Publicly consuming Bret Easton Ellis (web extended)
Peter Madsen - The Daily Iowan
Issue date: 9/29/05 Section: 80 Hours
"That was such a Bret Easton Ellis thing to say."
He laughed at himself.
"I'm just going to hop in my car and go to Malibu to do a reading," he repeated in an exaggerated, almost drugged panache.
"Kip Pardue is gonna be there."
Aside from his admitting, "Yes, adverbs are my friends," the above is pretty much all I remember from the phone interview I had with Bret Easton Ellis. Sure, I taped it, but my cassette recorder malfunctioned.
I can paraphrase his saying the recent pseudo-memoir Lunar Park isn't any more autobiographical than Less Than Zero, American Psycho, or the two other novels and the collection of short stories that comprise his catalogue. Throughout the interview I asked questions like, "In the book, you write that you better reveal yourself in fiction, but are fans wasting their time if they puzzle over whether you really did spend $100,000 on drugs in 1994 or if you really did date George Michael?" His answers were easy and ample, yet I can only say with any certainty that his respective answers were, "Yes, that's true," and, "Yes, they are."
As far as my editor Meghan Sims was concerned, this wasn't going to cut it. She had slotted the Q&A for the Oct. 6th 80 Hours cover, and now, without the transcript, I would have been lucky if the piece ran as an "online exclusive" - that is, if she didn't flat out fire me instead.
As a last ditch effort to save my job and retrieve Ellis' answers to my stock questions, I drove to Minneapolis to catch the author at his Sept. 12th reading.
Held at the University of Minnesota Bookstore (which Ellis repeatedly referred to as a "Banana Republic"), the reading drew more than 100 people - slightly more than Chuck Klosterman's Minneapolis reading a couple months before. Ellis, standing at a faux-mahogany podium, was dressed in an expensive suit that misfit him. His shirt collar was tucked back into itself, and the hem of his shirt hung from under his double-vented blazer. It was as if he had recently lost 30 pounds and had dressed during the car ride to the reading.
He read like a professor, making slight gestures with his left hand while his right cradled a dust-jacketless book. As he read two excerpts from Lunar Park, he enunciated so clearly his listeners could see his tongue press against his front teeth when he said words that began with "th" and "d." The first depicted him hitting on creative writing students. The second featured the fictitious Ellis describing his latest project: a book called Teenage Pussy, which, in its outline, resembled Terry Southern's Candy - that is, if the college freshman Candy Christian were instead a 35-year-old scuzzball named Mike whom the Ellis character assured his publisher was someone who "loved to give love and get love back." As the 41-year-old author described the sexual injuries Mike would sustain en route to a phallic fulfillment (back clawed until bleeding, ruptured testicles, testicular hickies, a penile fracture - "there was a loud pop, then excruciating pain"), and general dehydration, Ellis' face grew remarkably pink. When he finished, he waved his hand to dispel the image of an ice-packed, broken penis and the crowd's subsequent laughter.
"All right. So when I stop blushing, I'm going to look up and see if anyone has any questions they might want to ask."
Audience member : I find it absolutely fascinating the discomfort that reading that aloud brought to you.
Ellis: [chuckles]
Audience member: I just want to know the difference between your [thinking that in your head] and putting that down in a book for millions of people to read and reading that in front of us?
Ellis: Um...
Audience: [loud laughter]
Ellis: Ah, not a lot. I don't know. My soul still hasn't recovered from reading that. There's a big difference, because I locked myself in my office the entire time I'm writing that, and I'm sort of laughing to myself and thinking, 'well, how can I make it even funnier - for me.' Basically, I wrote that to make myself laugh. If other people laughed when they picked it up on the bus or in the bedroom, fine, but it's really not meant for all public consumption.
Audience member: [inaudible].
Ellis: 'Why the delay?' I guess that's the question. Well, I work very slowly. By the time I was ready to write this book by the summer of 2000 - it just took me that long. I don't know. I write really slowly. That's just it. And that's a big regret. If you look at it, I've only published five novels in the past 20 years, and it's been averaging out to about a novel every four years or so. And it really is...
Audience member: Quality over quantity.
Ellis: Well it could be.
Audience: [laughter]
Ellis: But I gotta tell you: I'm jealous of a lot of my other peers who have a book out once a year, every year and a half. But I also don't have a ton of ideas for books. I don't have like 30 ideas for books lying around. I mean, the ideas for books I've had I have published.
