Bret Easton Ellis was born in Los Angeles, California in 1964. His first novel, LESS THAN ZERO was published in 1985 while he was still a student at Bennington College. THE RULES OF ATTRACTION, Ellis's next novel, was published in 1987. In the fall of 1990 Ellis's publisher, Simon & Schuster, canceled his third novel, AMERICAN PSYCHO on the eve of its release due to external pressure from Simon & Schuster's parent company Gulf & Western. Alfred A. Knopf published the book in the spring of 1991 as a Vintage paperback original. Next Ellis published THE INFORMERS, a collection of linked stories. Ellis's first novel in eight years, GLAMORAMA, was published in January 1999.

This interview took place on two occasions, November 4, 1996 and October 22, 1998

Jaime Clarke: When did you begin writing?

Bret Easton Ellis: I was fairly young. I started with children's books that I would make my parents for Christmas. I'd design the drawings in Magic Marker and write a text and progressively the books got more elaborate. Because I was a very precocious kid, my parents became more alarmed by the subject matter that I was incorporating into each of these children's books and it culminated in this book I wrote called "The Angel's Trip" which sounds like an old Roger Corman late sixties, LSD acid flick. Actually it had a very charming story line about how the angel on top of a Christmas tree falls off on Christmas Eve and has to make her way up the "tinsel trail" back to the top of the tree by Christmas morning before the family wakes up. Unfortunately there are villainous ornaments who orchestrated the angel's fall and who don't want her to get back to the top and so a lot of the good ornaments get slaughtered in the process trying to protect the angel. The angel befriends a couple ornaments, a few Christmas balls, one who betrays her somewhere near the end. And then there's the countdown. It's dawn. There's a ticking clock. 5:59, 7 seconds, etc. Can the angel make it to the top? Can she kill the evil, maniacal dwarf Santa that really wants to be on top himself? It was very violent and very sexually suggestive because some of the ornaments were prostituting themselves in order to get information about where the angel was at certain precise moments on the tree. And yes, I gave this to my parents as a Christmas present. I must have been about ten or eleven at the time.

There was a book that I wrote when I was much younger, that was more innocuous: "Harry the Flat Pancake," which was about a boy who wakes up one morning to find out he's a pancake and very, very flat but that also ended up being a study in chaos and corruption for some reason. Still it was much more innocent than "The Angel's Trip," but I wrote "Harry" when I was around six or seven.

The first full scale novel I attempted was in 1978 and it was based on a summer where I was sent off to work in one of my grandfather's casinos in Nevada because I had really bad grades and my parents--actually my sisters who showed my parents--found pot in my room. I went to Buckley, a very corrupt Beverly Hills-type high school where you could actually bribe the principal by taking him out to lunch at Ma Maison and he would change your grade from an F to a D to get you out of summer school. So instead of summer school, I went to work at one of my grandfather's hotels in Nevada to shape me up because I was a real horror, a really bad kid. I stayed about four weeks before my grandfather fired me. But the "experiment" actually worked. I really did shape up. I met a lot of native American Indians working in the mines there and they also had jobs in the hotels and so I saw a slice of life that I'd never been privy to before. "Like--hey, you should thank your lucky stars you spoiled little brat that you're not 15 and working in silver mines" I really came back a very different kid and during the fall of 1978 when I got back to L.A., I started to write this novel about this young man's experience working in a casino in Nevada and everything that happens to him and that was my first novel. The book that really made me want to write a "serious" novel was after I read The Sun Also Rises for a class in high school. I had never really paid attention to language before when I read novels and that was the first book that made me pay attention to sentences, how paragraphs were structured, why the dialogue sounded they way it did and in quick succession I wrote two novels when I was in high school. One I completed my junior year, one was completed senior year. They both are very similar. The second one was close to what a lot of Less Than Zero ended up being about.

I began writing at a very young age and I think the reason was my mother was an avid reader and I was constantly taken to the library. This was actually before a time when my parents bought books and my mom went to the library a lot, so I read constantly and I think the impulse to write started from the fact that reading gave me so much pleasure that I wanted to mimic that pleasure, wanted to copy it somehow. So the impetus to write started very young.

