Brett Easton Ellis. “The character of the serial killer is like a kind of evil double of the writer.”

It is in his suite at the Palais Madame Reve in Paris that Brett Easton Ellis receives in his strict uniform of joggers and hat while the television is on. Goodbye Len. On Confessing a Weakness for the Protagonist: Author Daniel BruhlAmerican psychologist sits down on the sofa to begin the conversation with his usual candor and confusion, interrupted only by room service bringing him a third bottle of gin when he insists he only ordered one…

The essayist is publishing the other day debriswhich chronicles her senior year in Los Angeles at Buckley’s elite institution, decorating it slasher movie. Because if it’s about the loss of innocence and coming of age for Brett and his friends, this big powerful book also features a serial killer who’s getting dangerously close to this sleazy little clique. rich and very sexually active to judge by. with the narrator’s honest account of his own deceptions. An interview with a writer who became a literary superstar as soon as her first novel was published. less than zerowhen he was only twenty-one years old.

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Madame Figaro: Why did you mix fact and fiction? debris ?
Brett Easton Ellis. The book is personal but not autobiographical strictly speaking because of the symbolism with which it is imbued, and with such metaphors as the character of the serial killer, who to me is like a kind of evil double of the writer. He considers himself an artist. dismembers bodies to transform them by putting the parts back together; breaking into houses and building a story in his own way, stealing a pen here and pasting a poster there… However, I wanted to evoke the events that happened to me when I was seventeen. At first the narrator was not called Brett, but Clay, and I adopted a minimalist style à la less than zero “I am going to the barn by car. It is a sunny day. Debbie stands in front of her horse… But it didn’t work. It had to be a person of a certain age who remembered and told. Everything fell into place from then on, and as I went on, I thought that this book contained so much of me, that it spoke so much of my life, that there was no reason for me to call it any other way than Bret Easton Ellis, and that I give the narrator’s first novel a title other than less than zero…

Where does your fondness for serial killers come from?American psychologist To: Imperial suites ?
They haunted my California childhood. I remember the murders of the Manson Family or the Hillbillies (serial killers on a rampage in 1977 and 1978, editor’s note) However, the central subject Fragments, obsession and how it can get out of control and make you lose your judgment as well as your sense of reality. The novel tells the story of a young man, Brett, who is obsessed with university freshman Robert Mallory, whom he resents for many reasons; a couple he made with Brett’s boyfriend and more. Then the narrator begins to tell a story about him, to imagine connections between a serial killer and this young man, and wants to convince the reader, like everyone around him, that all this is true. That’s the key to the book, and Brett’s main problem. how to control a writer’s superpower, his imagination, as Luke Skywalkers and other Marvel superheroes learn to control theirs. Because in this mythology, if it doesn’t work, people can get hurt… A friend joked after reading the book. “I never imagined you wanted to write Scream ! But even though the plot does involve a bloody climax, I thought I’d mostly write about the characters of Ryan, Matt, Debbie, those who inspired them and were a big part of my life, and Buckley, and finally Los. Angeles.

The city itself is a character in the novel…
Absolutely, and the same can be said for my other two novels that are out there. less than zero And Imperial suites. My books are also works about the places where they take place, from Bennington University The Laws of Attraction in ManhattanAmerican psychologist. In many ways, debris is an act of meticulously recreating a specific period – 1981 – in a specific location – Los Angeles – with all the movies and songs of the time – someone counted one hundred and forty-four titles… Because we are. did in those days. we listened all the time. I remember a teacher who watched my first stories. But because there was always a song playing in the background. He continued. “You’re wrong to do that. By tagging movies, fashion, current bestsellers, you meet yourself. In two months, no one will be interested in your stories. Literature should be timeless… This is not my opinion. Brands are a part of life. We give the name of the soda that the character drinks, and we give the brand of clothing because it hits you; the hero wears a Lacoste Polo and he drinks Seven-Up, that’s it.

I wasted my time collecting 20,000 pages of Hollywood scripts that would never be produced.

Brett Easton Ellis

In what? debris does it differ? Lunar Park whose hero is also called Brett Easton Ellis.
I wanted back Lunar garden making fun of myself, satirizing “Bret Easton Ellis” and, in addition to playing with Stephen King’s codes, it contributed to the fun of writing it. debris is a more honest and authentic book. I stopped hiding things because I adopted the cool guy attitude less than zerowhere I avoided including events that happened to me, such as this relationship with the producer in the hotel room that I describe; debris. I thought he would make me work on a script when he just wanted sex. I was disappointed without trauma. I just told myself that I’m an adult and that in the adult world these are things that can happen. less than zero includes a scene where my character, Clay, watches Julian sleeping with a businessman in a hotel. Then I could never be a participant, I could only be a witness. Yet today, as I turn fifty-seven, I have succeeded, as I have dreamed for four decades, in writing the scene as it unfolded.

Was this novel also a way for you to relive the youth you long for?
Absolutely. You know, writing a book is an emotional experience, not an intellectual one. You would have told me two days before starting debris that I was about to start debris, I would say no. Only I was obsessing about the teenager who inspired me Matt Kellner, whom I hadn’t seen in 40 years, I was thinking about sex, about what it’s like to be young, to live this life… And I couldn’t believe it. this was my life The detail and poignancy of the descriptions come from an influx of emotion that came over me one night in April 2020. I have to “feel” my books to write them. I wish it were different. it had been thirteen years since I’d written a novel… It could also be because I wasted my time preparing 20,000 page scripts for Hollywood that would never get made. Who knows if I could write two good books instead of this useless mountain of paper?

Les Éclats, Bret Easton Ellis, translated from English by Pierre Guilielmina, ed. Robert Laffont, 616 pages, €25.90.