Like Bright Lights, Big City (1984), Story of My Life is narrated by an observant, witty, and jaded member of Manhattan's party elite. Alison Poole's descriptions of drug use and casual sex reflect a slice of life in the present, which the novel's epigraph describes as an age of anarchy.

Drug use constitutes one of the major pastimes of Alison's crowd, and although she knows rationally that it is dangerous, she generally gets swept along with the crowd, willing to temporarily lose herself and her problems in a line of cocaine. A recurring plot element is a card with the emergency number of a drug treatment center which is transferred from character to character. At the end of the novel when Alison comes to her senses, she finally uses the card to call for help.

According to the characters in Story of My Life, love and sex...