Interview with Bret Easton Ellis
by Jaime Clarke
Part Two
JC: What about the research for American Psycho?
BEE: The research that I did was only to inform the murder sequences because I really had no idea where to go with that. These were sequences, four or five of them scattered throughout the book, that I left blank and didn't work on until the book was completed; then I went back and filled those scenes in. I didn't really want to write them, but I knew they had to be there. So I read a lot of books about serial killers and picked up details from that and then I had a friend who introduced me to someone who could get me criminology textbooks from the FBI that really went into graphic detail about certain motifs in the actual murders committed by serial killers and detailed accounts of what serial killers did to bodies, what they did to people they murdered, especially sex killings. That's why I did the research, because I couldn't really have made this up. What happened, though, was that once I had all these details and descriptions down and I started writing these sequences, Patrick Bateman's voice entered into the scenario and he perverted them even farther because he'd been in my head for so long and he was such an extreme character that any sentence I would write, somehow he would get into it. I think he gave those sequences an extra spin that I could not have gotten from pulling them straight out of textbooks and plopping them right in the midst of the novel.
JC: What was your like life during the time you were writing American Psycho?
BEE: I was fairly down on myself so I felt I deserved to be writing a book like that. I felt I really deserved it. You know, no one held a gun up to my head to write this book. I had a comfortable lifestyle and it's not like I was working in a coal mine during the days and working on this book at night because I needed to feed the kids. It was an artistic choice I made and I wanted to write this book. But I cried a lot, I drank a lot, I did a lot of drugs during this period, at times I was a real mean son of a bitch, but so what? I couldn't really feel sorry for myself while I was working on it, but it was a really bad period. I was genuinely unhappy; it was not fun.
JC: How do you go about outlining a novel like American Psycho?
BEE: I think it's incredibly important if you are a non-narrative writer to have an outline. I don't think it's crucial if you have a plot-driven book, but I think in that case you pretty much have a story in mind and the story carries the book along. If you're writing the sort of novel that I tend to write, where the sequences are much more random and the effect ultimately is a cumulative one, then you really need to be very careful about what scenes you include and which scenes you just ignore and don't deal with. The first page of an outline, for me, is basically the entire movement of the book and what's going to happen. It would almost read like a book jacket description, I guess, but much longer and with much more detail. For example, American Psycho: Patrick Bateman lives in New York, he does this, he knows these people, he's a killer, he likes this, he doesn't like this, and in the end this is going to happen, or he's going to be here in the end and you'll meet him here in the beginning. Then I have a breakdown of every scene or at least an idea of every scene. For example, there's a scene where Bateman's going to take bloody sheets to the cleaners to get washed. Okay, that's going to be a scene, where's that scene going to be placed? I'm going to put it before he goes to the Yale Club, or maybe it will occur after the lunch he has with so and so. The outline takes about three of four months to complete--where every scene that you want your narrator to experience, whether it's going to the Hamptons, whether it's going to a restaurant, whether it's murdering someone, is in a fairly precise order. There will be notes accompanying those scenes and sometimes the notes accompanying those scenes are longer than the scenes themselves turn out to be. So the outline is huge. The outline is incredibly detailed and it ends up being very long. It includes all the characters, a shorthand on their ticks, or what they have to do with the narrator. Then there are notes about certain motifs you want throughout the book, certain things you want to repeatedly occur and then once that's all done, the trickiest part is getting the voice down. That's the part of the outline that I tend to go back to the most often when I'm working: what can be included in this narrator's voice and what cannot be included. For example, with Patrick Bateman the notes read "include constant references to status, products, clothing," etc. The notes also read "omit metaphors, similes, anything where Patrick Bateman can see something as something else because everything is too surface oriented for that to occur." Cut anything that seems lyrical or poetic. If any of that comes out in the writing and it could be the kind of sentence I love and is very beautiful and flowing to me, I would still remove it because it doesn't fit into Patrick Bateman's voice. That is also true for the college kids in The Rules of Attraction, where there were certain things that they would notice, and there were certain things that I as a writer would notice but that they wouldn't notice and I'd have to cut. But since they're narrating, I think it's the writer's responsibility to be as true to those voices as possible. And if that means cutting out things that you really like, well that's too bad. You set this book up, this guys narrating it, it has to be his way. That's why I'm very surprised and disappointed in a lot of books that are narrated by characters who sound like college professors or accomplished writers. Even Updike, with the Rabbit books, probably knew that he could not have Harry Angstrom talk the way that Updike wrote and so he put it in third person. It's just there's always something patently false, many times when you pick up a book and it's narrated by someone where the writing is poetic and detailed and rich you get an inkling that the character would not notice those details, would not notice those connections. I think it probably loses me a lot of readers staying that pure to a voice. I know that Norman Mailer, for example, when he wrote about American Psycho, said that I'm a writer who believes in ultimately staying as true to this character as possible, but often a richer novel is one where the writer throws in a couple of things that the writer does notice, where the writer doesn't totally give himself over to a narrator. But it feels right to me, it's something that I'm interested in doing as a writer.
