An Interview with Bret Easton Ellis
by Jaime Clarke
Bret Easton Ellis was born in Los Angeles, California in 1964. His first novel, LESS THAN ZERO was published in 1985 while he was still a student at Bennington College. THE RULES OF ATTRACTION, Ellis's next novel, was published in 1987. In the fall of 1990 Ellis's publisher, Simon & Schuster, canceled his third novel, AMERICAN PSYCHO on the eve of its release due to external pressure from Simon & Schuster's parent company Gulf & Western. Alfred A. Knopf published the book in the spring of 1991 as a Vintage paperback original. Next Ellis published THE INFORMERS, a collection of linked stories. Ellis's first novel in eight years, GLAMORAMA, was published in January 1999.
This interview took place on two occasions, November 4, 1996 and October 22, 1998
Jaime Clarke: When did you begin writing?
Bret Easton Ellis: I was fairly young. I started with children's books that I would make my parents for Christmas. I'd design the drawings in Magic Marker and write a text and progressively the books got more elaborate. Because I was a very precocious kid, my parents became more alarmed by the subject matter that I was incorporating into each of these children's books and it culminated in this book I wrote called "The Angel's Trip" which sounds like an old Roger Corman late sixties, LSD acid flick. Actually it had a very charming story line about how the angel on top of a Christmas tree falls off on Christmas Eve and has to make her way up the "tinsel trail" back to the top of the tree by Christmas morning before the family wakes up. Unfortunately there are villainous ornaments who orchestrated the angel's fall and who don't want her to get back to the top and so a lot of the good ornaments get slaughtered in the process trying to protect the angel. The angel befriends a couple ornaments, a few Christmas balls, one who betrays her somewhere near the end. And then there's the countdown. It's dawn. There's a ticking clock. 5:59, 7 seconds, etc. Can the angel make it to the top? Can she kill the evil, maniacal dwarf Santa that really wants to be on top himself? It was very violent and very sexually suggestive because some of the ornaments were prostituting themselves in order to get information about where the angel was at certain precise moments on the tree. And yes, I gave this to my parents as a Christmas present. I must have been about ten or eleven at the time.
There was a book that I wrote when I was much younger, that was more innocuous: "Harry the Flat Pancake," which was about a boy who wakes up one morning to find out he's a pancake and very, very flat but that also ended up being a study in chaos and corruption for some reason. Still it was much more innocent than "The Angel's Trip," but I wrote "Harry" when I was around six or seven.
The first full scale novel I attempted was in 1978 and it was based on a summer where I was sent off to work in one of my grandfather's casinos in Nevada because I had really bad grades and my parents--actually my sisters who showed my parents--found pot in my room. I went to Buckley, a very corrupt Beverly Hills-type high school where you could actually bribe the principal by taking him out to lunch at Ma Maison and he would change your grade from an F to a D to get you out of summer school. So instead of summer school, I went to work at one of my grandfather's hotels in Nevada to shape me up because I was a real horror, a really bad kid. I stayed about four weeks before my grandfather fired me. But the "experiment" actually worked. I really did shape up. I met a lot of native American Indians working in the mines there and they also had jobs in the hotels and so I saw a slice of life that I'd never been privy to before. "Like--hey, you should thank your lucky stars you spoiled little brat that you're not 15 and working in silver mines" I really came back a very different kid and during the fall of 1978 when I got back to L.A., I started to write this novel about this young man's experience working in a casino in Nevada and everything that happens to him and that was my first novel. The book that really made me want to write a "serious" novel was after I read The Sun Also Rises for a class in high school. I had never really paid attention to language before when I read novels and that was the first book that made me pay attention to sentences, how paragraphs were structured, why the dialogue sounded they way it did and in quick succession I wrote two novels when I was in high school. One I completed my junior year, one was completed senior year. They both are very similar. The second one was close to what a lot of Less Than Zero ended up being about.
I began writing at a very young age and I think the reason was my mother was an avid reader and I was constantly taken to the library. This was actually before a time when my parents bought books and my mom went to the library a lot, so I read constantly and I think the impulse to write started from the fact that reading gave me so much pleasure that I wanted to mimic that pleasure, wanted to copy it somehow. So the impetus to write started very young.
JC: Also, didn't your maternal grandmother write children's books? Could that have influenced you to write children's books?
BEE: That could be it, but I actually think I wrote my first children's book before I was aware of my grandmother having written a couple of children's books of her own. But I don't necessarily think my grandmother really had any influence over me becoming a writer. I simply wanted to become a writer and the reasons are much more ambiguous and complex than someone in the family being a writer and having that person influence me.
