SOURCE: "Bookshelf: 'Story of My Life,'" in The Wall Street Journal, September 16, 1988, p. 23.

In the following review, O'Rourke offers a favorable assessment of Story of My Life.

Oh no, it's rich kids leading empty lives, taking harmful drugs and having sex too often (then feeling empty, drugged and tired). In Story of My Life, Jay McInerney seems to be adding another volume to the dread and burgeoning category of "Self-Helpless Books."

The browser's first instinct is to take the author, the characters, the author's ex-friends upon whom the characters are based (and the producers, directors and studio executives who will turn it all into a movie any minute now) and ship them to Bangladesh so that the impoverished farmers of that flood-plagued nation will have something to stand on during monsoon season. The more so because Mr. McInerney has shaken this particular coca bush before, in his...