The Bret Easton Ellis Interview Part 1 can be found here.

We debate Robert J. Lennon, which I get horribly wrong, and Bret has to correct me, it’s so embarrassing, and he lets me off the hook. I’m thinking of J. Robert Lennon, which isn’t the same thing that Bret is talking about.

JR: We’ve moved away from the questions, and they seem silly at this point.

BEE: No, no, no, no, ask me whatever you want. I totally transparent. I’m in a totally transparent mood.

JR: How much of this conversation before the questions do you want me to transcribe?

BEE: I want you to do whatever you want to do.

JR: Patrick Bateman, if you were to be visited by him today, there seem to be a lot of genitals flying around in the air, alarmingly. Do you think he would approve, and how do you think he would handle it?

BEE: I’m being totally transparent with you, I don’t understand that question.

JR: People are using texting, facebook, in really weird ways, as forms of expression. Bateman seems like, well, he was interested in shock value. How would he handle a NYP front page about a politician who texted his erection to his girlfriend?

BEE: I’m going to give you an answer, I don’t want you to be offended. I don’t care.

JR: (laughing)

BEE: I can’t give you the fake literary answer here. Not the answer that is expected of me. Well, Patrick Bateman would find Anthony Weiner foolish, because he didn’t understand that technology worked this way. He should have used a better cell phone. I don’t care. I don’t care what Patrick Bateman thinks about anything anymore. Which makes the idea of the interview, and I begged my publisher not to ask me to do interviews, because I’m going to be asked questions that I’m not going to be able to answer, that I don’t want to answer. So I’ll be very honest, I’m totally fine with these questions, but I don’t want you to be offended when I say I don’t care what Patrick Bateman thinks about anything.

JR: Do you think the violence in American Psycho is all in Patrick’s head? All made up? A delusion?

BEE: (laughing) Here we go again.

JR: If you’re going to be transparent with me, you’ve got to answer that question.

BEE: (laughing then raising his voice in mock protest), I’m about to be! I’m just laughing. Does it really make it more interesting to you know?

JR: To me? Not to me, but it is a question I have always asked myself.

BEE: I don’t know. I grappled with the question a lot when I was writing the book. There were times when it seemed very real to me, and there were times when I felt very playful. And there are a lot of hints that this was all in his mind. Then there would be brutal incidents that have to be real, you can’t think this up. As I finished the novel, I didn’t think it would be a question. I just assumed people would think he did it. Or, I thought conversely, that this is a young mans fantasy. I don’t know whether he did it. I don’t care whether he did it. It doesn’t make the book anymore interesting to the reader. In fact, I think it makes the book less interesting to a reader.

JR: That’s an honest answer. That’s good. Thank you.

This book shocked people when it came out, shocked the establishment. I wonder what you see shocking people now? Are we so worn down by what’s happening to us that nothing really shocks us anymore? In books is there anything you find shocking, or since 9-11 have Americans seen it all? And that unless it happens to them, it doesn’t matter?

BEE: 9-11 was shocking. The little terrors of the everyday, they shock people. Casey Anthony trial is shocking in the terms of the details that keep coming out. They bother and disturb me. I turn CNN off if I hear chloroform, or mouth taped over. She partied after she murdered her little girl. There is still stuff, as a culture, what are we shocked by, or are we even interested in being shocked anymore. That’s interesting to me. There isn’t a counterculture. There isn’t an urge to shock people anymore, like there was when our society was Empire. Surface-polite, where we lived in this age, with veneers, all about manners, keeping up appearance. And that’s when the counterculture rose up and shocked people. Whether you want, say, Lenny Bruce, or Allen Ginsburg writing “Howl”, or whatever, those people didn’t create work to shock people, I don’t think. I think it was an expression of where they were at a particular moment in history. I don’t know if we have that need to express ourselves.

