This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. My guest today is a New York Times bestselling author, screenwriter, and columnist whose breakout novel Bright Lights Big City inspired a generation of New York writers and New Yorkers themselves. Jay McInerney is a prolific writer with eight novels under his belt. He adapted Bright Light's Big City into the feature films starring Michael J.
Fox in nineteen eighty eight.
Mcinnerney has been awarded the Literary Lion by the New York Public Library and the James Beard MFK. Fisher Award for Distinguished Writing. In addition to his work as a novelist, mcinnerney has been the wine columnist for House and Garden, The Wall Street Journal, and most recently, Town and Country Magazine. While his novels are synonymous with a glamorous even decade in New York, mcinnernie did not always live.
In the city.
He moved quite frequently during his childhood, and his upbringing place apart in his writing.
Yeah, absolutely, they are shaped by their childhood and also, you know, I think, in my case, especially by their early adulthood. You know, I was lucky to have had fairly happy childhood in terms of my relationship with my parents. However, I moved almost every year that I was growing up, and that that was difficult because every year I had to renegotiate social terrain. I had to like get in fights with kids from yeah, a little fresh set of bullies,
and that undoubtedly marked me. It made me kind of socially adapt and fascible because I had to be. But it also made me somewhat withdrawn because I spent a lot of time, you know, in my room, reading reading books and writing silly little short stories.
In terms of bright letsbig city.
The thing that shaped me also was you know, it's either Hemingway or many people have said it since, including Gordon Wish, but he said that the best thing that can happen to he is the writer, is the worst thing that can happen to you that doesn't kill you. And in my case, I lost my dream job at the New Yorker, my fashion model wife dumped me in very short order, and then my mother died of cancer all within the space. She died a year I was about twenty five, And you know, I mean those are
three really bad things to happen. But I think if those three things hadn't happened, I might have cruised through life fairly easily. I would have become a moderately good writer. But you know, my first book does have a lot of pain, and because there was a lot of bad things that happened to me in my early twenties, and
that all went into the book. And even though I like to think and people tell me that it's a very funny book, and in many ways, there's also this underlying current of pain that courses through it.
You know, I'm going to read the book again because when I read the book, you're you're young, I'm young now sixty sexs. I'm like, I'm afraid to read it. I'm being laughing, I'm crying at the same time.
I reread it recently because someone offered me a fair amount of money to use a quote out of it, and I didn't. I didn't recognize the quote, so I reread the book. What it turns out they took the quote out of the movie, luckily, but luckily I wrote the screenplay, so I still got the money.
You still got.
But rereading the book, I was kind of impressed, and I was also kind of daunted because I just thought I could only have written that book then. You know, I think there's a certain music of the spheres that you hear when you're in your twenties too, that you just that becomes inaudible later. That was a book of my twenties by Lepswick. City was pre internet, pre digital, pre you know. I mean sometimes I wonder how we found ourselves back then. You know, how do we find
our friends? You know, it's just we meet them somewhere.
You have a Yeah, you have a rendezvous and you hope that they show up.
I guess, oh, I net working friends, I think is much smaller than Yeah, you didn't. You didn't have the facility to keep up with all those people, you know. I read that book years ago, and I was addicted to cocaine. I was a cocaine addict. I got forty years sober coming February. I don't talk about that much on the record, And when I read that book, I'm in that pain of lugging myself home at the four o'clock in the morning, trying to sleep.
I couldn't.
When I think of it now, I just absolutely Shulder, and it's my friend friend friend of mine says, you know, he thinks everybody in life gets a bathtub full of cocaine and a swimming pool full of vodka, and after that, you better saw.
That's your limit. That's pretty funny now.
But when when you write as other people have observed, no, this is not my observation. You wrote it in the second person. People have commented about that a lot. Why what propelled.
You, Well, what propelled me was the birth of the thing really is. So one night I was you recognize this type of night. It was like three thirty in the morning, and I was, God, I think I was. I wasn't a club that no longer just obviously, but maybe the world. And I'd gone with a friend and he disappeared with a girl, and my girl had rejected me.
And so I'm standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom and the coc is just run out, and I remember saying into the mirror, You're not the kind of guy who'd beat a place like this at this time of the morning, but here you are. And I was certainly try and you weren't that kind of guy I want. I was, no, but I told me something. I was a good Catholic boy. I didn't know what was I doing snorting coke at three thirty in the morning.