JC: That's interesting because in the workshops they're always saying, well, first person narration is so hard to do well, which I would agree with, but they're always trying to push people into third person and it's always been hard for me to get a grasp of the function of the third person, not technically, but in telling the story it's just so much more interesting to me, in first. Maybe it's just a preference to go with the voice of a character.
BEE: There's many more chances for ambiguity, for leaving stuff out, which to me can be as great as stuff that's kept in, stuff that you're wondering about, where you're constantly kept in question, where you're constantly turning the pages, wondering if this person's going to notice these things, or if he's going to make this connection, or if he's going to say this, or do that. You know everything when you're reading a novel written in third person. Everything's going to be worked out because the writer oversees the entire canvas. There's a lot more suspense, I think, in first person novels. And I think even more so when you're working in first person, present tense, which I always do. Only now am I realizing how tricky a mode it is, and I know there's a lot of resistance towards that and I've been criticized roundly by people, most recently by Ian Frazier who went on his little tirade in an interview about first person-present tense writing where it always seems to him to be like, "oh, I pick up the phone, oh, Madonna's on line one," I say. "Oh, hi, Madonna, how are you doing?" (laughs). I don't think it's that radical, but for some people it's a tricky thing to adjust to, reading a book that's written in the first person-present tense.
JC: The furor over American Psycho came on suddenly. What about it really surprised you the most.
BEE: It actually did come on suddenly. There were a lot of warning signs if I look back on it. But when that publisher decided he wouldn't publish the book, that came very suddenly. I knew there was a lot of pre-controversy and there were problems in-house and the guy who did my covers before backed away saying it was the most disgusting thing he'd ever read, blahblahblah. On a Monday night when I talked to my agent and she said, "Listen, I think we're going to have to move this book because I think they're not going to publish it," I was totally, totally shocked. Then later that week when the announcement was made, I talked to my editor and he told me that in fact this was true, it was really shocking. This was the last thing in the world I thought would've happened. I thought maybe they would publish the book and maybe people would be upset by it, I guess, but I never thought they would not publish the book and I never thought that, for example, the National Organization for Women would call for a boycott of the book, or the book would cause this kind of fury. I just didn't think this was going to happen. I didn't think there was enough in the book to make it that shocking. Probably, in retrospect, I should have known better because one person who had read some of it in manuscript form had taken a deep breath and said, "You're gonna get in a lot of trouble. This is really some of the most disgusting things I've ever read in my life. And if you think you're not going to get in a lot of trouble, you're really quite mistaken." And I thought, well this person doesn't really read books, so I'm not going to listen to this person. Also, my agent had read it and said it was fine and my editor had read it and said it was fine. There was no real sense of pre-publication doom surrounding the book. So when the ax came down from Simon & Schuster, it was genuinely shocking.
JC: Whose most responsible for the outrage about this book, Simon & Schuster? NOW? Who?
