Psycho is a psychological thriller and satirical novel by Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1991. The story is told in the first person by the protagonist, serial killer and Manhattan businessman Patrick Bateman. The book's graphic violence and sexual content generated a great deal of...
and Glamorama
Glamorama
Glamorama is a novel by American writer Bret Easton Ellis. It was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1998. Unlike Ellis' previous novels, Glamorama is set in and satirizes the 1990s, specifically celebrity culture and consumerism...
. McInerney revealed that the character of Alison Poole is based upon his former girlfriend, Rielle Hunter
Rielle Hunter
Rielle Hunter , August 1, 2008, San Jose Mercury-News. is an American actress and film producer. She is known for having had an affair with and conceiving a child with 2004 Democratic Party vice-presidential nominee John Edwards., August 8, 2008, Chicago Tribune. She is said to be the basis of a...
, then known as Lisa Druck. He described the character as "cocaine addled," and "sexually voracious" but also treated her with some sympathy. McInerney's roman a clef
Roman à clef
Roman à clef or roman à clé , French for "novel with a key", is a phrase used to describe a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction...
opened a prescient glimpse into the notorious horse murders
Horse murders
The horse murders scandal were cases of insurance fraud in the United States in which expensive horses, many of them show jumpers, were insured against death, accident, or disease, and then killed to collect the insurance money...
scandal, which did not become known to the public until 1992, when Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated is an American sports media company owned by media conglomerate Time Warner. Its self titled magazine has over 3.5 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the...
magazine published a confession from the man who had murdered Lisa Druck's horse at her father's behest, in order to claim the insurance on its life.
McInerney also has a cameo role in Ellis's Lunar Park
Lunar Park
Lunar Park is a novel by Bret Easton Ellis with elements of faux autobiography and pastiche. It was released by Knopf on August 16, 2005. It is notable for being the first book written by Ellis to use past tense narrative.-Plot summary:...
, attending the Halloween party Bret hosts at his house. It was later revealed that McInerney was not pleased with his representation in the novel.
Throughout his career McInerney has struggled against the strong, almost indelible, image of himself as both the author and protagonist of Bright Lights, Big City. He recently appeared at Williams College as the Commencement speaker for the Class of 2010.
Personal life
His first wife was fashion model Linda Rossiter, and his second wife was writer Merry Reymond; for four years he lived with fashion model Marla HansonMarla Hanson
Marla Hanson is a screenwriter and ex-model.Born in Independence, Missouri, Hanson attended college in Dallas, Texas. After working selling real estate and insurance, a job promotion brought her to New York City. There, a part-time modeling job eventually became a full-time career in the 1980s.In...
.
His third marriage was to Helen Bransford. In 2006, he married Anne Hearst
Anne Hearst
Anne Randolph Hearst is an American socialite, philanthropist, and publishing heiress.Hearst is one of the five daughters of Randolph Apperson Hearst , former president of The San Francisco Examiner, and his first wife, the former Catherine Wood Campbell. She is the granddaughter of newspaper...
.
Fiction
- Bright Lights, Big CityBright Lights, Big City (novel)Bright Lights, Big City is an American novel by Jay McInerney, published by Vintage Books on August 12, 1984.- Plot :It is written about a character's time spent caught up in, and notably escaping from, the mid-1980s New York City fast lane. It is one of the few well-known English-language novels...
(1984) - Ransom (1985)
- Story of My LifeStory of My Life (novel)Story of My Life is a novel published in 1988 by the American author Jay McInerney.-Plot and characters:The novel is narrated in the first-person from the point of view of Alison Poole, "an ostensibly jaded, cocaine-addled, sexually voracious 20-year old." Alison is originally from Virginia and...
(1988) - Brightness FallsBrightness FallsBrightness Falls is a 1992 novel written by Jay McInerney. His fourth novel, it tells of a couple named Russell and Corrine Calloway who meet in college. Their story continues in McInerney's 2006 novel The Good Life, which follows them into middle age....
(1992) - The Last of the Savages (1997)
- Model Behavior (1998)
- The Good LifeThe Good Life (novel)The Good Life is a 2006 novel written by Jay McInerney. A sequel to his 1992 novel, Brightness Falls, it takes place immediately before, during, and after the events of September 11, 2001.-External links:*****...
(2006) - How It Ended (short story collection) (2009)
Nonfiction
- Bacchus and Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar (2000)
- A Hedonist in the Cellar: Adventures in Wine (2006)
Film
- Bright Lights, Big CityBright Lights, Big City (film)Bright Lights, Big City is a 1988 drama film starring Michael J. Fox, Kiefer Sutherland and Phoebe Cates, based on the novel of the same name by Jay McInerney. It was the last film directed by James Bridges before his death in 1993.-Plot:...
adapted in 1988, screenplay McInerney, directed by James BridgesJames BridgesJames Bridges was an American screenwriter and film director.Bridges was born in Paris, Arkansas. He got his start as a writer for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and one of his episodes, "An Unlocked Window", earned him a 1966 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Episode in a TV...
, starring Michael J. FoxMichael J. FoxMichael J. Fox, OC is a Canadian American actor, author, producer, activist and voice-over artist. With a film and television career spanning from the late 1970s, Fox's roles have included Marty McFly from the Back to the Future trilogy ; Alex P...
, Kiefer SutherlandKiefer SutherlandKiefer Sutherland is an English-born Canadian actor, producer and director, best known for his portrayal of Jack Bauer on the Fox thriller drama series 24 for which he has won an Emmy Award , a Golden Globe award , two Screen Actors Guild Awards and two Satellite...
, Phoebe CatesPhoebe CatesPhoebe Cates is an American film actress, model, and entrepreneur known for her roles in several teen films, most notably Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Gremlins.-Early life:...
Short stories
- "Everything is Lost" (2009, Sunday Times 4th Jan, online text)
- How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (2009 331 pp. Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95). Titles, with descriptions from The New York Times book review by Sam TanenhausSam TanenhausSam Tanenhaus is an American historian, biographer, and journalist.-Biography:Tanenhaus received his B.A. in English from Grinnell College in 1977 and a M.A. in English Literature from Yale University in 1978. He is currently the editor of The New York Times Book Review and Week in Review...
, included:- "Con Doctor," about a drug-addicted doctor, exiled to a southeast town after a stint in rehab, tending to inmates at the local prison and cohabiting with a lady friend, "herself a recovering alcoholic, brassy and voluptuous", with whom sex makes him feel "simultaneously that he is slumming and sleeping above his economic station.”;
- "My Public Service," in which he explores one of "the many varieties of the strangling embrace, [with] star-struck political hirelings reduced to pimping for a philandering senator;
- "The Madonna of Turkey Season": "Irish-American brothers locked in competitive mother-love";
- "Invisible Fences": "a Bible BeltBible BeltBible Belt is an informal term for a region in the southeastern and south-central United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average.The...
couple whose sexual dysfunction degrades them into sick rituals of voyeurism"; - "Smoke": "[I]ntroduced Russell and Corrine Calloway, the ManhattanManhattanManhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
couple-with-everything whose marital vicissitudes animate McInerney’s two most ambitious novels, Brightness Falls and its sequel, The Good Life." - "In the North-West Frontier Province": "[E]erily predicts our current postterrorist age[;] ... a glimpse of hell, set in the parched hilly borderlands between AfghanistanAfghanistanAfghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
and PakistanPakistanPakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
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