Nineteen years after it was first published by Vintage Books, the paperback imprint of Random House has ordered twenty-five hundred additional copies of Jay McInerney's Story of My Life to be printed. The move comes not as a response to the sucess of McInerney's latest novel (indeed, The Good Life, published by Knopf in 2006, was met with lukewarm reviews), but rather to last week's news that John Edwards had an affair with Rielle Hunter, the woman who produced videos for him when he was a candidate for president.
The novel, which was first published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1988 then reprinted as a paperback original by Vintage a year later, is narrated by Alison Poole, an actress with an appetite for sex and drugs. It is widely known that the real-life inspiration for Poole was none other than Rielle Hunter. The novel has been climbing Amazon's sales rankings, from No. 470 earlier this week to No. 292 this morning.
In an article recently published in New York City's Daily News, McInerney expressed suprise that Hunter, who the author knew by the name Lisa Druck in the eighties, got involved with Edwards. "It really surprises me," he said. "She’s not attracted to conventional guys—and Edwards, with his haircut and all, is a conventional guy.”