JC: Also, didn't your maternal grandmother write children's books? Could that have influenced you to write children's books?

BEE: That could be it, but I actually think I wrote my first children's book before I was aware of my grandmother having written a couple of children's books of her own. But I don't necessarily think my grandmother really had any influence over me becoming a writer. I simply wanted to become a writer and the reasons are much more ambiguous and complex than someone in the family being a writer and having that person influence me.

JC: Did someone at Buckley recognize your talent early on, in an English class or a creative writing class?

BEE: No, they didn't have creative writing classes in high school, but there was a teacher there who really turned me on to contemporary American fiction. I read a lot as a teenager, new books coming out, anyway. But there was a teacher at Buckley, Steve Robbins, who recognized that I was really interested in becoming a writer and he became a friend of mine. But since I wasn't writing fiction, I can't say he was influential in that way, but I did write a lot of journalism for him. I took a class called The Personal Essay. We read a lot of New Journalism and that's where I discovered Joan Didion, who became a major influence on Less Than Zero. So, yeah, he was definitely someone who recognized something in me, some yearning or some desire to be a writer and kind of coaxed it and helped me along in a lot of ways.

JC: It might be hard now, but can you think of what you wanted to be before you started writing?

BEE: I was interested in acting. I wanted to be an actor and I did act in a couple of elementary school plays. I played the prince in a stage version of Cinderella when I was in the fourth grade. I also wanted to write movies, but growing up in Los Angeles, you're around that all the time. I wanted to be an actor and I took an acting class, but I couldn't roll around a classroom and be told, "Be a doughnut!" for an hour. The first day of class I realized I was way too private a person and the only way that I could express myself artistically without totally humiliating myself was through writing.

I still have fantasies of being a musician and that 's one thing I definitely was going to embark on before Bennington. I was in a band in high school.

JC: What was the atmosphere like when you first got to Bennington?

BEE: I'm not going to pretend that I was real innocent, coming from L.A. I mean I was pretty jaded so when I got to Bennington and met other people like myself, it was a little too easy to slip into the Bennington life. The kind of kid who went there I already knew, so I didn't feel particularly alienated or freaked out. The other thing about Bennington was that most of the students were artists, and most of the kids I went to high school with were definitely not interested in art or if they wanted to be artists they wanted to be screenwriters. So going to Bennington and hanging out with people who actually wanted to write novels or were writing poetry or were seriously considering being dance majors was kind of thrilling and exciting. That's what ended up making the transition from LA to Bennington a really smooth one. It was actually very fun the first year-so fun in fact that I was almost on the verge of being thrown out.

JC: What was your first writing workshop at Bennington like?

BEE: The first workshop I took at Bennington was only open to juniors and seniors. It was taught by Joe McGinniss. I hadn't really applied to any classes my first two weeks there. I was feeling the space out, meeting people, tapping kegs, whatever. But I realized it was getting kind of out of hand and that I had to get some classes. So I looked in the course guide and realized that the only class I wanted to take was this workshop taught by McGinniss. It had already started, but I submitted some of the non-fiction pieces I had written during high school for Steve Robbins, about youth culture in L.A. and very much in the style of Joan Didion. I submitted these pieces to get into Joe's class, thinking "no way," but I'd just give it a shot for the hell of it.

Then I got a note from Joe McGinniss asking me to come to his office. So I met with Joe and he said "Yeah, I'm going to let you into this class based on what you've shown me and I also want to send these to my agent in New York and also to my editor." I was kind of delighted but really horrified at the same time. I just thought it was a very scary proposition. I was eighteen. I was too young. It seemed like too much responsibility. I hadn't met a lot of juniors and seniors at Bennington, but I took the class anyway. It was about writing non-fiction and journalism and using fictional techniques. We had to write three essays that term and the first essay I wrote was about my first month and a half at Bennington. I didn't change names, I wrote exactly what I saw happening, the people who were doing drugs, acting rowdy, the parties, sex. The piece caused a complete shit storm. I became vilified. My box was continually stuffed with notes from people horrified that I had written this. There were a couple of people in the piece who had spiked some punch with LSD or MDMA, and a lot of people had gotten really wasted and when I wrote about this I just named names. There was another guy who bit some girl's neck and sent her to the infirmary, so I kind of played up this guy's vampirical tendencies. He was furious. I really only used first names, but the campus is so small everyone knew who I was writing about. Joe flipped for this piece, and everyone in the class loved it, too. Unfortunately, a lot of people mentioned in this piece didn't like it and were really pissed and were worried it would get back to the administration. I realized later that I was an idiot and should've changed the names.