During the time of American Psycho there definitely was a need to express myself. I was annoyed by what I was seeing. This was ‘86, ‘87, ‘88, ‘89, the infatuation with yuppie culture and what it meant, and I wanted to be a yuppie. I wanted all of those things, but I was disgusted with myself. That’s what it means to be successful? That’s what it means to be a man? Do I have to be this? You’re talking about a successful kid who got out of college with a book, but that didn’t matter. You’re still in a crowd of people. You’re still living in society. I didn’t move to Ireland, live in a castle. I engaged with people, and I was often disappointed with what was expected of me when I wrote that book. That’s what that book became about.

At times there were moments when there was the urge to push it further than it needed to go. Gary definitely felt it didn’t need to go as far as it did. And he wanted all of the violence removed, and that was a big fight. He wanted all the violence removed and he told me in a passionate, passionate letter, after we had out blow out in Bel-Air. He said “You will be humiliated by this book in five years. You will be very embarrassed if you don’t take it out. It will look juvenile adolescent and you will be embarrassed by this, and I’m imploring you to take out these violent sections.” And I said, “Gary, you’re wrong. You’re missing the point. You don’t get the book.” I wasn’t trying to shock anyone with American Psycho, but now, I don’t know where the necessity is. There is nothing to shock us anymore, but there is no need to be shocked. I think in the very uptight conservative culture, there are these moments, where people get pushed to do it, shock people, upset people. I was living in a time where David Lynch and Madonna were shocking people. These were mainstream artists who were pushing boundaries — in what they say, the conservatism of the Reagan years, or what they saw at that time.

JR: I read some Carver stories, especially “A Small Good Thing”, and American Psycho at the same time, and I was really shocked by your book, and the Carver stories were really marrow-cutting, and that’s really interesting to me, which is why I asked that question.

BEE: I think it’s personal now, the things people are able to do, and the fuck-ups that happen in their lives, and that shocks people now. I’ve been listening to you, and I’ve been thinking “ what has shocked me in the last five years,” and I remember finding those pictures of me at some party, and I’m like, “whoa, oh, that’s fucking awful.” I don’t know. There are historical moments when the need to be shocked is an integral part that is shocking and then there are moments when they aren’t there.

JR: Do you think Oprah would pick one of your books. James Frey and I are friends and I remember when he became a big deal, and I called him on the phone before he went on Oprah for the first time, and I said, “don’t fuck it up.” He told me he wasn’t going to, and said what an opportunity this was. Then it became something else. Then Franzen goes back, like Frey did.

BEE: James got two days; John got what, fifteen minutes?

JR: She had to really emote it up.

BEE: She’s menopausal? I don’t know.

JR: Your new book comes out, she picks you, do you think that’s something that could happen? Do you think she is a legitimate gatekeeper for American culture, and what she says goes for books?

BEE: Yes she is. I’m not saying that with any irony at all, she has picked a lot of great books and some very poor ones. If you look in anyone’s library you will find the same books on their shelf. I think she has chosen the two best American novels of the last ten years, The Corrections and Freedom. That is an amazing thing to do, to that audience, to get those books out there.

I want to get back to James for a second. It was the beginning of something I remember I was told. I was one of the first people to read that manuscript (A Million Little Pieces), Sean gave it to me, (editor of AMLP), and I didn’t know Sean, and my family was going through some drug difficulties. My sister was almost dead, and did rehab repeatedly, and so this book hit me at the right time. I was trying so hard during certain points of the story, when he saves the girl from the fire, that I overlooked things that were not quite plausible. I was overwhelmed by the details of the book, so impressed, before the fraud came out, and here is James’ fuck up. Look, I understand literary ambition. I didn’t have to deal with it. I got it out of the way when I was twenty – Boom! But I have lived with it with male friends for 25 years. I’ve seen it wreck them. I understand where he was with ambition, and not going anywhere with his novel. But if you say it’s a memoir, you’re making a deal with the devil. James wasn’t smart enough, he wanted the success of the book, but how could you have the success with the book, because reading that book as fiction, you don’t care. If you’re told it really happened, you’re overwhelmed by it.

