25.13: Story of My Life, by Jay McInerney (1988/2010 paperback)

I'm a product of the 1980s. I started high school in 1981 and graduated from undergrad in 1989. I wore leg warmers, stirrup pants, ballet flats, and unfortunate prints and color combinations--likely all at the same time. I turned up the collars on my shirts, pegged my pants, coated pennies with clear nail polish so they wouldn't lose their shine in my loafers, added additional piercings to my left ear lobe, and got an asymmetrical haircut. Since I lived in Saginaw and East Lansing, Michigan, I didn't experience the same extremes of vacuous culture, cocaine and drug use, and casual sex that big-city folk engaged in, but it also wasn't a period of innocence or sophistication. Frankly, if there is one saving grace to the 80s, it's that Facebook didn't come around for another 20+ years. For this I am eternally grateful to the Internet gods.

While we don't have minute-by-minute photo and narrative documentation of the 80s, we're not without our recorders. Premier among them is Jay McInerney; between his books and those of Brett Easton Ellis, you can pretty much understand the mindset of the time period without having to actually live it. And, those of us who did live it--even in some mid-western way--can take a trip down memory lane by picking up any of their novels of the period. Some time ago, Amazon apparently decided it was time for me to do so, and it put this book forward as a recommendation when I was ordering some comics (difficult to get from a local retailer in our small community). The book originally came out in 1988 but was reprinted in 2010. Even leg warmers have resurfaced, so it makes some sense.

I thought I had read all of McInerny's work when it originally came out, but somehow this novel seemed unfamilar to me when reading about it--enough for me to add it to my book order. And, as I read through it, it seemed both unfamiliar and familiar all at the same time. It's not that the details of narrator Alison Poole's life were so familar as to make me recognize I had, indeed, read the book. Instead, the story of the over-sexed, overly-high, overly-privileged culture she was immersed in seemed familiar. And even if these overlys weren't in your 80s experience, the entire tone of the book and attitudes of the characters are reminiscent of the period itself. It's quintessential McInerney, and a good read for those not afraid of looking back to see where we were for a brief time.