Jay McInerney is a gossip boy

Jay McInerney, the American novelist, is to appear in the American series Gossip Girl (cast pictured), the sexy New York prep school soap once described on The First Post as "the show every parent dreads their daughter watching". At 53, some are saying McInerney is a little old to be doing such things – and it is certainly hard to imagine his hero, Scott F. Fitzgerald, deigning to make such a foray into prime-time TV.

As a result, the widely read US blog, Gawker, has described McInerney as one of the country’s "saddest writers" in a posting today. Says Gawker: "McInerney wrote a definitive novel about youngs in New York called Bright Lights, Big City about 63 years ago and has been sorta mooching and blogging and bopping around since."

Gawker is, perhaps, being a little too hard on the writer. He is only appearing in a guest spot in which he will play a mentor to a character called Dan, played by Penn Badgely, described by Gawker as “a strapping DUMBO teen who aspires to be a writer”.