So I finally made it home that night. I had to walk up to East fifth Street because I'd run out of money. And I wrote that very sentenced down on a scrap of paper and I stuck in the desk drawer and forgot about it. And about six months later I had submitted a story to George Plimpton at the Parish Rebume and he actually called me on the phone. And I'm not going to try and imitate him. You probably could be. He had this pretty fluty patrician boye hes d. He liked this story, but did I have
anything else? So I go through my desk and I'm like going crazy, and everything I read that I had written in last year seemed like really imitative and derivative, like here was my Ambdie story, here was my Robert Stone story, here's my Raven Carver story. And then I came on this piece of paper. You're not the kind of guy whould be a place like this at this time in the morning, and I thought, wow, I said, you know, that's how we talked to ourselves. We talked
to ourselves in the second person. We don't say I idiot, We say you idiot.
You know.
So that night I sat down, I wrote. I wrote the first chapter of Bright Lights, Big City, basically, and the next morning I called up George a Paris review office, and I said, I got one. I got one, and I sent it to them and they promptly published it. And I subsequently thought, you know that the story is not done. And I also it created a nice stir.
I mean back when literary buzz was something other than on Instagram and it was real and yeah, and so I thought, you know, I should just keep going with the story, because I said to myself, this guy is in obvious pain. What's wrong with him? Something bad has happened to him, but it doesn't come into the particularly into the story. And so so I started writing a novel, which I finished and I finished the first draft in
six weeks. And my editor was Gary Fisketjohn of Random House, and about halfway through my writing process, I told him I was writing a novel and he said, well, I hope to god it isn't in the second person, And that almost stopped me cold. So then I went back and I tried writing in the first and the third, and something just drained out of the story. It wasn't as funny, it wasn't as self conscious, and so I
stuck with it. And there were one or two reviewers who thought I was crazy, but there were quite a few others that liked it, and it subsequently sold hundreds of thousands of copies, so I guess readers weren't put off by it.
But the guy is for a good part of the book.
The guy is high, he's like you know, so he's self conscious, he's in a slightly altered state.
But he's in pain.
In my mind, this is what I get from other things you've written and my sense of comments you've made in interviews. What I see about you is that the guy that has his pain, but it's always trying to overcome it. There's an emotional sturdiness to you as a person, and in the books there seems to be they don't stop fighting, they try not.
To give up and succom It's not Bukowski.
Well, I went through some crises this past year and my wife said to me fairly recently, she said, I can't believe I have upbeat and optimistic. You are a medalists, And I said, but what would be the point of letting it defeat you and being.
Down being of the health issues? Yeah? Yeah, it's like, you.
Know, I like to think I have a positive attitude even when it seems ridiculous. You just lose that additional peace of mind that you might preserve.
You're writing and you're submitting, and it's journalism or whatever, you and essays and things. The guy that you're editor. How do you end up with him? You will him before bride lights? How do you get him?
I met him at Williams College when we were both there, and we initially pursuing the same woman who was a Wellesley transfer student, and we had a big feud about that, you know, And the first time I ever really met him, he threw a cigarette into my.
Beer piece, and so it was love.
I went over to try to fight him, and we were pulled off each other. And then somehow the next thing I knew we were friends. And we took a class on James Joyce's Ulysses together and that was sort of a bonding experience. And then I remember that I gave him one of the first hardcover books I ever bought was Raymond Carvers Will You Please Be Quiet?
Please?
And I wanted so I was finished with it. I thought it was extraordinary, and I lent it to him, and it was kind of wonderful because he ended up being Raymond Carver's editor down the road. But in the meantime we became best friends. We when we graduated, we drove across the country together in a beat up Volkswagen and spent about three months on the road until we couldn't find work, and eventually parted, but he remained my best friend. And then he went to work for Random House.
So he was the logical person to go to when I had a book to publish. He was ready to throw out if they all all my books so far, you know, And it was. It's an interesting relationship because on the one hand, it's great to have your best friend editing your work, and on the other hand, it makes for some tense kind of sibling rivalry, you know, yeah, very honest, I mean, to the point that he would sometimes write in the margins like the exclamation mark and you know, just a little discouraging.
I mean.
But usually when I finished a book, he would come to wherever I was living and just camp out for about a week and we would just go over pretty much line by line, and sometimes we would fight terribly about about stuff. I mean, he wasn't sure by the second person at first, and I'm really glad I held my ground on that. And I have to say his name is Gary Fisk John by the way, But I have to say that the thing I give him credit for is that he always said in the end, it's
your name on the book. So apparently I had the veto power, although it's hard sometimes not to feel like I was the naughty student and he was the teacher.