JC: What about the usefulness of workshops? Do you think there are limitations to what a workshop can teach a writer?

BEE: Absolutely not. No limitations whatsoever. It is hands-on experience. Reading books is the best experience for a writer, just reading a lot of books. But workshops are pretty essential for reasons that you might not think of immediately. First of all, they make you write and there are a lot of times you don't want to write. You have an idea for a story and it's very easy to be lazy, to just think it through and walk around with it in your head. So the workshop puts that pressure on you to put on paper the material that you're thinking about. Also, if you're really smart, workshops inure you to criticism and to how people interpret your work. A lot of people say incredibly moronic things in workshops. There are very few people in workshops who can pull themselves back from how they feel about you and what they know about you and just focus in on your work. I think it's really important to deal with criticism and to slowly start building an armor against it. Not against good editing or smart guidance, but a lot of times you have to ignore what people say about your work because the reason one writes is intuitive, you don't even quite know where it comes from. So hearing someone bitch about how you put this story together can be decidedly unhelpful. I know that doesn't sound like what workshop should be about because you'd think they'd be about communicating your ideas and hearing what other people have to say. I 'm with that to a point. But once you hear what everyone has to say, you have to build a wall where your temperament and your reason for writing is protected because it has nothing to do with what anyone else says, and workshops give off the feeling that they do. Workshops are also only as good as the teacher who oversees them. The worst thing for a workshop is a teacher who falls asleep and lets students bicker about the use of the word 'pickle' in a sentence. A great teacher can really make it an exciting, vital process on the road to becoming a writer.

JC: What are your writing habits?

BEE: I don't write everyday. I think about writing everyday, but I don't write everyday. There are days where I write a lot, and there are days where I can't do it. Somedays I either have notes or parts of things that I put into my computer, reorganize or edit. It really depends on what's going on in my life, it really depends what kind of mood I'm in. Sometimes the material overrides the mood and makes you push forward and say, "I really want to do this, I have the impulse to do this right now, I'm gonna do it." And there are other days where you feel like crap and you can't do it. You can't will a good paragraph, you can't wish it to work out.

JC: You write longhand, right? And then you enter it in the computer? Is there something in that ritual?

BEE: I write everything longhand. All notes, even the outline that I complete before I write a book is done in longhand and then put into the computer (those are the notes that I'll refer to during the writing of the book). It's really amazing to me that the four books that have been published so far were really all done on typewriter. I didn't have a computer until very late in the game. I really was kind of suspicious, and I felt that I was so technologically immature that I really couldn't work a computer. I was afraid of the computer. So American Psycho was three drafts done on a typewriter which now seems to me...I'm just really dumbstruck, I'm totally stunned that I did that.

JC: Is there an edit between the writing in longhand and putting it on disk?

BEE: It depends on the chapter. If the chapter is kind of tricky, then I'll do another version in longhand where I'll edit and change stuff. If the material is pretty straight-forward--and right now the book I'm working on has a lot of exposition and expository dialogue--and it's easy and I just know exactly what a character has to say, etc., etc. Then you can place it in the computer. But other sequences that are trickier, paragraphs that are hard, or dialogue that needs a particular spin, I'll rewrite it a couple of times long hand and then put it in the computer. I'm also editing on the computer constantly.

JC: You've talked before about how a paragraph looks aesthetically on a page, how you'll change it if it looks too long, etc. Talk about this idea of the visual stimulus outside of what's going on with the actual words.

BEE: There are very few books where I was consciously aware of this. There were two times where it was amazing to me. First one was Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, where the whiteness surrounding the words is as important as the words themselves in a lot of ways. And the whiteness surrounding the words adds an extra dimension of emotionality to the book that it wouldn't have had if it was done with very close set type and every chapter ran into another as it usually does in most books. There was something so suggestive about the way the paragraphs were set up in that book and the way the whiteness covered everything else. When you turned the page it was a page where white dominated and then there were two paragraphs that just floated alone in this whiteness. That summed up what was going on in the book and the themes of the book as much as the action in the book.

