Bright Lights, Big City narrates a few disastrous days in the life of an aspiring young writer in the swirling, madcap world of young, upwardly mobile Manhattan in the 1980s. The book's narrator, plagued by a failed marriage and an unnamed sense of loss and guilt, watches helplessly from the distance of a cocaine-induced haze as he proceeds to squander his prestigious job and all sense of dignity and self-respect. Under the cover of an ironic sensibility, impervious to his surroundings, he plunges deeper into an abyss of nightclubs, shallow conversation, sex and drugs. (read more)