I was contacted by Library of America to go to the synagogue on Fifth Avenue when Read had a presentation myself and two other people, John Rothman, and one of the to read from Roth's bibliography. So we go there and I get an email from Philip Roth. It says, thank you so much. I'm really very pleased that you're doing this. So we go and do it and works
pretty well. I mean, it's great stuff to read, and I'm a pretty good reader in public that way at that time where the accents are and he writes me again he says, I heard it went great, Thank you so much.
Again.
I'm very and so I stopped and I go, let me ask you a question. What do you think about me writing? I'm writing a memoir and I want to write it an the third person so I can protect some people, as I did in my divorce book. Roth writes me back, and he goes, first of all, and there was a capitalizations. Frampis first of all, there is no such thing as a memoir in the third person. You must put yourself out there. You spare no one, particularly yourself.
And it goes on and on and oh he didn't, he didn't do it.
But I have written books. I swear to God, this is funny. I'm not that I dwelled on this city point. I was even aware until now that I've written books. Why we write sentences in that second person. I did that for Runs, and I got attacked by the editors for that.
It's an easy thing to fall into because it's a mode that we often use internally in conversation. And yeah, and in conversation, and sometimes I've seen it where other people will slide into the second person.
When when they're writing.
I got some grief for it at the time, not from regular readers, you know, from critics who wondered if it was a legitimate mode.
But I'm being glib here somewhat when I say that your life obviously changes after that book.
My life changed almost overnight. I mean, nothing happened overnight back then, because you know, when you publish a book, I mean, even a word of mouth takes time to spread. And it was a while before much was written about Bret Let's Big City. And very quickly it sold out its first printing, and it took about six seven weeks to reprint it, and we were afraid it might die then, because you know, that's a long time.
People step at me.
Yeah, but it did, and you know, and the second pretty sold out very quickly, and the thre and suddenly, you know, by three or four months after it was published, I was I was getting kind of New York.
Famous, you know.
And I remember, I mean one of the first indications I had of this was I was trying to get in.
Remember the Palladium opened a long time ago, now dormitory.
Yeah, so a bunch of us went to try and get in. It was a huge line, and I just said, oh the hell with this, my friend Morgan intric and said, no, wait a minute, and he manages to get up to the bouncer and he says, that's Jane mcinherney over there, And the bouncer immediately says, oh, well, why didn't you say so, come on in?
And that was this way, mister man.
That was the first time I thought, wow, maybe my life is changing, you know, and.
Girls and all of it. Yeah, all of it, I mean, And it.
Was yeah, I mean, and for a relatively shy person who was just out of graduate school, it was kind of.
How old when the book came out twenty seven.
I'd been to graduate school, I'd spent two years in Japan teaching English.
What did teaching English and Japan do to feed your career as a writer? If anything, just.
Gave me time to write because I only had to teach you about ten hours a week. I mean, I was kind of fascinated by Japanese culture and so on. But there came a point where I realized that staying there was was not going to engage me in my own culture. It was going to, if anything, divorced me
from my own culture. And so so at that point I moved back to New York with my girlfriend, who was a fashion model, and for me, everything was about New York was just so new and amazing, and it was almost like I was a foreigner coming to discover this new country, and I just found New York extraordinary, and I just thought I could write about this. I could write about New York. And not many people, you know, since I don't know since Sallenger, not that many people had.
I remember Tom Wolf coming up to me in nineteen eighty six and he said, that was brilliant that you wrote about New York. He said, I'm going to do the same thing. And then, of course he wrote Bumpire of the Vanities, which turned out to be a pretty good book, and then there was a whole slow of New York novels. But I remember Jason Epstein, who was a vice president of Random House, who was kind enough to take my book on. He took me out to lunch and he said, first of all, nobody your age
reads this is nineteen eighty three. And then he said, and secondly, nobody cares about New York.
So he was He said, he wrote coming out of the seventies, which is yeah, he's likely New York.
He said, he wrote a really good book, but he said, I just want to tamp down your expectations. And you know, allegedly nobody wants to read about New York. But three years later every other work was set in New York City.
Author and columnist Jay mcinherney. If you enjoy conversations about the New York literary scene, check out my episode with Tina Brown.