BEE: I think it all comes together. I mean, listen, when a book gets canceled by a major publishing house a month before it was supposed to be printed and sent out to bookstores, that's a story. That doesn't happen to novels. In fact it's almost unprecedented. There are non-fiction books that are stopped for certain legalities, about defamation of character and things like that, but defamation of clothing (laughs). Once this `story' took hold and once the book became the subject of the spotlight's glare, yeah, then everyone started running and attacking it. That didn't seem so surprising to me. That was just everyone coming out of the woodwork heading towards this great target. Everybody who slammed it, or yelled about it received a lot of publicity. Everyone got a higher profile because of it, whether you were a critic and spent three pages bashing it in The New York Times, or you were Tammy Bruce, the head of the LA chapter of NOW. It just raised everyone's profile. Being canceled surprised me, but all the other junk that happened in the media didn't. The only other thing that did kind of surprise me was that no one, at least in America, came to any kind of whole-hearted defense of the book. John Irving wrote a very thoughtful essay about Roger Rosenblatt's review of the book for The New York Times, but even John Irving couldn't quite come out and say American Psycho is about this, etc. etc. He really couched his argument. He was very careful. Mailer really didn't do it, either.
JC: Did that disappoint you?
BEE: No, it didn't disappoint me. I was surprised that they took the book seriously enough to even consider writing about it.
JC: In the atmosphere where everyone was freaked out about it.
BEE: Yeah, I was surprised that they even bothered. But it was also surprising that no one even came forward and said anything positive about the book. Not that it deserves to be talked about in that light, but I still thought at least someone would.
JC: It deserves to be taken seriously and read.
BEE: I think now that the controversy is over it's being read by a less hysterical public. I think the people who do like it and who do read it appreciate it for their own reasons and they aren't influenced by the reviews and reactions when the book first appeared.
JC: In an interview someone asked if Patrick Bateman was based on anyone you knew and your answer was, "Partly guys I met on Wall St. partly myself, and partly my father." That's an interesting statement. Could you say specifically what characteristics are yours and what are your father's?
BEE: I moved to New York after--somewhat improbably--having written a book that I wrote for credit at Bennington that turned into this...thing. No one thought that this book was going to sell as many copies as it did. We had no promotional money. There was not going to be any ads. There was a first printing of about 5,000 copies. And it just went out there, all alone, into the void. That was fine with me. I was happy to get a book published, I was happy to start a career. But then...something happened. Less Than Zero was really a word-of-mouth book. There was not a lot of press at first. It just existed and you could pick it up or you didn't have to pick it up. So I moved to New York--this is an awful thing to say--as a very successful young man. I made an enormous amount of money and I moved to Manhattan and I sort of got sucked up into this whole yuppie-mania that was going on at the time and I think in a lot of ways, working on American Psycho was my way of fighting against myself slipping into a certain kind of lifestyle. Everytime I would sit down to write this book, I would gradually get my head cleared somehow and think, "Oh my god-are you really gonna like go out and wear this suit tonight and hang out with these people at Nell's? Is this really what you're life is going to end up being about? Are you really going to decorate your apartment with expensive southwestern-style furniture? Just, you know, calm down a minute and take stock . This would happen everytime I sat down to write this book. I identified with Patrick Bateman initially because in a lot of ways he was like me. He was young, he was successful, he lived a certain kind of lifestyle, and so in that respect I saw him often as myself. That's why I consider the novel autobiographical.
At the same time, I think it was a criticism of the way my father lived his life because he did slip into that void. He was the ultimate consumer. He was the sort of person who was completely obsessed with status and about wearing the right suits and owning a certain kind of car and staying at a certain kind of hotel and eating in a certain kind of restaurant regardless of whether these things gave him pleasure or not. So the book, in the end, was a criticism of his values. And they were values that he passed on to me and I still can't say I've completely shaken off. There are still things that I recognize about myself that I know my father infected me with. Certain attitudes I have about things. I still can't get a cheap haircut. My father always took me--ever since I was a young man--to a certain kind of hair salon to get my hair cut (laughs). And I cannot--even though I think it's outrageous to spend whatever it costs for a men's haircut in Manhattan, eighty dollars? ninety dollars? I still can't escape that pull. It's always there. In a way I guess, American Psycho was my send off to my dad, my way of saying, "I'm going to escape your grasp somehow" and I think that's how he informed the book.
JC: Previously you've pointed out that there is a difference between what is shocking, and what is offensive. Is it okay to do both with respect to writing? Is it okay to be offensive?