Audience member: [groan]
Ellis: I mean, I don't have anything else lying around, so that's it. It takes a long time. It also takes a long time for me to be convinced that I would want to write a book, that I would want to spend that much time on it. I spend an exorbitant amount of time on the outline, and the outline is a very long process.
Audience member: I'm curious what inspired you to write about supernatural things.
Ellis: The genesis of this book goes back to around 1989. I had spent three years with Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, and I wanted to have something fun. Not that that wasn't fun to write in its own way, but it was dark, and it seemed to me a very tricky and complicated book, and I wanted to write something very, very simple. I wanted to go back to the stuff that I liked as a kid. I wanted to go back to the comic books I liked. I wanted to go back to Stephen King, the international espionage thrillers, Robert Budlem's stuff. I wanted to write a genre book. And one of the genres I liked was the haunted house novel. And so it was supposed to be just a pure haunted house novel, and then, over the year, a lot of things happened to me, because I worked on another novel before I began Lunar Park, and it changed it. It became a much more personal book. It became a book much more about a writer and a lot more about my dad's death and more about my feelings about Patrick Bateman and American Psycho and what that whole thing was about, and all of that got pushed into this book. And instead of being a very stream-line, straight-ahead homage to Stephen King that I wanted to write, it ended up becoming kind of a different animal, kind of a melding of genres. So that's how that happened.
Audience member: Are you really writing a follow-up to Less Than Zero?
Ellis: I was in L.A. for about 19 months recently, and on the 20th anniversary of Less Than Zero, which was in May 1985 - I don't think many people in this room were born by 1985; some of them, perhaps - ah, I decided to reread the book. It's kind of sad. I opened a bottle of wine.
Audience: [snickers]
Ellis: I picked off this very tacky '80's kind of cover, paperback, and I read it. That's not what made me do it, though. It made me really think about living in L.A. and, you know, 'Where are those characters now?' They'd all be around my age now, around 41, they probably have kids who were the same age as they were when Less Than Zero was published. You know, 'Where's Clay and Blair and Julian?' There were some ideas I had for it that I thought were very good. And other times, there are moments I hope I'm hit by a bus, and I don't write the book.
Audience: snickers.
Ellis: Because it could be terrible. It could be an absolute terrible book. It could really undermine people's memories of the original. But you know, you can't help yourself. If you want to write a book, you have to write a book. And, fortunately or unfortunately, that's really the only thing that's announced itself in my head right now.
Audience member: If American Psycho came out today, do you think it would have the same reaction that it did?
Ellis: No. Absolutely not. I think pretty much...God, there's so many reasons. But no, I don't think that would be the case.
Audience member: Your character in Lunar Park is afflicted with what you call "acquired situational narcissism" disorder. This seems very much to be an ongoing theme with your protagonists. Do you [consider] yourself overly narcissistic?
Audience: [laughter and clapping]
Ellis: Well, to a certain degree, if you're going to write a book with a character named Bret Easton Ellis -
Audience: [laughter]
Ellis: - um, there's your answer, I guess. I guess, to a certain degree, you do have to be a bit of a narcissist if you're going to sit in a room all day creating fiction. And especially if you're writing a novel where you're a main character... Yeah, I guess having acquired situational narcissism is part of your job description. I think it's part of the deal of being an artist in general.
Audience member: What do you feel is your most autobiographical book?
Ellis: They're all autobiographical in a lot of ways, but if I have to look back, I would have to say that American Psycho is probably the most autobiographical of all the novels. And I know that causes consternation and people getting upset... I was writing about my dad, I was writing about myself, I was writing about a lifestyle that I was living that wasn't really unlike Patrick Bateman's. I mean, I didn't have all that money, but the yuppie movement was huge at that time in New York - I mean, everyone was trapped in it. If you go out to clubs, everyone was wearing suits. What can I tell you? It was that kind of era. But it was also a portrait of self-loathing and anger. I had gotten out of school [Bennington] and came to the city, and even though I had a career, I had been cocooned for about 22 years. And when I got out, I said, 'My god, this is society? This is what society demands of me? This is what it means to be a man? This is what I have to do? This is what the real world is about?' And it was shocking, and it was upsetting, and the punky little nihilist in me wanted to complain about it: the consumerism and life in the '80's, Reagan to a lesser degree, and Wall Street and yuppies, but I was also there. Someone asked me, 'Why didn't you ever write that memoir that you talked about?' At one point, about seven years ago, I talked about writing a memoir, because some people wanted to write a biography about me, and someone else was like, 'Why don't you just write a short one yourself?' And I realized that I had written my autobiography, if you had read all my books. All those books map out who I was at every stage of my life. It's all there. It's all out there. Emotionally, you can tell where I was at any given time. So, I don't know if that really answers the question as well as it should have.