JC: Did someone at Buckley recognize your talent early on, in an English class or a creative writing class?
BEE: No, they didn't have creative writing classes in high school, but there was a teacher there who really turned me on to contemporary American fiction. I read a lot as a teenager, new books coming out, anyway. But there was a teacher at Buckley, Steve Robbins, who recognized that I was really interested in becoming a writer and he became a friend of mine. But since I wasn't writing fiction, I can't say he was influential in that way, but I did write a lot of journalism for him. I took a class called The Personal Essay. We read a lot of New Journalism and that's where I discovered Joan Didion, who became a major influence on Less Than Zero. So, yeah, he was definitely someone who recognized something in me, some yearning or some desire to be a writer and kind of coaxed it and helped me along in a lot of ways.
JC: It might be hard now, but can you think of what you wanted to be before you started writing?
BEE: I was interested in acting. I wanted to be an actor and I did act in a couple of elementary school plays. I played the prince in a stage version of Cinderella when I was in the fourth grade. I also wanted to write movies, but growing up in Los Angeles, you're around that all the time. I wanted to be an actor and I took an acting class, but I couldn't roll around a classroom and be told, "Be a doughnut!" for an hour. The first day of class I realized I was way too private a person and the only way that I could express myself artistically without totally humiliating myself was through writing.
I still have fantasies of being a musician and that 's one thing I definitely was going to embark on before Bennington. I was in a band in high school.
JC: What was the atmosphere like when you first got to Bennington?
BEE: I'm not going to pretend that I was real innocent, coming from L.A. I mean I was pretty jaded so when I got to Bennington and met other people like myself, it was a little too easy to slip into the Bennington life. The kind of kid who went there I already knew, so I didn't feel particularly alienated or freaked out. The other thing about Bennington was that most of the students were artists, and most of the kids I went to high school with were definitely not interested in art or if they wanted to be artists they wanted to be screenwriters. So going to Bennington and hanging out with people who actually wanted to write novels or were writing poetry or were seriously considering being dance majors was kind of thrilling and exciting. That's what ended up making the transition from LA to Bennington a really smooth one. It was actually very fun the first year-so fun in fact that I was almost on the verge of being thrown out.
JC: What was your first writing workshop at Bennington like?
BEE: The first workshop I took at Bennington was only open to juniors and seniors. It was taught by Joe McGinniss. I hadn't really applied to any classes my first two weeks there. I was feeling the space out, meeting people, tapping kegs, whatever. But I realized it was getting kind of out of hand and that I had to get some classes. So I looked in the course guide and realized that the only class I wanted to take was this workshop taught by McGinniss. It had already started, but I submitted some of the non-fiction pieces I had written during high school for Steve Robbins, about youth culture in L.A. and very much in the style of Joan Didion. I submitted these pieces to get into Joe's class, thinking "no way," but I'd just give it a shot for the hell of it.
Then I got a note from Joe McGinniss asking me to come to his office. So I met with Joe and he said "Yeah, I'm going to let you into this class based on what you've shown me and I also want to send these to my agent in New York and also to my editor." I was kind of delighted but really horrified at the same time. I just thought it was a very scary proposition. I was eighteen. I was too young. It seemed like too much responsibility. I hadn't met a lot of juniors and seniors at Bennington, but I took the class anyway. It was about writing non-fiction and journalism and using fictional techniques. We had to write three essays that term and the first essay I wrote was about my first month and a half at Bennington. I didn't change names, I wrote exactly what I saw happening, the people who were doing drugs, acting rowdy, the parties, sex. The piece caused a complete shit storm. I became vilified. My box was continually stuffed with notes from people horrified that I had written this. There were a couple of people in the piece who had spiked some punch with LSD or MDMA, and a lot of people had gotten really wasted and when I wrote about this I just named names. There was another guy who bit some girl's neck and sent her to the infirmary, so I kind of played up this guy's vampirical tendencies. He was furious. I really only used first names, but the campus is so small everyone knew who I was writing about. Joe flipped for this piece, and everyone in the class loved it, too. Unfortunately, a lot of people mentioned in this piece didn't like it and were really pissed and were worried it would get back to the administration. I realized later that I was an idiot and should've changed the names.
JC: What about the usefulness of workshops? Do you think there are limitations to what a workshop can teach a writer?
