Literary Inspiration
"Brat Pack" novelist Jay McInerney said that his former girlfriend, Hunter, is the basis for the lead character Alison Poole in the 1988 novel Story of My Life. McInerney described their relationship and Hunter's role as the inspiration for the character in an interview in 2005. McInerney also said that he chose to write about her and her friends because he was both "intrigued and appalled" by their behavior.
McInerney's friend and fellow Brat Pack author Bret Easton Ellis also includes the character Alison Poole in two of his novels, Glamorama and American Psycho.
There was open speculation that Story of My Life was a roman à clef novel when it first appeared; to New York Magazine's questions "Is it real? Did it happen?" McInerney replied, "I'm anticipating some of that kind of speculation, but I'm utterly confident of not having any lawsuits on my hands. The book is a fully imagined work of fiction. On the other hand, it's not to say that I didn't make use of … That's why I live in New York. Mine is not an autonomous imagination."
In 2008, McInerney incorporated the John Edwards affair into the Allison Poole follow-up story "Penelope on the Pond" in his collections The Last Bachelor and How It Ended.
Read more about this topic: Rielle Hunter
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