It is his third novel about Corrine and Russell Calloway, a couple who live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

[1] Like the previous two novels in the series, Bright, Precious Days is set against the backdrop of a historical event, in this case the Great Recession.

Drawing the term from Philip Roth's novel The Counterlife, McInerney has said that Russell’s life exists as a “counterlife” to his own, allowing him "...to continue exploring the life of this city" and to avoid writing autobiographical sequels to his first (and best-known) work, Bright Lights, Big City, which focused on the club culture and nightlife of Downtown Manhattan in the 1980s.

This change in focus also allowed McInerney to produce a more "panoramic" novel about New York, one that "encompassed a much broader picture of contemporary life".

[3] The idea that an affair between Corrine and Luke McGavock, a banker, "wasn’t really over" after concluding ambiguously in The Good Life inspired McInerney to write Bright, Precious Days.