Audience member: How many days a week do you work when you're writing a book?
Ellis: I keep hours like most of my friends who have jobs in offices do. I want to see them at dinner. I don't want to be alone. So I work from 10 to 7, or 9 to 6, or whatever, and I stay in my office, and I work daily - when I'm working on something I want to be working on. I don't just go to an office when I'm not working on something and sit in front of a blank computer and think, 'Well, I gotta think of something to do.' I want to be inspired, and I want to have fun. I can't imagine anyone who just goes and sits down and has no idea what they want to write about and writes, 'Frank walked down the street when the car hit him, because he was looking over at Jennifer in the park, because she had the white dog with the pink necklace,' and then he writes about that for fifty pages and then decides to start someplace else. I also like things to be very neat. I work best when I'm not worried about money, when I'm not ill, when I'm not heart-broken, when I'm not filled with some sort of despair. I really do find that the best times when I work are when I'm sort of content and in a comfortable place. And I believe in that Flaubert dictum where he wrote, 'To write like a revolutionary, you need to live like a bourgeoisie.' I kind of get what that means.
Audience member: How do you feel about people questioning the fiction versus the non-fiction [in Lunar Park]?
Ellis: Well, it kind of bothers me, but I asked for it by changing the narrator to my name and by adding certain biographical elements of my life. So, what can I say? Can I really complain about it? No. Did I think I was going to do this entire tour and fake being the Bret in the book and answer everything in that way and pretend everything was true, that I did have a wife and that I was attacked by this bird doll?
Audience: [laughter]
Ellis: That lasted for about one and a half interviews, and I couldn't keep it up anymore. It was just exhausting - and embarrassing, too. It was not fun to do it. But sure, I don't mind. People ask all the time [about] specifics. 'Did this really happen?' Sometimes it did; sometimes it didn't.
E-mail DI reporter Peter Madsen at:
pfmadsen@gmail.com
He laughed at himself.
"I'm just going to hop in my car and go to Malibu to do a reading," he repeated in an exaggerated, almost drugged panache.
"Kip Pardue is gonna be there."
Aside from his admitting, "Yes, adverbs are my friends," the above is pretty much all I remember from the phone interview I had with Bret Easton Ellis. Sure, I taped it, but my cassette recorder malfunctioned.
I can paraphrase his saying the recent pseudo-memoir Lunar Park isn't any more autobiographical than Less Than Zero, American Psycho, or the two other novels and the collection of short stories that comprise his catalogue. Throughout the interview I asked questions like, "In the book, you write that you better reveal yourself in fiction, but are fans wasting their time if they puzzle over whether you really did spend $100,000 on drugs in 1994 or if you really did date George Michael?" His answers were easy and ample, yet I can only say with any certainty that his respective answers were, "Yes, that's true," and, "Yes, they are."
As far as my editor Meghan Sims was concerned, this wasn't going to cut it. She had slotted the Q&A for the Oct. 6th 80 Hours cover, and now, without the transcript, I would have been lucky if the piece ran as an "online exclusive" - that is, if she didn't flat out fire me instead.
As a last ditch effort to save my job and retrieve Ellis' answers to my stock questions, I drove to Minneapolis to catch the author at his Sept. 12th reading.
Held at the University of Minnesota Bookstore (which Ellis repeatedly referred to as a "Banana Republic"), the reading drew more than 100 people - slightly more than Chuck Klosterman's Minneapolis reading a couple months before. Ellis, standing at a faux-mahogany podium, was dressed in an expensive suit that misfit him. His shirt collar was tucked back into itself, and the hem of his shirt hung from under his double-vented blazer. It was as if he had recently lost 30 pounds and had dressed during the car ride to the reading.
