Jay McInerney – The Queen and I

“A refugee from the western suburbs, I used to skip school and take the bus into the city. I hung out on St Mark’s Place and the Bowery, copping the look and attitude of punk, discovering Bukowski and the Beats in the book shops. Returning to the subdivision of Jersey was an embarrassment. The soil was too thin for art. No poetry could ever grow in the grapefruit rinds of the compost heap.”