Lightning Strikes
Interview Fêtes Christopher Bollen's New Book
With his debut novel, Lightning People, finally on shelves, Christopher Bollen stood in front of a crowd of friends last night at Soho House and cleared something up. "If you had to listen to me for five years saying I was writing a book—I wasn't lying," he announced. On a table at the back of the room, he had the hard covers to prove it. A sprawling tale of rootless thirtysomethings in post-9/11 New York, Bollen's freshman effort has drawn comparisons to Brights Lights, Big City and The Bonfire of the Vanities. The Interview editor and writer kept his day job but seriously toned down his social life while working on it, and Patrik Ervell, Adam Kimmel, Leelee Sobieski, and Natasha Lyonne were among those raising glasses of Moët-Chandon (which co-sponsored the dinner, with Maybach) to welcome him back to the swirl.
Of course, the main question for this group of readers, as Ryan McGinley put it: "Isn't everyone going to be looking for their character?" The photographer offered up a fact he hoped now might be fiction. "Chris and I spent a lot of time in the nineties at that bar called the Cock, in the East Village," he said. "I must have given my camera to him one night, because he took a picture of me with my face buried in a go-go dancer's crotch. So maybe that'll pop up in the book." Readers, you'll have to pick up a copy to find out. In the meantime, based on the evidence at hand, the new tome was well received. Chirped Daphne Guinness, as Bollen paid a visit to her table: "Now you'll have time to edit mine!"
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