Bright Lights, Big City is an American novel by Jay McInerney, published by Vintage Books on August 12, 1984. It is written about a character's time spent caught up in, and notably escaping from, the mid-1980s New York City fast lane. It is one of the few well-known English-language novels written in the second person, and its main character is unnamed. He is a writer who, by day, works as a fact checker for a high-brow magazine—likely based on Harpers or The New Yorker, where McInerney himself once worked as a fact checker—for which he had once hoped to write. By night, he is a... party-goer, a cocaine user, seeking to lose himself in the hedonism of the 1980s yuppie party scene, often going to the nightclub Heartbreak. His wife, Amanda, recently left him and he copes with this by pretending nothing happened and telling no one that she's gone. Initially hopeful that she will return someday, he eventually resorts to searching for her at a fashion event. He obsesses over every item she owned in his apartment, every modeling photo and every club she visited, even repeatedly visiting a mannequin based on her.
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| Author: | Jay McInerney |
| Genre: | Novel |
| Year published: | 1984 |
| Number of editions: | 10 |