BEE: You have to ask yourself: what is offensive? Everyone has their own different list of what is offensive and what is not. I don't think there's anything offensive that you can do in writing. There's nothing you can do that's going to offend me in a book unless it's really stupid writing and it's a really stupid idea for a book or you've got moronic dialogue or stuff that really rings false. That will offend me. But in terms of subject--you can write about pedophiles, someone who slays thousands of people, a corrupt politician--none of that is going to offend me. But if you really handle it poorly on an aesthetic level, then I'm going to be probably more upset. But I don't think there's any topic you can touch that's going to be offensive to me.
JC: Just the way that it might be presented.
BEE: Yeah, it is really, ultimately, about presentation and it's also about, at least from my point of view, style and how you present your material. I think it's very hard because of how we've been pulverized by visual images to be genuinely shocked by what we read in a book. I find it very rare to come across something where I'm gasping. I might gasp at some kind of revelation that happens in the book, but it's rarely a scene of sexuality or a scene of violence that makes me freak out. It's usually something more subtle than that.
JC: What is the residual effect of American Psycho on your life?
BEE: Well, I think it's two-fold. In some ways it damaged my reputation. Then on the same level, in other ways, it completely enhanced it. In the end, it completely changed whatever reputation I had and pushed it in a different direction. It also made me very distrustful of the publishing industry. I'm much more wary of publishers now. I'm much wary of editors, I'm much more wary of how the business side of publishing works. But I can't really say there's been any personal residual effect from the book. In the end I can really only look at it as something that was ultimately positive. I don't really see any negative side to publishing that book. I really don't. I think in the end, it's a book that more people appreciate than don't. And when it was first published I thought, "Okay, I'm sort of ruined now and this has wrecked whatever career I might have had as a writer." But in the end, I really don't think it did. I think it might have helped it more than I even want to admit. Which is kind of, at the very least, thought-provoking. Residual effect? I just don't know. I just don't look at my life in a lot of ways as something defined by the novels I've written. Writing is just one aspect of my life and it's very easy to fall into it everyday and do it and yes the books reflect who you are, but also there's a whole other canvas that exists that's dotted with friends and lovers and relationships and going out and having a good time and dealing with your family and bad things that happen and good things that happen. All of it not connected to writing, or to being published, or having `things' happen to your books. There are many other things in my life right now that are more important to me than writing. Writing is important and it's one thing, but there are a lot of other things that affect me much more. I would have to say certain relationships had a much more residual effect on my life than whatever reception to a certain novel did. Or my father's death had a much more residual effect than any review, or any success or lack of success a certain book had. The whole publishing thing is really kind of minor stuff compared to the tangibles, the real life stuff, the stuff that doesn't have anything to do with those nasty words like "Career" and "Reputation" and all that crap.
JC: It seems like it would be easier to write "nice books". It seems you risk so much with technique, with the things you do. At a certain point don't you think, is it worth it?
BEE: It's very strange to me that you say this because in the end it's really not a choice. It's really just a reflection of the writer, whether the subject is vampires, Japanese businessman taking over Los Angeles, evil corrupt law firms, or whatever. It's just a reflection of who you are. I don't think you can force yourself, at least not to the ends of an honest book, to write in a way that you don't really want to write. You write how you write. Some people will like it, some people will not like it. But it's not really about pleasing people or making people understand things. Writing is really a very selfish thing. You're writing a book because you want to write a book and you're interested in these characters and you're interested in this story and you're interested in this style and you're basically masturbating at your desk with all these papers and these pens and if it goes out there, hits a nerve, fine; if it doesn't, well, fine, too. It's really about expressing yourself in a lot of ways, to yourself and not to anyone else. You're pleasing yourself when you're writing, you're not pleasing a bunch of other people. You're not constructing a little candy house, or a little gingerbread house that everyone can take a piece of and feel sweet and nice and that makes themselves feel good about themselves or about reading a book. Writing a book is actually a very selfish and very aggressive thing. You're writing this book and putting it out there and it says, Read me! Read me! Read me!