BEE: Absolutely not. No limitations whatsoever. It is hands-on experience. Reading books is the best experience for a writer, just reading a lot of books. But workshops are pretty essential for reasons that you might not think of immediately. First of all, they make you write and there are a lot of times you don't want to write. You have an idea for a story and it's very easy to be lazy, to just think it through and walk around with it in your head. So the workshop puts that pressure on you to put on paper the material that you're thinking about. Also, if you're really smart, workshops inure you to criticism and to how people interpret your work. A lot of people say incredibly moronic things in workshops. There are very few people in workshops who can pull themselves back from how they feel about you and what they know about you and just focus in on your work. I think it's really important to deal with criticism and to slowly start building an armor against it. Not against good editing or smart guidance, but a lot of times you have to ignore what people say about your work because the reason one writes is intuitive, you don't even quite know where it comes from. So hearing someone bitch about how you put this story together can be decidedly unhelpful. I know that doesn't sound like what workshop should be about because you'd think they'd be about communicating your ideas and hearing what other people have to say. I 'm with that to a point. But once you hear what everyone has to say, you have to build a wall where your temperament and your reason for writing is protected because it has nothing to do with what anyone else says, and workshops give off the feeling that they do. Workshops are also only as good as the teacher who oversees them. The worst thing for a workshop is a teacher who falls asleep and lets students bicker about the use of the word 'pickle' in a sentence. A great teacher can really make it an exciting, vital process on the road to becoming a writer.
JC: What are your writing habits?
BEE: I don't write everyday. I think about writing everyday, but I don't write everyday. There are days where I write a lot, and there are days where I can't do it. Somedays I either have notes or parts of things that I put into my computer, reorganize or edit. It really depends on what's going on in my life, it really depends what kind of mood I'm in. Sometimes the material overrides the mood and makes you push forward and say, "I really want to do this, I have the impulse to do this right now, I'm gonna do it." And there are other days where you feel like crap and you can't do it. You can't will a good paragraph, you can't wish it to work out.
JC: You write longhand, right? And then you enter it in the computer? Is there something in that ritual?
BEE: I write everything longhand. All notes, even the outline that I complete before I write a book is done in longhand and then put into the computer (those are the notes that I'll refer to during the writing of the book). It's really amazing to me that the four books that have been published so far were really all done on typewriter. I didn't have a computer until very late in the game. I really was kind of suspicious, and I felt that I was so technologically immature that I really couldn't work a computer. I was afraid of the computer. So American Psycho was three drafts done on a typewriter which now seems to me...I'm just really dumbstruck, I'm totally stunned that I did that.
JC: Is there an edit between the writing in longhand and putting it on disk?
BEE: It depends on the chapter. If the chapter is kind of tricky, then I'll do another version in longhand where I'll edit and change stuff. If the material is pretty straight-forward--and right now the book I'm working on has a lot of exposition and expository dialogue--and it's easy and I just know exactly what a character has to say, etc., etc. Then you can place it in the computer. But other sequences that are trickier, paragraphs that are hard, or dialogue that needs a particular spin, I'll rewrite it a couple of times long hand and then put it in the computer. I'm also editing on the computer constantly.
JC: You've talked before about how a paragraph looks aesthetically on a page, how you'll change it if it looks too long, etc. Talk about this idea of the visual stimulus outside of what's going on with the actual words.
BEE: There are very few books where I was consciously aware of this. There were two times where it was amazing to me. First one was Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, where the whiteness surrounding the words is as important as the words themselves in a lot of ways. And the whiteness surrounding the words adds an extra dimension of emotionality to the book that it wouldn't have had if it was done with very close set type and every chapter ran into another as it usually does in most books. There was something so suggestive about the way the paragraphs were set up in that book and the way the whiteness covered everything else. When you turned the page it was a page where white dominated and then there were two paragraphs that just floated alone in this whiteness. That summed up what was going on in the book and the themes of the book as much as the action in the book.
This is also true, I think, of Ulysses where Joyce does certain things with paragraphs and with spacing paragraphs and with having paragraphs four or five pages long. I do think that a reader--besides what's going on with the action of the text--finds something very suggestive about the print, about the kind of type that's used, about the way a writer sets up paragraphs. If you start reading a paragraph and you notice that it's going on for two or three pages, I think that just does something emotionally to you. Some people might say "Skip this," and think, "I gotta get to something quicker." Some people might just fall into this very fluid, flowing prose and understand they're just going to have to float with it a little while. The way the pages in a book look changes your mind about the book as you're reading it. If you turn a page and see a very clipped conversation between two people where each sentence is three or four words, you're going to get an emotion just from that, perhaps realizing, okay these people are maybe upset with each other, obviously they don't want to really talk that much to each other and that says as much as what people are actually saying. Some people might find that a very fancy theory and don't look at books aesthetically in that way, but I do.
