Vanity Fair Diaries: Revenge of the ’80s | Tina Brown in Conversation with Jay McInerney

Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, published in August 1984, perfectly captures the mood—doomy, self-destructive, even hopeless, but at the same time soaringly ambitious—of NYC when Tina Brown arrived from London, barely out of her twenties.

Brimming with fear and insecurity, she was plunged head first into the maelstrom of the competitive New York media world and the backstabbing rivalries at the court of the planet’s slickest, most glamour-focused magazine company, with the task of reviving the Conde Nast’s troubled flagship, Vanity Fair. This was NYC in the ’80s and you’re invited to take another look at it with the ringmasters who defined the flash, dash and power-brokering of that excessive time.

A book signing follows the event.