A great editor isn't an autocrat. I mean, you have to have a vision in the same way the director has to have a vision of a movie, and you have to have a worldview too. I mean, I knew
what I wanted to do with Vanity Fair. I wanted to combine the elegance and glamour of the magazine, of the famous magazine in the twenties and thirties, with some of that narrative gristle of journalism that had then become the sort of defining feature of the great magazines of them the seventies and eighties, like Rolling Stone, like New York Magazine. So I wanted to modernize that formula.
If you like.
To hear more of my conversation with Tina Brown, go to Here's the Thing dot Org. After the Break, JAYE mcinherney talks about his involvement in the film adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City and helping Michael J. Fox prepare for the role. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. The nineteen eighty eight film adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City starring Michael J. Fox, premiere to mixed reviews.
I was curious about Jay mcinnerney's work on the film and how he felt about the portrayal of the main character, Jamie Conway, who was based on Jay himself.
Michael and I get along tremendously well. In fact, we used to stay out till three. I don't know how I made it's this set every morning, because we used to stay out till three in the morning, doing snorting coke and doing all the stuff that you do in the method actors. I first learned when I was hanging
out with Michael. First of all, the power of a persona, and his persona was Alex Keaton, and his millions of fans wanted him to be Alex Keaton, and they didn't want to see him with a koch straw up his nose. And my smaller legion of fans had no interest in seeing Alex Keaton playing me mirror. Yeah, I mean they had no interest. And so that that was there was
a disconnect right there, getting from the start. And then also I think you know, I mean Sidney Pollack was the producer, and he once said to me, he said, why do all these people want to get into all these nightclubs? And I just said, oh man, we don't really understand what's going on here, do we. And and you know, the director, James Ridges, he was, you know, he was aging out at that point this kind of material.
And Cowboys completely different kind of movie. Yeah.
Yeah, So I mean, look, I wrote the screenplay, but honestly they shouldn't let me write write the screenplay because I didn't know that much about movies at the time. Screenplays are very different than, as you know, than novels. You know, it's like writing a novel is a hosting party. Write a screenplay is like catering party, you know, And you have to have a different language, and you have to realize that movies are made out of images, you know, they're not made out of words.
I think Mammot taught me this, or I observe this about Mammoth, and he confirmed with me in whatever language, I'd done a few Mammot films I did.
Glen Garry, obviously, I did the state name, remember that one.
And when I was around him and you could talk to him, he's so intimidating. He's this amazing talent and you know, universally admired in the in the in the acting world, you know, in the acting world.
And so, I mean, I really believe that only.
On is probably one of the five best players I've ever read in my life for an actor.
Well, Glenn Garry, Glenn Ross is not so shabby either.
Well, no, but he won the Pulitzer Prize. That my scene wasn't even in there. So when he puts my scene in there, I called him and I go, why are you taking your Pulitzer Prize winning book and changing it for the movie business, Because because I never believe these guys had a criminal nature, I need someone to come in and turn the screws tighter so they commit a crime. And he said, I wrote this person that you're going to play to come in and to push
them towards the criminality. Now he writes, Bob Enters, Bob, you're probably wondering why I called you well here today. No, his old idea was, what's the point in the screenplay of any stage directions, I'm going to describe the room because in the book, that's the only chance you're going to get see the room.
If I tell you.
What's in the room, if I accent something, if I accent their behavior, his hand shaking, he's scratching his crotch. Whatever you write, I'm responsible for that. And then a screenplay or a teleplay, it's a director's going to come in and just do whatever they want to do. And man,
it's so spare in that way, so spare. When I saw that movie, I thought thought that those people lost that idea, Like there wasn't enough of the book and the kind of I don't want to say grit, but just the sense of the book in the movie.
Well, you know, I think back to The Graduate because The Graduate actually was a very successful novel until my assault Mike Nichols get a hold of it, and Mike Nichols so kind of reinvented the book, you know, and he had this great underwater scenes, you know, in the swimming pool and you know, the scene in the closet I mean, but he found a visual language to interpret
what was largely a novel of dialogue. And people don't even remember that there was a book called The Graduate Now, So I mean, it's not the worst thing in the world for me that Bright Lights the book is better than Bright Lights the movie. You know, I wonder if we'd had a Robert town as a screenwriter, and if we'd had Tom Cruise as Tom Cruise for a year was supposed to be the star. Tom Cruise came and spent three four days and nights with me, following me around so that he could model.