He read like a professor, making slight gestures with his left hand while his right cradled a dust-jacketless book. As he read two excerpts from Lunar Park, he enunciated so clearly his listeners could see his tongue press against his front teeth when he said words that began with "th" and "d." The first depicted him hitting on creative writing students. The second featured the fictitious Ellis describing his latest project: a book called Teenage Pussy, which, in its outline, resembled Terry Southern's Candy - that is, if the college freshman Candy Christian were instead a 35-year-old scuzzball named Mike whom the Ellis character assured his publisher was someone who "loved to give love and get love back." As the 41-year-old author described the sexual injuries Mike would sustain en route to a phallic fulfillment (back clawed until bleeding, ruptured testicles, testicular hickies, a penile fracture - "there was a loud pop, then excruciating pain"), and general dehydration, Ellis' face grew remarkably pink. When he finished, he waved his hand to dispel the image of an ice-packed, broken penis and the crowd's subsequent laughter.
"All right. So when I stop blushing, I'm going to look up and see if anyone has any questions they might want to ask."
Audience member : I find it absolutely fascinating the discomfort that reading that aloud brought to you.
Ellis: [chuckles]
Audience member: I just want to know the difference between your [thinking that in your head] and putting that down in a book for millions of people to read and reading that in front of us?
Ellis: Um...
Audience: [loud laughter]
Ellis: Ah, not a lot. I don't know. My soul still hasn't recovered from reading that. There's a big difference, because I locked myself in my office the entire time I'm writing that, and I'm sort of laughing to myself and thinking, 'well, how can I make it even funnier - for me.' Basically, I wrote that to make myself laugh. If other people laughed when they picked it up on the bus or in the bedroom, fine, but it's really not meant for all public consumption.
Audience member: [inaudible].
Ellis: 'Why the delay?' I guess that's the question. Well, I work very slowly. By the time I was ready to write this book by the summer of 2000 - it just took me that long. I don't know. I write really slowly. That's just it. And that's a big regret. If you look at it, I've only published five novels in the past 20 years, and it's been averaging out to about a novel every four years or so. And it really is...
Audience member: Quality over quantity.
Ellis: Well it could be.
Audience: [laughter]
Ellis: But I gotta tell you: I'm jealous of a lot of my other peers who have a book out once a year, every year and a half. But I also don't have a ton of ideas for books. I don't have like 30 ideas for books lying around. I mean, the ideas for books I've had I have published.
Audience member: [groan]
Ellis: I mean, I don't have anything else lying around, so that's it. It takes a long time. It also takes a long time for me to be convinced that I would want to write a book, that I would want to spend that much time on it. I spend an exorbitant amount of time on the outline, and the outline is a very long process.
Audience member: I'm curious what inspired you to write about supernatural things.
Ellis: The genesis of this book goes back to around 1989. I had spent three years with Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, and I wanted to have something fun. Not that that wasn't fun to write in its own way, but it was dark, and it seemed to me a very tricky and complicated book, and I wanted to write something very, very simple. I wanted to go back to the stuff that I liked as a kid. I wanted to go back to the comic books I liked. I wanted to go back to Stephen King, the international espionage thrillers, Robert Budlem's stuff. I wanted to write a genre book. And one of the genres I liked was the haunted house novel. And so it was supposed to be just a pure haunted house novel, and then, over the year, a lot of things happened to me, because I worked on another novel before I began Lunar Park, and it changed it. It became a much more personal book. It became a book much more about a writer and a lot more about my dad's death and more about my feelings about Patrick Bateman and American Psycho and what that whole thing was about, and all of that got pushed into this book. And instead of being a very stream-line, straight-ahead homage to Stephen King that I wanted to write, it ended up becoming kind of a different animal, kind of a melding of genres. So that's how that happened.
Audience member: Are you really writing a follow-up to Less Than Zero?
Ellis: I was in L.A. for about 19 months recently, and on the 20th anniversary of Less Than Zero, which was in May 1985 - I don't think many people in this room were born by 1985; some of them, perhaps - ah, I decided to reread the book. It's kind of sad. I opened a bottle of wine.
Audience: [snickers]
Ellis: I picked off this very tacky '80's kind of cover, paperback, and I read it. That's not what made me do it, though. It made me really think about living in L.A. and, you know, 'Where are those characters now?' They'd all be around my age now, around 41, they probably have kids who were the same age as they were when Less Than Zero was published. You know, 'Where's Clay and Blair and Julian?' There were some ideas I had for it that I thought were very good. And other times, there are moments I hope I'm hit by a bus, and I don't write the book.
Audience: snickers.
