Interview with Bret Easton Ellis
by Mark Amerika and Alexander Laurence
Bret Easton Ellis is the author of four controversial novels including
Less Than Zero, The
Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, and The Informers. He grew up in Los Angeles
where he played keyboards for many new wave groups, hung out in the LA punk scene, and now is often
nostalgic for that time in the early 1980s. He wrote a few novels at an early age, made it
fashionable to go to Bennington, and eventually moved to New York City. He was often attacked for the
intolerable violence in his novels, his character's passivity, and his generally "devoid of morals"
esthetic, especially in 1991's American Psycho which was so violent that one publisher refused
to publish it. Presently, Ellis has been working on a novel about the fashion world and supermodels.
So watch out!
Mark Amerika:
How did you come to write The Informers? Where did it come from? Did you write this right
after American Psycho?
Bret Easton Ellis:
It was written over a ten year period of time. I started working on it in 1983 and I finished it
last August. It was 50% longer. It was the project I could go to, with no intention of ever
publishing it, whenever I got major writer's block with the other novels. I would go back to this
book which seemed to be about a group of people that criss-crossed paths in Los Angeles. That would
relax and loosen me up, whenever I got stuck or tripped over someone's voice in one of my other
novels. The Informers was the place to practice a new monologue or a new voice. It was like
going to a gym, or getting in shape for a marathon.
I went down to Richmond, Virginia to finish this novel which I had been working on for a long time. I
hoped to finish it by Christmas. It was due to the publishers. A friend had a house down there. I had
my own room. I had all my stuff splayed out there. I couldn't write any of this new book, and went
back to The Informers. I started to play around with it. It just became more and more apparent
to me that if I don't push this book out of my life, then I'm going to be fooling around with it, and
I'll never get to this other book that I really want to write. So I offered this to my publishers
with the provision that I would be finishing my other book. I said "You don't have to publish it. I'm
just making good on my deadline. You can take it, or throw it away." To my surprise, they liked it.
There were a few stories, that I wanted in that, we argued over.
Alexander Laurence:
You spoke of the Rikki Lake show before. What kind of influence has the media had, growing up
watching TV, now being 30 years old--how has that informed the novel?
BEE:
The question is "How has television informed every book?" Media has informed all of us, no matter
what artform we pursue, whether painters or musicians. TV has unconsciously, whether we want to admit
it or not, shaped all of our visions to an inordinate degree. How? I don't know. I couldn't give you
specifics. Is it good or bad? I don't know. I think it just is.
MA:
What do you think of the more alternative, subpop, cultural phenomenon like the Internet and the
Zine scene? Is there any connection to what you're doing?
BEE:
Probably not. I'm sent a lot of Zines from other people though. Tower Records in LA has a Zine
section. This last winter I picked up a couple of them. There was this guy who was doing what Dickens
used to do; he was serializing a novel. It was an interesting way to get your work out there. This
novel was very good. The writing in most of the Zines isn't that great. But some fiction in
Esquire and The Atlantic sucks too. The pessimist in me wants to leap out sometimes and
say "This generation is a bunch of dumb asses that just want to sit around and watch Nick at Night."
Then there's those who are trying to get their work out through Zines. It's all about getting your
work read in a time when so few people actually read. There's the Internet now and some people are
reading that instead of touching books. I think that's scary, but I'm old-fashioned. I have a
computer but I've never been on the net. I'm very scared of progress.
AL:
To stress the visual aspects of writing and how media has influenced us, there's one chapter in
The Informers which is all unanswered letters. Younger people, being influenced by media and
being more visually oriented, would not write letters like your character Sean chooses to do?
BEE:
It's true. I didn't think of that when I was writing the story. I liked the conceit of writing an
epistolary section of the book. On the page, letters, and the way the story is set up, it works
better with words rather than dialogue. What am I saying? I know what you're saying. It's a good
point. In terms of scenes in books I'm writing, in terms of how words look on a page, in terms of
space breaks, in terms of how much white should be on a page: these are all things that I think about
constantly. If I see that a paragraph looks--just aesthetically, visually--too long and for some
reason interrupts some narrative flow or fluidity, then I will break that paragraph up. Not
necessarily because of the language or the words, but purely on a visual basis. With a conversation,
you might want to get across the idea that they're not connecting, so in a visual way you can string
along twenty single lines of dialogue. The visual stimulus that words have on a page is something I
think about. I don't know if older writers are concerned with that.
