The provocative novelist on looking back at his teenage self, the sales generated by a hostile Q&A and his obsession with Marilyn Monroe
Bret Easton Ellis, 58, is the author of nine books, most recently White (2019), a memoir of culture and politics that describes, among other things, the impact of reading Thomas Tryon’s violent 1971 horror classic The Other when he was seven years old. Speaking from home in Los Angeles, where he’s currently at work on a mock true-crime audio show with Irvine Welsh, he calls his new book, The Shards – a high-school mystery first serialised on his podcast – “a Bret Easton Ellis novel for people who don’t like Bret Easton Ellis novels”. Of whom, he adds, there are many: “I am the worst-reviewed American writer of my generation. It’s just a fact. If you can find another one, please, I’d like to know; it’s not Chuck Palahniuk, I can tell you that.”
Your previous book, White, which was mainly about movies and novels, was widely discussed as though it were only about Donald Trump, not least in a hostile New Yorker Q&A. How did that feel?
I think Trump really deranged mainstream media. Anyone who even came close to figuring out [his appeal] got deemed a traitor. The response perfectly illustrated what I was talking about and I can only be grateful: the book was kind of doing nothing and then the New Yorker thing appeared and suddenly we shot up to No 1 on about six different levels on Amazon. I got booked on Tucker Carlson, which sold a ton of books. Controversy helps! The negativity was nothing compared with American Psycho. After American Psycho, people assumed I would never publish again. All 30 of my publishers around the world dropped me. Not one stood by me except for Picador.
So why aren’t you publishing The Shards with them?
They didn’t want it! I’d been with them since I was 21 but something felt broken. They made a lowball offer and my agency made this decision to take a risk trying a new kind of deal [with Swift Press]. There is this antiquated notion in traditional publishing: “Give the big fat advance! Never make it back! Promote a book that will never make anyone any money once that advance is given up!” What if you partner with a publisher, don’t take an advance and work together selling the product? Start making money for the house and yourself from book one.
Did serialising the novel on your podcast shape its composition?
I don’t think it did. I knew the book’s movements from the beginning, I just couldn’t figure out how to tell it; I had to get old enough. I’d been thinking about the book so often since first trying to write it in 1982 that when the spark ignited one night in April 2020, I had 14 pages the next day and just spent a year and a half finishing the rest.
What drew you to the novel’s autobiographical voice?
It gave the project an immediacy I hadn’t been able to locate for 40 years. I wasn’t really thinking, oh, I’m going to create a work of autofiction. I just wanted to write about some of my classmates and my somewhat sentimental feelings of nostalgia about a period in my life that was also extremely painful; to finally, at 58, look back at [being] that boy in 1981, a year that changed everything for me, and to write about it, and people I love, without embarrassment.
The Shards is published by Swift Press (£25) on 17 January. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