Ellis: Because it could be terrible. It could be an absolute terrible book. It could really undermine people's memories of the original. But you know, you can't help yourself. If you want to write a book, you have to write a book. And, fortunately or unfortunately, that's really the only thing that's announced itself in my head right now.
Audience member: If American Psycho came out today, do you think it would have the same reaction that it did?
Ellis: No. Absolutely not. I think pretty much...God, there's so many reasons. But no, I don't think that would be the case.
Audience member: Your character in Lunar Park is afflicted with what you call "acquired situational narcissism" disorder. This seems very much to be an ongoing theme with your protagonists. Do you [consider] yourself overly narcissistic?
Audience: [laughter and clapping]
Ellis: Well, to a certain degree, if you're going to write a book with a character named Bret Easton Ellis -
Audience: [laughter]
Ellis: - um, there's your answer, I guess. I guess, to a certain degree, you do have to be a bit of a narcissist if you're going to sit in a room all day creating fiction. And especially if you're writing a novel where you're a main character... Yeah, I guess having acquired situational narcissism is part of your job description. I think it's part of the deal of being an artist in general.
Audience member: What do you feel is your most autobiographical book?
Ellis: They're all autobiographical in a lot of ways, but if I have to look back, I would have to say that American Psycho is probably the most autobiographical of all the novels. And I know that causes consternation and people getting upset... I was writing about my dad, I was writing about myself, I was writing about a lifestyle that I was living that wasn't really unlike Patrick Bateman's. I mean, I didn't have all that money, but the yuppie movement was huge at that time in New York - I mean, everyone was trapped in it. If you go out to clubs, everyone was wearing suits. What can I tell you? It was that kind of era. But it was also a portrait of self-loathing and anger. I had gotten out of school [Bennington] and came to the city, and even though I had a career, I had been cocooned for about 22 years. And when I got out, I said, 'My god, this is society? This is what society demands of me? This is what it means to be a man? This is what I have to do? This is what the real world is about?' And it was shocking, and it was upsetting, and the punky little nihilist in me wanted to complain about it: the consumerism and life in the '80's, Reagan to a lesser degree, and Wall Street and yuppies, but I was also there. Someone asked me, 'Why didn't you ever write that memoir that you talked about?' At one point, about seven years ago, I talked about writing a memoir, because some people wanted to write a biography about me, and someone else was like, 'Why don't you just write a short one yourself?' And I realized that I had written my autobiography, if you had read all my books. All those books map out who I was at every stage of my life. It's all there. It's all out there. Emotionally, you can tell where I was at any given time. So, I don't know if that really answers the question as well as it should have.
Audience member: How many days a week do you work when you're writing a book?
Ellis: I keep hours like most of my friends who have jobs in offices do. I want to see them at dinner. I don't want to be alone. So I work from 10 to 7, or 9 to 6, or whatever, and I stay in my office, and I work daily - when I'm working on something I want to be working on. I don't just go to an office when I'm not working on something and sit in front of a blank computer and think, 'Well, I gotta think of something to do.' I want to be inspired, and I want to have fun. I can't imagine anyone who just goes and sits down and has no idea what they want to write about and writes, 'Frank walked down the street when the car hit him, because he was looking over at Jennifer in the park, because she had the white dog with the pink necklace,' and then he writes about that for fifty pages and then decides to start someplace else. I also like things to be very neat. I work best when I'm not worried about money, when I'm not ill, when I'm not heart-broken, when I'm not filled with some sort of despair. I really do find that the best times when I work are when I'm sort of content and in a comfortable place. And I believe in that Flaubert dictum where he wrote, 'To write like a revolutionary, you need to live like a bourgeoisie.' I kind of get what that means.
Audience member: How do you feel about people questioning the fiction versus the non-fiction [in Lunar Park]?
Ellis: Well, it kind of bothers me, but I asked for it by changing the narrator to my name and by adding certain biographical elements of my life. So, what can I say? Can I really complain about it? No. Did I think I was going to do this entire tour and fake being the Bret in the book and answer everything in that way and pretend everything was true, that I did have a wife and that I was attacked by this bird doll?
Audience: [laughter]
Ellis: That lasted for about one and a half interviews, and I couldn't keep it up anymore. It was just exhausting - and embarrassing, too. It was not fun to do it. But sure, I don't mind. People ask all the time [about] specifics. 'Did this really happen?' Sometimes it did; sometimes it didn't.
E-mail DI reporter Peter Madsen at:
pfmadsen@gmail.com
