Story of My Life by Jay McInerney
Published 1976 · 176,000 words · about 12 hours at an average pace
How hard is Story of My Life to read?
Story of My Life scores 52 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 40 out of 100
- Flat eighties party vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Short, breathless, affectless sentences.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Deliberately shallow.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Light.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- A narrator whose account of her own life is a running evasion.
- Symbolic density: 38 out of 100
- Little; the flatness is the method.
- Ironic distance: 78 out of 100
- The comedy and the horror both come from what Alison will not say.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- It stops rather than ends.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- A single monologue.
How Story of My Life is regarded
Story of My Life holds a literary regard score of 45 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.