He had a great opportunity, and he was asked to go on the Oprah show, basically whip him to death in front of a national audience, he wasn’t smart enough to defend himself. He wasn’t smart enough to come up with the idea that a memoir is this. That it’s embellishment. No memoir is true. When she says “Why did you lie?” he wasn’t smart enough to come up with the argument that a memoir in itself is a lie. He should have said, “I apologize for coming on your show, I guess I was confused about the nature of the show,” whatever. He had a chance to do it, and he didn’t.

Would I ever go on her show? Will she ask me? I don’t know. American Psycho has been around for 25 years, if you had come to me when it was published and asked if it would be around in five years, there was so much controversy when it was published, it was eviscerated, I would have said no. But now that it’s been around, and it’s gotten respectable — American Psycho is now a respectable book. I don’t know if she would invite me. Who said if you stick around long enough people will give you awards even if you really don’t deserve them? I don’t really think about that stuff.

JR: (Bret sighs heavily at this point, and I feel horrible for keeping him on the phone for almost an hour.) What are you reading right now? Fiction or non-fiction.

BEE: You’re asking me at a weird point. Freedom blew everything out of the water when I read it. Everything else seems so minor in comparison. It has this scope, ranginess, and I like it better than The Corrections, I like that it was looser than The Corrections, and funnier, and not so tightly plotted. Freedom fucked up books for me that fall, and a lot of books that may have been good, I decided after 5 pages, probably won’t get better. I liked A Visit From the Goon Squad, which was a big rebound from The Keep, not a good book, not bad, just a misstep. I read Looming Tower, and I stopped after 50 pages. I downloaded a Redford bio that Knopf is publishing, also very boring, and I think you’re asking me is there a school of writing, or a kind of writing that I’m leaning towards?

JR: You have such a distinctive style, separate from your peers, at least of your age. I’m wondering, what are you working on now? And then there is the autobiographical side to your writing, you have a journal. What are you reading? Or what did you read while you were writing your books? A lot of writers say you should keep a book at your elbow that you want your book to sound like.

BEE: That’s very interesting, I haven’t thought about that for a long time. Chandler during Imperial Bedrooms, over and over. Stephen King for Lunar Park, and I would say Joyce for Rules of Attraction, stream of conscious. Joan Didion and Carver for Less Than Zero, so yeah. Delillo for Glamorama. Philip Roth for the first half of Lunar Park. So yeah, you’re right. There are books that influence other books and writers.

I’m not working on anything now. I don’t have the answer you want. I read that article by Salman Rushdie where he says he’s giving up on the novel, he’s going into TV, and doesn’t have a novel going and this is the first time I don’t have a novel going either. Something happened in fiction for me, in the last 6 years. Oh, I’m reading The Secret History, but I’m only doing that so I can get it made into a mini-series. Trying to get HBO interested. By my bed? I am feeling the same way as Salman is feeling, I have lost the desire to convey my pain and feelings in the context of the novel. I’ve been out here writing scripts for Hollywood, mostly dealing with TV ideas, which do connect with me emotionally. The problem is you become obsessed with them like a novel. The minute that stops you have to leave Hollywood, but you are paid to create these shows. I’ve written three-hundred pages of a show I sold called The Follower. Is it going to happen? I wrote one-hundred fifty pages of a show called The Canyons for Showtime. This is where I am now.

After a bunch of stuff fell through last week, movie deals, and stuff, I was on the treadmill, and suddenly there was a little speck of an idea, that I’d had since December. A novel started floating around, and then that speck gets connected to another large speck. And then they become these concrete things. So, I’m not. I was ruling out another book when I was touring for Imperial Bedrooms. We are in a post Empire world. I’m not interested in writing about it in terms of a novel, but that might change.

JR: That’s a good spot to end. Thank you Bret.

BEE: Thank you. Good luck with your interview.