MA:
Speaking of dialogue--there's quite a bit of dialogue in what you write. You seem to have an ear
for dialogue. Is that something innate? Where did you develop that?
BEE:
Everything I wrote is a monologue. Less Than Zero is a monologue by this zombie surfer
dude from L.A. Everyone thinks "Clay, he's so sensitive because he went to school back east." He
decides to leave in the end. That would always bother me when people would say, "the hero of the
novel". He isn't a hero at all to me. He's like this big void. He troubles me more than any other
character that I've written about. That novel is a monologue and so is American Psycho.
MA:
Why you and your novels are successful and widely read is because you have captured a common
language; at the same time, you're stylizing it. Are there any writers or artists who helped you
develop that sense of writing with your ear?
BEE:
That's a really good question. Where does it come from? I would say from seeing a shitload of
movies, reading a ton of books, watching enormous hours of television, and having it all soak in. If
for some reason you want to be a writer, that's where the ear comes from. I don't know what other
reference points there were when I was growing up. It was books, movies, TV and rock and roll.
AL:
What about raw experience? Is what you write about purely literary and formal, or is it a
depiction of a certain world you've been a part of?
BEE:
It's really strange. Getting back to Less Than Zero--everyone always assumed that it was
such an autobiographical novel. Understandably so, because it was a first novel, and everyone thinks
that a first novel is autobiographical. Except for the fact that both Clay and I left Los Angeles and
went to college back east, it's incredibly un-autobiographical. I had actually written two books
before Less Than Zero, where I rid myself of a lot of autobiographical tendencies, when I was
16. When I wrote Less Than Zero, I was really writing about a person that I found totally
morally bankrupt. The reason why he troubles me more than the other characters is because at least he
has a bit of a conscience. Yet he still refuses to break out of his passivity. He still allows evil
to flourish around him. That bothers me more than Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, who I
can look at as a stylized villain or a big metaphor for a ton of stuff, and a launching pad for
anything you want to say was wrong about the 80's: consumerism, yuppiedom, greed, serial killer chic,
etc.
MA:
There's something else to your writing. From the point of view of a reader, you seem connected to
this lineage of writers associated with satire; writers like Swift, Céline, and the Marquis De
Sade. Do you see a connection with your writing to that lineage?
BEE:
I have no idea. Totally not connected. Never informed any of my work. Didn't know who
Céline was till American Psycho was published. I still haven't read much of Sade. I
didn't see a connective thread to any other writers. Still don't. I've been influenced by a lot of
writers, but I still can't see a thread between me and Hemmingway, Joan Didion, or Joyce, or
Flaubert: people who did influence me. When you ask me about a specific writer, I would be pretty
hard pressed to tell you where their voice comes from, although I think that I'm pretty well read.
AL:
Do you ever write autobiographically?
BEE:
It's interesting, this idea of being so overwhelmingly influenced by pop culture, and yet, in
your writing, not that influenced by events in your life. That's a new idea very common to artists of
this generation. You're making up stuff, but at the same time it's autobiographical because it stems
from how you're feeling. I think temperament and sensibility can be autobiographical. American
Psycho was, for me, an autobiographical novel. Not because I went around chopping up prostitutes,
not because I worked on Wall Street, but because the tone of the book accurately reflects how I was
feeling when I was writing it. If I was a well-adjusted happy person doing the writing of that book,
it would have been a much different book. It would have been a lot less violent and bitter.
AL:
How do you feel about all the negative criticism that you received? The Informers received
initially all negative reviews, then it turned around. Readers tend to really like your novels or to
really hate them.
BEE:
I've been reviewed a lot. I've been reviewed in the New York Times eight times: four times daily
and four times in the Sunday. I never got a good review. The one that appeared last Sunday was the
first one. So I got one out of eight. The daily review of this book called it "stupid". They actually
used the phrase "This is a stupid book." This other guy said it wasn't stupid. Everyone has an
opinion. I have to tell you honestly that I just don't care what anyone says. I really can't take
pleasure in that one good review. I got more calls from people who saw the review who were more
gratified than I was. I don't think that the literary establishment is about to take a new overlook
of my career, or work. What you said earlier about people not forgiving me for American
Psycho--that's going to stay true for a long time. You don't write a novel for a reaction. You
write novels for very personal reasons.
(c) 1994 Mark Amerika and Alexander Laurence
Back