– When you’re 58 years old, nostalgia sets in, Ellis says to Good Morning Norway as he sews the vinyl at the Big Dipper record store in Oslo.
Music has a central place in the author’s life and helped him to start writing novels again.
– One evening during lockdown, when the wine was popped a little earlier than usual and I sat and listened to the music that defined my youth – then it came loose, explains Ellis.
A full 13 years have passed since the author last published something and many have been waiting in anticipation for what the highly controversial author would come up with this time.
This week he was in Norway to launch “Skår”, or “The Shards” as the new book is called in English.
– I am still a polarizing writer in the US. Either people are very receptive to what I write, or they hate it, he asserts.
– That’s how it has been for me for the last forty years.
Death threats and banned
Ellis had his big breakthrough already at the age of 21 with the book “Under zero point” (1985). But it was his third novel, “American Psycho” (1991) that really put him on the world map, especially after the film based on the book came out in 2000. The ultra-violent and misogynistic protagonist Patrick Bateman has cult status to this day, and the book was highly controversial when it came out.
– I had 32 publishers around the world who had published my first two books – 31 of them dumped me. It was shocking then, but now I see it as an honor and think it’s pretty cool, he smiles.
PSYCHOPATHIC TIKTOK EXAMPLE. The mass murderer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho – here in the form of actor Christian Bale – has become a role model for constantly new groupings. On TikTok, there has been an explosion of so-called “memes” with Bateman from those who identify themselves as sigma men – an introverted version of the alpha male. Ellis himself says that he does not understand the phenomenon. Photo: From the film “American Psycho” (2000)/Copyright: Universal Pictures.
– I survived the death threats, the ban, the hatred from the “mainstream” literary system. I thought if I can make it through that, I can make it through anything. It strengthened me.
People said to me, “You’re never going to be published again and your career is ruined.”
– Were you a victim of an early cancellation culture?
– Yes, in many ways you can say that it was one of the first examples of cancellation culture. But cancellation exists on so many levels. There are people who won’t accept me – magazines, institutions, universities, but obviously I haven’t been completely cancelled, as I’m on a book tour and speaking to full houses, he laughs.
– He is a bit crazy
It is not only Ellis’s fiction that has aroused resentment. He was caught for supporting Donald Trump when Trump called Mexican immigrants rapists. And many must have reacted when Ellis defended his friend Kanye West after he spoke about his Nazi sympathies.
Here he pays tribute to Hitler: – I get scared
– I know Kanye, we have worked together on several projects over the past five years. He’s a little crazy, I’ll admit it. I didn’t understand why he risked everything for just this. But I understood his need, as a destructive artist – who feels stifled by society, who doesn’t feel he can say what he wants and who just goes, as he himself called it, “death con 10” and is as scandalous as possible.
– Neither I, nor my Jewish boyfriend, believe that he is anti-Semitic. Nor does my stepfather, who is Jewish and lost his entire family in the Holocaust, says Ellis.
Beinhard defender of freedom of expression
When it comes to the Trump criticism, he is spot on.
– Yes, I said he called Mexicans rapists in a speech he gave early in his career. So what? I did not agree with him. It was such a heated atmosphere that whenever someone tried to understand Trump’s popularity – which is what I was trying to do – they were seen as a Trump supporter. I didn’t vote for him, and I didn’t mean to defend him, but I wanted to defend people’s right to vote for him. Many of the people I know did.
He believes that the price of living in a democracy is to put up with crap and he will always defend a person’s right to express themselves, even if he doesn’t agree with them, as he claims he did in the case of Trump and Kanye.
-I live in a country where Westboro Baptist Church (a pronounced homophobic denomination, editor’s note) demonstrate and say horrible things at people’s funerals. If we want to live in a society with freedom of speech, then we have to put up with that too. That’s life, It’s not easy, he says passionately.
Lives with a girlfriend 22 years younger
He is annoyed by the younger generation – often referred to as “millennials” and “Gen Z”. Or as Ellis calls them: “Generation Wuss”.
He believes they are far too vulnerable and contribute to limiting the space for expression. Ironically, he himself lives with a millennial – the 22-year-younger musician Todd Michael Schultz.
Fact: These are millennials and Generation Z
Millennials is the generation born between the early 1980s and up to the year 2000. They have grown up with increasingly advanced digital technology.
Generation Z (or just Gen Z) is a term used for the generation born from the mid-1990s to the beginning of the 2010s.
Source: Wikipedia
– Todd has really opened my eyes and explained this generation to me, so I have gained much more sympathy. I can understand their neuroses and the shame they feel. But my generation wanted get offended, shocked and confronted about things, so I lack that sensitivity. They annoy me. Even Todd is annoyed by his own generation, says Ellis.
Concealed his orientation
In his big comeback, Ellis describes his own youth in the eighties in Los Angeles. A life among highly privileged youth at one of LA’s best private schools, where he was part of the inner circle. At the same time, it was a life of lies. For 17-year-old Ellis lived out his homosexual orientation under the nose of his unsuspecting girlfriend and in secret from his friends.
PRIVILEGE GROWING UP.. Ellis grew up on LA’s sunny side. He studied at the fabled university Bennington College in Vermont, which fostered many American cultural greats. One of them Pulitzer Prize winner Donna Tartt – one of his very best friends. Photo: Espen Aarebrot-Heiestad./Good morning Norway.
He has been trying to write this book since he was eighteen years old, but has taken almost forty years to complete. At times it has been too painful, but then the pandemic came.
– 2021 was a real crap year! Even though a lot of bad things happened to me in my youth, 2021 made the year 1981 appear like paradise, he says and continues:
– When I sat listening to music that night, I tried to look up all my friends from that time. And it all came back. I couldn’t write about it as an 18-year-old. I would have to be 56 years old to be able to describe all the things that happened to me then.
– Sorry that I was gay
In the record store in Oslo, Bret Easton Ellis pulls out some favorites from the shelves, such as the Kred artist Wayne Zevon and Elvis Costello. The new book is jam-packed with song references – over 160 pieces. Then he finds the band “Ultravox” and the song “Vienna” which was a megahit in the 80s.
«It means nothing to me…”they sing in the chorus.
MUSIC LOVING AUTHOR. Ellis recreates moods from 80s LA and adds small hints about the mass murderer in the book. The British publisher has collected all the songs chronologically in a playlist that you can listen to while reading. Photo: Espen Aarebrot-Heiestad
– The song repeats itself and sets the mood throughout the book. It gives a feeling of eerie, he explains.
Because this book also contains a psychopathic mass murderer who creeps closer and closer to the author’s group of friends. This very element of tension belongs to the fiction, even though California was an epicenter for mass murderers.
Otherwise, Ellis claims that most of it is true.
– I wanted to write this book to tell those who knew me then that I love them. I apologize for lying and making things up. To my boyfriend at the time – sorry for being gay.
Worried about his parents and girlfriend
Other than that, he is not too concerned with what people think, he claims. He is more worried about his parents who are getting old and about his girlfriend who struggled with serious drug problems while he was writing the book himself.
– It has been an exhausting year. Todd returned from rehab two weeks ago and it’s the first time he’s been home alone. The worries me, he admits openly.
– And then the pipes in my bathrooms at home, he quickly adds:
– They are a nightmare. I’ve been on the phone more with the plumbers back home in LA than with my PR people on this book tour, he laughs.
After reading the finished manuscript of the book “Skår”, Ellis feels that something in him has been healed.
– It feels so good. I know it sounds cheesy – to talk about writing as therapy – but that’s exactly what it is. You write about pain and by writing about pain it eases, he concludes.