The character on me. It was very weird. He kept calling me sir, which was very peculiar. I mean, I was like a year older than he was.
But he finally, you know, it got delayed and he finally left to do Top Gun, which I think was a good career choice.
Tom.
Yeah, I mean so strange. He was such a such a polite, respectful kid, as I say, only a year younger than me. But you know, Michael, there was a mismatch there in the in the casting, I think, and uh not that Michael isn't a great actor, because he is, but taking on an iconic TV role and embodying it. It's it's really hard then to you know, to prode, to blame, to get the audiences have known what he was.
Anyway, after you launch the book comes the imitators and or people say we're we're kind of I don't want to.
See imitating or piggybacking.
When but brettyston Ellis comes and does his book, which she said he put a character in there based on you in Lessons Are was that true?
And later in one of his later books called Lunar Park, there's a character named Jay McInerney no like, who gets drunk and falls.
Into the pool.
Okay, well who starts cocop a Porsche you know? Okay, yeah, I never did those two things.
Yeah, no, I don't. I doubt it. But Brent's book was.
Very different than mine, and it was it was it was very dark, and it was very sort of His own was neolistic and his pros was really stripped down and bear His big influence was shown didion. And when I first read his novel before it came out, Morgan Intric and his editor were seeing to me, I'm going to promote this as the West Coast by lets big city and so at first I was inclined to not
like the guy at all. But then we did a seminar together, and I read the book and I thought, you know, he's really talented, and we're doing two completely different things. Although it was very easy for the press to lump us together because young people drugs, you know, that kind of nightclubs, that kind of thing. But I befriended Brett in part because I wanted to warn him what was likely to come his way, in other words, that his life was going to be turned completely upside down.
I mean, it has actors a lot, but it doesn't usually happen to writers. And it did happen to me, and it did happen to him in a way that it hadn't since you know, Mailer and Capodi and Vidal, that generation. And I'm still good friends with Brett, and you know, in some ways, you know, we haven't experien it's in common that not many people have for that period.
Yes.
Sure, author and columnist Jay McInerney. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow. Here's the thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you'll get your podcasts When We Come Back. Jay McInerney details the story behind his screenplay for the nineteen ninety eight film Gia, which launched the career of one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, Angelina Jolee.
I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the thing.
Ten years after the release of the film Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney penned the screenplay for Gia, which launched the career of Angelina Jolia In nineteen ninety eight, Despite having two of his scripts made into movies with big stars, mcinnernie chose not to continue with a career in screenwriting. I wanted to know if he was ever tempted at the time to move to Hollywood and pursue writing for film full time.
So I did some specs screenplays, and I got my price up pretty high, and it was a nice way to make money. The only full length screenplay wrote that really got produced was Gea, which was what I remember. It's HBO's first movie. Because the HBO, remember, was just a recycling bin. Basically, they took like Red October and then they just put on TV and that was what
they did. But then they came to me and they said, Hey, we've got this idea to make original movies, and how'd you like to do the first one about Gia Kuranci. And I just said, oh, this is perfect, like drugs eighties models.
Let's call Jay McInerney. I mean, what else would you do? Right?
And so I said to them, Look, I could write a good screenplay, I think, But I said, it's all going to depend on the casting. I said, you have to find a woman who is utterly charismatic. Because Gia never said anything memorable in her entire life. I mean, there's not a single line that anybody can remember that she said. But you know, luckily they cast it perfectly. I mean, Angelina Jolie was extraordinary, and she that was her big break.
She made the movie, and he.
Made the career of one of the biggest movie stars in history. But in that way that you've known, I mean as whether as friends or partners, if you will, You've known a lot of famous women. I used to know fleetingly Marla Hanson, right, I think it was after she was attacked.
I knew after she was attacked.
We went out together for four years. Well story, Marla Hanson was a small town girl, Texas, came to the city got some modeling jobs, and she got it and rented an apartment. The landlord was very invasive, and she kept turning down his advances and he fired finally high two men to slash her face. You know, I mean, so I talk about symbolism, you know, all the kind of mom a model whose faces slashed. And I met her after the attack as well. Keith McNally used to
have these dinners at to Nelson. He said, you know, when he come to I think you'd really like this girl that's there. And I was kind of fascinated to meet Marla Hansome because she was she didn't really cover the post like seven times by then, and and everybody would liked Marlae because she said, you know, I'm undeterred and I'm going to keep modeling and I love New York. And so I found her well, first of all, I found her really good looking, and secondly, I found her face.
