STORY OF MY LIFE

by Jay McInerney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 1988

Brights Light, Dim Bimbo might be a better title for this fictional memoir of an aspiring young actress in Manhattan, a 20-year-old airhead who peppers her narrative with lots of ""likes"" and ""I go""s and ""yadda yadda yadda""s. But mostly her story seems the stuff of woman-hating fantasy--she sinks so low only a boy-writer would bother to document, and McInerney does so with barely disguised contempt. Alison Poole is devoted to excess, which may indeed beckon the fall of civilization, as McInerney's pretentious epigraph implies. But she's hardly representative of much other than her own self-description as a ""deprived deb,"" ""young stuff,"" and ""unit""--a contemporary girl full of innocent chatter (""Fucking is one thing. But sticking your face in someone's crotch--I mean, that's really intimate"") and charming insouciance (""Usually when I meet a guy it takes me about three seconds to wonder how big his dick is""). Alison worked once ""for about three seconds,"" so her current club-hopping, coke-snorting, and acting lessons are subsidized by her five-times-married father, when she can find him, which isn't often, since he's off chasing girls younger than his daughter. Alison's adventures in the big city center on boys--even the men are boys there, she tells us--and her friends, a sexually voracious bunch of girls whose motto is ""can't rape the willing."" What Alison prowls for are ""boys in Paul Stuart suits with six-figure salaries and a little hellfire in their eyes."" Such is Dean Chasen, this week's willing weenie, a bond salesman with the soul of a poet (like, he quotes Shakespeare!) who considers Alison his ""postmodern girl,"" and she's totally ""in lust"" with him. There was a time when Alison would wake up at five in the afternoon with ""plugged sinuses and sticky hair"" and ""some kind of white stuff in every opening."" These days she's a little more concerned with survival--at the end of this lost weekend is a clinic in Minnesota, where Alison finds herself hoping that ""all this hysterical noise which is supposedly my life"" is mostly a dream. A cheap bit of redemption, to be sure. McInerney's clearly not the meager talent that Bret Easton Ellis recently proved to be (for all the hoopla, Bright Lights remains a brilliant book) but he better find something worth writing about, lest he fade with yesterday's news.

Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1988

ISBN: 0802144586

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly--dist. by Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988

Categories: FICTION