The other thing is, everyone has different tastes. I have friends who get incredibly upset about a negative review. I'm always wondering, well, why are you entitled to a good review? Why is anyone entitled to a critic hugging you and kissing your ass just because you wrote a book? Some people like some work, some people don't like other work. In my case, the main core of a lot of literary critics in the United States don't respond to how I work. I don't think they necessarily hate me because I was very successful at a young age, or I've had bestsellers or whatever. I think it's just because they don't like how I work or what I'm writing about. I also think it's a very conservative, very old fart kind of establishment that's writing about me; but I don't think they're writing about me in the way they do because they hate me or they have a personal grudge against me. I just don't think they like my books. Donna Tartt submitted stories to The Atlantic--I remember when this happened--and one of the editors took her out to lunch and said, "Listen, you'd be better off selling shoes." And if Donna Tartt had listened to this person, she would've never finished The Secret History. I mean, if someone from The Atlantic Monthly takes you out to lunch and tells you this, you'd be crushed. But you've also got to be, like her, strong enough to shrug it off and say "Well, they're wrong and I'm going to write my book, whether anyone likes it or anyone doesn't." That's what you've got to do.
JC: What kind of research did you do for GLAMORAMA?
BEE: I started researching this book by immersing myself in the fashion world--going to shows, meeting designers, getting a feeling for the milieu. But what happens when I start doing research on a book is that I get very frustrated because I'm writing fiction and I already know what I want to do with that novel and I'm usually disappointed by "the facts." Whether it was Wall Street in AMERICAN PSYCHO or the fashion world in GLAMORAMA--the facts I come up against often don't really connect to what I want to do as a novelist so I end up saying, "Screw it, I'll just go my own way and make it up." The other thing that everyone has been asking about concerns how much research I did in terms of all the celebrity names.
JC: I guess I was thinking about all the different locales and all the names of celebrities.
BEE: Well, it's really only Paris, Milan and London--all of which I've been to a few times. Actually, I'm really not that well-traveled at all. Even though half of GLAMORAMA takes place in Paris, I don't fell I really know that city all that well. When I was working on the book I'd occasionally go to Paris on business and since I knew what was going to happen in the book I'd scout out the city on my free time. So even though I never lived there, I got kind of a feel for it. I know the streets, a few hotels, the metro, a couple of clubs, stuff like that. Other research included taking the QE2 to Europe. But hanging out in Paris doesn't necessarily inform the work. The book isn't about Paris or Europe--that's just a backdrop. With the names--I just think that living in this society, in a culture that's so celebrity-obsessed--most of the names came to me without any effort. If I felt I needed a lot of names to fill up a paragraph--I didn't consult a list, they just came to me. It was simple.
JC: Often literature has a timeless quality to it but GLAMORAMA is a novel that feels like it happened an hour ago. what about the juxtaposition of these two ideas--timelessness versus writing a novel that is contemporaneous with our time and culture?
BEE: God, I hate the word "literature" and all that it implies. I don't think about "timelessness." I just write what I want to write and I really don't worry about whether a book is going to be dated--because of its cultural references--next week or in a year or two years. The motivating force behind writing a book is not to write something that will--to use the cliché--stand the test of time. That's not something you should be thinking about when writing a book. I remember when I was writing AMERICAN PSYCHO and someone who had read an early draft asked me if I was worried about all the brand names dating the novel. And I said no, because even though I might be writing about a specific time and a specific place, hopefully it's in such a way that a reader can connect it to a larger metaphor--alienation, pain, America, the overall tone of the culture. My novels might be period pieces now but I think the scope of the books is larger than that and I think they touch upon more universal themes. The brand names--that's just wall paper and not essential to the novel's success. At least not to me. My critics tend to think that the books are overly concerned with that wallpaper and I think that's why the critics tend to lose sight of whatever else I'm doing as a writer.
JC: Was it hard to keep the references in the novel current over the eight years it too you to complete it?
BEE: I began the book in December 1989 and finished it in November 1997. And so I really couldn't keep all the references "current." If you really want to be conscientious about checking the references--you can kind of grasp the time frame I wrote it in. For example, early on in the book there's a lot of actors from the television show "Twin Peaks" mentioned. And that was from 1990. As the writing of the book progressed, the references got more and more current. But in the end the names are meaningless--and a lot of them are made-up, too. They're just names. These names mean something to the characters but in the end--five, ten, fifteen years down the line--the names just aren't going to mean the same thing to someone picking this book up in 2010 or 2020. They work on a certain level that really doesn't have a lot to do with their actuality. It might be slightly more fun to read the book now because you can put faces to the names.
Part Three
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