Even afterwards she was she was very beautiful. And so we started dating after that, and and then unfortunately then I became more of a tabloid fixture because I was dating a tabloid fixture. We went about four weeks dodging the paparazzi, and then finally this, you know, one one of them said to me, look, j just give me a pictures. Put the five thousand dollars with you.
Whatever it was. Then I'll never forget.
I was dating a woman of this many many years ago, many years ago. I was dating a woman who was a very famous movie actress. And we're there and she was divorcing her husband, and she said, I don't want to hurt my husband's feelings. I really like him and we're friends and we're going to get divorced. And so when we leave this hotel, I'm going to go before you where you go before me?
I want us walking out the hotel.
Yeah, that's it was the first time I was ever introduced to that, Like this kid from Massive People Long, I'm sitting there going you want me to what you want me to go out ahead of you?
Because oh I get, I get, I get, And I.
Never knew that I did just sneak around because of who you are and the cameras and stuff, that's what we see.
So we did that. I went at the back door and she went out the front door and got her picture.
Taken whatever, and you know my education from back then about how you try to manage your personal life in public like that.
It's really tough.
The ones I see that are the most successful movie stars, you don't know anything about them.
You really don't the most I agree, But a little bit about that.
By the way, we went to Barnes and Noble on seventeenth Street at Union Square, you know the area.
Yeah.
Whatever macinn Earn do they have is in softcover. Is there any place I can get hardcover books of the books?
Oh? I want Bright Lights, Big City.
Well the problem is the only Right Lights was published in trade paperback, and I was upset about that. But my editor said, look, this is the this is the way to reach people your own age, she said, because hardcover books are expensive, which is true. I didn't buy many when I was back. I try to only buy hardcover now. Yeah me, oh, me too. So there's there's really no American hardcover by Latswig City. All the other books are in hardcover I want to get, But the
problem is the publishers. They only do one run of hardcover and then it all goes into the So what are you working on now? I just sold a book to Kannaff, my longtime publisher, and it's called See You on the Other Side. I started writing it during the pandemic,
and it's and it starts in the pandemic. But where the title came from was that I walking past a coffee shop at that time, and it was right after everything had been closed and someone had slapped a sign on the windows I'd see you on the other Side, meaning like, what week, two weeks will be out of this mass, except it was.
More like a year and a half.
And then one of the main characters in the books book dies at the end of the book, and I suddenly when I was rereading the books, I was searching for a title and I saw this that I had written this down about this sign. I thought, God, that's that's a good title for the book. The bad news is that it's it's the fourth novel in a series
of novels about these characters, Kareen and Russell. Kareen and Russell Callaway, who when we first meet them, you really glamorous New York couple, not wealthy, but you know she's a stockbroker and he's an assistant editor, book editor, and he remains an editor throughout the series, but Brightest Falls
was going to be a one off. And then the crisis in that book was the was the stock market crash, and Russell had actually tried to perform a leverage buyout on his publishing, you know, so that was that's kind of thing that happened in the eighties. And and then nine to eleven came along, and I just for live me. I couldn't think, how am I going to you know,
take this into account as a writer. And then I finally, wait a minute, what if I just take these set of characters and just have them react to this event. And I really kind of like the characters, and you know, they're also going through marital crises and so on. And before I knew it, you know, I'd written a third one, which is set around the time of the crash of the two thousand and eight and Obamas and Obama's election,
you know, very big deals. So this seems to be partly a way for me of following a relatively heavily married couple, which you know, someone who's been married four times. It's like it's like something that I am passing. I'm fascinated by it, but also registering the kind of crises that New York City has gone through in my lifetime. So this is the very last one for but it's now a tet trilogy.
Well it's it's reminding me somewhat. I mean, are very distinctive writers. But and she reminded me someone of Richard Nelson's Apple Family Stories, those four plays he did where they were all seated around talking about AIDS and we cut.
To nine to eleven.
I mean, he's got these four tableaus and they're just talking about what's going on, and then their relationships and the wife goes on it gets to words and becomes a lesbian and her lesbian girlfriend comes into chapter four and blah blah blah. I mean, Richard Nelson, who I worship. I worship him. But where did you meet? And Annhurst is my wife. I met her in nineteen eighty six at a nightclub called MK. So she was with a friend of hers. I was sitting with Bretty Sinellis, Tama Jenowitz and.
Myself of all things.