JC: Do you work on several different projects at once? I read somewhere that you'd go to the stories in The Informers when you were stuck on something else.
BEE: The Informers are stories that I wrote in-between novels. It wasn't ever supposed to be a full-fledged novel, and I don't consider it a novel. It's a group of short stories and I think it's better to read it knowing that it's a group of short stories rather than approaching it as a novel. I think if you go into reading it as a novel, you're utterly confused and you'll have no idea what's going on. But as of right now, no, I'm not working on several projects at once. Occasionally there'll be a magazine assignment or some kind of screenwriting thing that seems viable because you're petrified about money. It keeps coming back to money, but money is really important to writers. The safety of your life really depends much more on it than other friends who have the safety net of say a job with the regularity of a paycheck. If you sell a lot of books, obviously there are years that are pretty good, where you feel safe, but it's a rollercoaster. There are years where you better save up because you realize that next year, that book's not going to be completed, that movie isn't going to be happening and so you've really got to plan. The only projects that end up interrupting a novel are magazine pieces and occasionally screenwriting stuff.
JC: Who else besides Joan Didion influenced you early on? You mentioned the Hemingway book, were there any others that you can think of that were a major influence, or was it pretty much Play It As It Lays?
BEE: It's hard for me to see now how Play It As It Lays or really any Didion has influenced my work lately. But initially, yeah, Didion, Hemingway, and at that point, early on, that was enough. You really don't need that many more people to influence you. One is enough, two is enough. Later on, I would have to say, while I was working on The Rules of Attraction, it was Ulysses by James Joyce. I took a class on it, actually at Bennington. It was a class on the postmodern novel and Ulysses took up the bulk of the semester. We also read Nabokov's Pale Fire, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. And so I found some of that creeping into the work a little, but it was just the sheer scope of Ulysses that was really inspiring. I can't say it influenced me in a way where I write sentences differently, but it really inspired me. And of course, I've always said I totally think movies have influenced me completely and I think it's hard to not be influenced by movies if you're our age or even a writer in your 40's. Movies have really altered the way novels are written.
JC: What writers do you admire now? Are there writers you always read when they have a new book?
BEE: I'll always read Don DeLillo, Robert Stone, Martin Amis, even though I don't really think he's written a wholly successful novel, but I do think he's a pretty great writer, sentence by sentence. There are a lot of writers that I read everything they write because, oddly enough, I end up becoming friends with them; and since I know a lot of writers, I tend to read all their books. For example, Richard Ford, who I really didn't have that much interest with at first in terms of his work, I now tend to read everything he writes and I kind of have a new appreciation for him that I didn't have at first because I got to know him personally. And I think Independence Day is an amazing book. And I'm someone who couldn't finish The Sportswriter. I want to reread it now. There's some skimming you have to do because the narrator is overly verbose and Frank Bascombe just wants to tell you about every little dust speck he sees on the highway of life. I also tend to keep up with most writers of my generation. I tend to read everything that people my age have written so far. There are very few young writers that I've not read.
JC: What are your all time favorite books?
BEE: It's going to be a very weird list. Sentimental Education by Flaubert. I'd say Ulysses by Joyce, I'm gonna say The Sun Also Rises but Hemingway even though I think A Farewell to Arms is a better book, I think Islands in the Stream is a better book, I think A Moveable Feast is a better book but I'd still have to say The Sun Also Rises. Of course, Play It As It Lays by Didion, as well as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album.
If I had to go with when I was younger and the books that really obsessed me when I was a teenager, I'd definitely put down Salem's Lot by Stephen King (laughs). It was a book I was obsessed with for a year. When that book came out, I think it was 75 or 76, I was about 11 or 12, and, literally, it may have been the only book I read that year. I read it 12, 13, 14 times. That's something I really haven't admitted before.
JC: Do you read poetry?
BEE: I'm continually, always reading a book of poetry, especially when I'm writing because there'll be an image in a poem, or a word in a poem that will spark off something in my head, much more so than prose does. I guess because poetry's so concentrated that the ideas and feelings in a poem go boom, boom, boom, much more quickly than if you read, say, a book or a story where everything is in a much longer form. So I'm always reading poetry, but I never wrote poetry. I never even wrote song lyrics. I wrote music for the bands, but I could never write the lyrics. The one time I tried, it was really humiliating. Maybe if I kept up with it, it would have been great, but I just didn't have the temperament for it.
