
Join us on Wednesday, January 29, for a conversation with author Jay McInerney and WAMC Northeast Public Radio's Joe Donahue. It will be the first author event of our season.
7 p.m. Wednesday, January 29
A Creative Life conversation/Q&A with WAMC's Joe Donahue
The Linda, WAMC’s Performing Arts Studio
339 Central Ave, Albany NY 12206
Books will be for sale and a signing will follow the conversation.
Registration required: https://mcinerney.eventbrite.com
McInerney wrote the decade-defining novel of the 1980s, Bright Lights, Big City (1984). Revisiting the novel 25 years later, Sam Tanenhaus said in the New York Times Book Review, "Each generation needs its Manhattan novel, and many ache to write it. But it was McInerney who succeeded." In 1988, the novel was adapted into a film Michael J Fox and Kiefer Sutherland.
McInerney's other novels include Story of My Life (1988), Brightness Falls (1992), The Good Life (2006), and Bright, Precious Days (2016).
In an essay published in The Guardian in 2016, McInerney reflected on Bright Lights, Big City:
The book that resulted drew on my own experience, but ultimately I felt free to change and shape the events of my life, and to create a character who was even more reckless and feckless than I was. I was also reporting on several subcultures, including the downtown art and club scene, which hadn’t been covered in the media, let alone in literary fiction up to that point.
Much of the excitement generated by the novel focused on this aspect of it – the notion that I was delivering news about the zeitgeist. Perhaps I was, but I can’t say I was aware of this when I was writing it.
I don’t think anyone sets out to be the voice of a generation, or to define a decade. Certainly I didn’t. I was most conscious of creating and sustaining that voice, which had undoubtedly been influenced by the writers I admired, and to paying homage to the novelists I loved, from Hemingway and Waugh to Salinger and Joyce. In the end, I like to think I managed to create something new.
Major support for The Creative Life is provided by the University at Albany Foundation.
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