I mean, we didn't hang out that much with Tama, but that night we were and this friend VERSI, you're gonna meet these guys.
They're like the coolest.
Guys in all of New York, and so In came over and introduced herself, and you know, I knew her last name.
She's the granddaughter of William Randall. First.
Yes, oh, and Marla Hanson was at the table as well, So I couldn't like flirt openly.
My former girlfriend, my future yeah, yeah, my imitators.
But we definitely hit it off and there was electricity there and so we just kind of stayed in touch. And when I broke up with Marla, finally a couple of years later, I called her up and I said, yeah, it's broke up in Marla.
That's really sad.
But I was thinking, like, yeah, not so sad, and she said, oh shit, And I said what she said, I just got engaged.
And it was like, yeah, and we have a problem. Yeah, I have a brother.
And it just kind of we just kept missing the boat, including on September tenth, two thousand and one, we had a date for the first time in many years.
We were both free. So we have a date.
We go to we got to a restaurant and so then I, you know, I invite her back to my apartment since we were downtown, and she says, tell you what. She said, let's not rush things. So let's do this again tomorrow. And she said, you might have it, you know, give me a data, maybe we'll have a different result. And I said, you're sure, sure, So so off she went uptown. I went downtown and the next morning was September eleventh, and she was trying to get to Long
Island where her kids were. The phones weren't working, and you know, so it was another four or five years before we got together. But now we've been married seventeen years and long time, long time.
But whenever I've met her, fleeting Lee, I don't know her that well, but whenever I've met her, what a lovely.
Woman she has. So you're adding a tetralogy, you're putting the new.
Additional latest, and that'll come out, I guess next year. And yeah, I'm just editing it at the moment with my new editor. His name is Errol McDonald, And yeah, I mean, I'm glad to be back in the game again. I also wrote a memoir during the pandemic. I showed it to my agent, who feels like it's about seventeen lawsuits waiting to happen.
So we've we've got to free things that.
Yeah, I mean, I mean the funny thing is might be some tips on it.
My story is about Mick Jagg and Carrie Fisher are no problem because they're famous, but it's it's like the wives and girlfriends and all and brothers and you know they.
Can't wait to read it.
Make sure you know those guys are Those guys might sue me, those girls might sue me.
So it's going to come out at all or not.
Well, yeah, well as su as I published this novel, then I'll figure out and I'll figure out the memoir.
But the first I mean, the people who have read it tell me it's really fun. A memoir from you. I'm dying to read.
Last thing I'll say is in your books the word bright appears three times. Yeah, and you seem to me like a very buoyant person. We didn't even get into the fact that you were the wine columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
How did that happen? I mean, other than you being a fan of wine.
Well, I started with you know, I just I love I mean, my friends know this. It's a hobby of mine. I love wine. And so my friend Dominque Browning took over her House in Garden magazine, and she wanted to have a wine column, but she thought wine writing was boring, so she she called me up and and I said, look, I don't know enough. I don't know enough to call him. And she said no, but that's just the way, she said,
you're you're a good writer, and you get enthusiasm. She said, just write like your one chapter ahead of the textbook of the class in the textbook, and write like a novelist right about the characters who make women. And so so I did this for a few years, and House Garden eventually folded, and then the Wall Street Journal called me up and said, hey, you want to be our wine critic.
Thought, well, we'll.
Street Journal met it's but you know the conic why their cultural coverage is quite good. And yeah, so I did a lot of things about the journal. I did that for four years. I like a lot of things about the Journal too, not so much their editorial page.
But well, as I said to some friends of mine, I would come across movies that I didn't feel somewhat needed to be remade or maybe them, here's an opportunity to take a story and tell the modern angle on that story Looking for Mister Goodbar was one I wanted to remake just to direct or produce or what you would say the female sexuality and how women are played with an exploited now or not, or how they do the exploiting whatever the female psychology is about sex and
do mister Goodbar again and contemporize it. And the other movie that's Bernie to be remade is Bright Lights, Big City.
Well it's it's supposedly in the works. But you know how these things work. You know, there maye when we're dead. There are fifty people who have to all agree at the same time, you know. But I have a conversation every month or two. It's gotta happen with the guys. Ready, I'm ready to We finally got to pay the lead role.
Who is as seeking as you are seeking? You are seeking many things. Oh, I'll take that. I like that.
My thanks to novelist, columnist and screenwriter Jay McInerney. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin. Our engineer is Frank Imperry. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich, I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio