junkieopf.blogg.se

No one can write about me without talking about it. I hate to tell you this, but the words Bright Lights, Big City are going to be in the first lines of your obituary.” It was a strange thing to say but I can say now, 35 years later, that she was right. About six weeks after publication I had lunch with my agent and she said, “I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s nearly impossible to follow that kind of success – in a way it sets you up for failure there’s an expectation that you have to top this book and that’s not easy to do. It was supposed to be this zeitgeist book that defined an era and a generation, and nobody has ever done that more than once. A lot of people were resentful of my success and felt I didn’t deserve it. It was a dream come true but it was also disorienting. How did it feel to receive that sort of acclaim with your first novel? An instant hit with both critics and readers, it’s regarded by many as the quintessential New York novel.

You wrote Bright Lights, Big City in 1984 as a broke, 28-year-old student. Over lunch in Greenwich Village 32 years later, he tells Nicole Abadee about its enduring impact on his life – and how it's possible to mix with and still skewer the rich. Set in New York's coke-fuelled 1980s, Bright Lights, Big City shot Jay McInerney to fame.