In the summer of 1982 I was staying in the East Village of Manhattan with my Williams College classmate and future editor, Gary Fisketjon, working as a reader of unsolicited manuscripts for Random House. The previous year had been a bruising one for me; within the space of several months I was fired from my job at the New Yorker, my wife left me, and my mother died of cancer. I’d retreated to the dreary refuge of Syracuse, in New York state, to study fiction writing with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, returning to Manhattan, the scene of my recent defeats, for the summer break. I still loved the city, though I felt as if I’d been flogged out of town the previous fall.
On returning to New York I picked up where I’d left off, exploring, and indulging in, the downtown nightlife; it was still possible to catch the Ramones at CBGBs and Iggy Pop at the Peppermint Lounge, to eavesdrop on Lou Reed and Andy Warhol at the Mudd Club; I was mesmerised by the downtown music and art scene, and yearned to create something like the literary equivalent. Keith Haring graffiti decorated our subway station and one morning Jean-Michel Basquiat, our East Village neighbour, stopped by at about 3am, carrying a good-sized painting under his arm, trying to sell it quickly; unfortunately, I didn’t have enough money, though it would have been the best deal I ever made. I wasn’t creating much myself, but I was eagerly throwing myself back into my old life in the dives and clubs, often crawling back to the apartment as the sun was coming up.
On one such occasion I found myself standing in the bathroom of a nightclub, staring into the mirror. Gary had disappeared, and the girl I’d been pursuing had ditched me. I was out of cash, and I was pretty sure that when I stepped outside I would see daylight. Looking into the mirror, I said to myself: “You’re not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are.” I was under the influence, and felt as if I were observing myself from a certain distance. I remember thinking: hey, that’s your interior monologue. When I finally made it back to our loft, having walked 15 blocks through the dawn’s surly light, I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down those lines before collapsing into my bed.
Some months later, back in Syracuse, I got a phone call from George Plimpton, the editor of the Paris Review. I was gobsmacked; I recognised his patrician voice, famous from cameos in movies and television appearances. I’d recently sent a story to the magazine and he told me he liked it and wondered if I had anything else, before he decided whether or not to publish it. As soon as I hung up I read through everything I’d written in the past year and realised it was all derivative and stale, until I got to that piece of paper I’d brought back from New York. A mere three or four sentences in the second person singular. That night I sat down and wrote a short story in that voice, about a night very much like the night the lines had been written. The story was informed by the pain and misery of the events of the previous year, and yet somehow that voice gave it a kind of comic lift, a wry perspective on the protagonist’s downward spiral. The narrator’s falling apart, but he’s watching himself do so, and commenting upon it with some degree of objectivity.
I sent the story, which I called “It’s 6am, Do You Know Where You Are?”, to the Paris Review, which promptly accepted and published it. And not long after that I realised that the story wasn’t complete, that I wanted to tell the backstory of the wasted nightclub patron. In the course of about six weeks I wrote 11 more chapters. I didn’t know if I would be able to sustain the second person voice over the course of a novel. I actually tried rewriting parts of the book in first and third person. But something seemed to be drained from the narrative when I did so – energy, self-consciousness and humour.
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.
• Jay McInerney will be discussing Bright Lights, Big City at a Guardian Book Club event in London on Tuesday 6 September. Tickets £15 from theguardian.com/guardianlive.