JC: What do you think is the function of novels, fiction, in society?
BEE: I was on a panel rather pretentiously titled "Whither Goes the Novel" and it was very interesting because we were talking about the best seller lists of 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990. And the shocking differences between even 1970 and 1980 where the top ten books were literary books, Vidal, Updike, Roth, Fowles. These were literary books that were huge. John Updike's Couples was published in 1968 and was on the cover of Time magazine and caused a rift in the culture. Portnoy's Complaint also caused a major rift. Then you look at the lists of the 1980's and it's Clan of the Cave Bear and a lot of Stephen King creeping up and in the 90's it's all Anne Rice and John Grisham. Corporate and fat and shiny books. I don't think there's any literary fiction on those lists at all. None at all. And it's very rare for a huge writer, someone whose going to be in that Pantheon of Letters, like Joan Didion, to get on the best seller list anymore where she would be on it at one time for months and months and months and these books were discussed at parties and everyone was reading them and talking about them as much as they were talking about any of the current movies or current rock music. Now, in the overall culture books play a much smaller role in peoples lives. Even people who don't read books, who don't touch books, I think were at one time touched by the way certain books had an impact on the culture. Now it seems to be very rare. I think books sometimes still have impact, but on a much smaller, more focused group of people.
I actually know people, and I'm shocked to say it, who don't read books, who don't buy books. In fact the guy I dedicated American Psycho to, Bruce Taylor, couldn't even get through American Psycho; he said it was "too hard". He said he read the sex scenes. He also didn't want me to dedicate this book to him, once he found out what it was about (laughs) and he begged me to take his name off the dedication. The book had to be dedicated to him, mostly because he was the one person who really taught me what's funny and what's not. And I always looked at American Psycho, as sick as this might sound, as a really funny book. And I know that all the humor in that book comes from hanging out with this guy, Bruce Taylor, who still is the funniest person I know and he doesn't read books. He has a really dark, twisted sense of humor that I didn't have before I met him. He's still my best friend and he lives out in LA and I've known him since the seventh grade and he doesn't read books, though he's the sort of person who years ago would have.
JC: Where did the first impulses for American Psycho came from?
BEE: When I moved to New York--actually even before I moved to New York in early 87--I wanted to write a book about New York. I visited New York a lot and I knew I wanted to set a book here. The city inspired me, like it does all writers. And so when I moved here, I started meeting a lot of young guys who were working on Wall St. and I thought, great, here's the perfect takeoff point for what I want to do; it's about money, it's about hollow money, it's about how can these kids be making these enormous sums of money during this time. So I'd started planning an outline of the book in December of 86 about New York and tentatively about Wall St., about the whole yuppie situation that was going on, about people who had graduated from college and were rampaging through the city. So it became a book about a guy who worked on Wall St. And so I began to do research, and research is a whole other area we can go into because I'm really not sure if research is such an important part of writing fiction. I knew a lot of friends at Bennington whose brothers were making a fortune on Wall St. and just living the whole 80's life and so I hung out with these guys for about two weeks because I wanted to find out what exactly people were doing. Now of course we all know they're in jail and so I know now why they couldn't talk about certain things, why they didn't take me to their offices, why they weren't extremely clear cut about what exactly their jobs entailed, how they were making so much money, etc.
JC: So you were hanging out with them at the end of the day?
BEE: At the end of the day, it was always meet at Harry's, meet the new bimbo they're dating, what's the hippest restaurant, talk about buying a car, talk about houses in the Hamptons they wanted to rent, which club to go to, where their dealer was, buying suits, clothes, trips, etc. So after two exhausting weeks of hanging out with these people I understood that my narrator would be a serial killer. I don't know where I made the connection, it just seemed logical that one of these guys would be driven so nuts by how status obsessed everyone is, that it would incite him into becoming a murderer. It just was a logical connection to me as a writer. And so I took off from there. I also think that the book was informed by a severe depression and black period I was going through, and I still maintain that it's the most autobiographical of all my novels because the mood of the book completely mirrored the mood I was in the three years it took to write it.
JC: That's a dangerous statement. Some people will misinterpret it.
BEE: Well, that's the risk you take. And I'm not really sure I'm interested in those people.
Part Two
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