This is also true, I think, of Ulysses where Joyce does certain things with paragraphs and with spacing paragraphs and with having paragraphs four or five pages long. I do think that a reader--besides what's going on with the action of the text--finds something very suggestive about the print, about the kind of type that's used, about the way a writer sets up paragraphs. If you start reading a paragraph and you notice that it's going on for two or three pages, I think that just does something emotionally to you. Some people might say "Skip this," and think, "I gotta get to something quicker." Some people might just fall into this very fluid, flowing prose and understand they're just going to have to float with it a little while. The way the pages in a book look changes your mind about the book as you're reading it. If you turn a page and see a very clipped conversation between two people where each sentence is three or four words, you're going to get an emotion just from that, perhaps realizing, okay these people are maybe upset with each other, obviously they don't want to really talk that much to each other and that says as much as what people are actually saying. Some people might find that a very fancy theory and don't look at books aesthetically in that way, but I do.

JC: Do you work on several different projects at once? I read somewhere that you'd go to the stories in The Informers when you were stuck on something else.

BEE: The Informers are stories that I wrote in-between novels. It wasn't ever supposed to be a full-fledged novel, and I don't consider it a novel. It's a group of short stories and I think it's better to read it knowing that it's a group of short stories rather than approaching it as a novel. I think if you go into reading it as a novel, you're utterly confused and you'll have no idea what's going on. But as of right now, no, I'm not working on several projects at once. Occasionally there'll be a magazine assignment or some kind of screenwriting thing that seems viable because you're petrified about money. It keeps coming back to money, but money is really important to writers. The safety of your life really depends much more on it than other friends who have the safety net of say a job with the regularity of a paycheck. If you sell a lot of books, obviously there are years that are pretty good, where you feel safe, but it's a rollercoaster. There are years where you better save up because you realize that next year, that book's not going to be completed, that movie isn't going to be happening and so you've really got to plan. The only projects that end up interrupting a novel are magazine pieces and occasionally screenwriting stuff.

JC: Who else besides Joan Didion influenced you early on? You mentioned the Hemingway book, were there any others that you can think of that were a major influence, or was it pretty much Play It As It Lays?

BEE: It's hard for me to see now how Play It As It Lays or really any Didion has influenced my work lately. But initially, yeah, Didion, Hemingway, and at that point, early on, that was enough. You really don't need that many more people to influence you. One is enough, two is enough. Later on, I would have to say, while I was working on The Rules of Attraction, it was Ulysses by James Joyce. I took a class on it, actually at Bennington. It was a class on the postmodern novel and Ulysses took up the bulk of the semester. We also read Nabokov's Pale Fire, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. And so I found some of that creeping into the work a little, but it was just the sheer scope of Ulysses that was really inspiring. I can't say it influenced me in a way where I write sentences differently, but it really inspired me. And of course, I've always said I totally think movies have influenced me completely and I think it's hard to not be influenced by movies if you're our age or even a writer in your 40's. Movies have really altered the way novels are written.

JC: What writers do you admire now? Are there writers you always read when they have a new book?

BEE: I'll always read Don DeLillo, Robert Stone, Martin Amis, even though I don't really think he's written a wholly successful novel, but I do think he's a pretty great writer, sentence by sentence. There are a lot of writers that I read everything they write because, oddly enough, I end up becoming friends with them; and since I know a lot of writers, I tend to read all their books. For example, Richard Ford, who I really didn't have that much interest with at first in terms of his work, I now tend to read everything he writes and I kind of have a new appreciation for him that I didn't have at first because I got to know him personally. And I think Independence Day is an amazing book. And I'm someone who couldn't finish The Sportswriter. I want to reread it now. There's some skimming you have to do because the narrator is overly verbose and Frank Bascombe just wants to tell you about every little dust speck he sees on the highway of life. I also tend to keep up with most writers of my generation. I tend to read everything that people my age have written so far. There are very few young writers that I've not read.

JC: What are your all time favorite books?

BEE: It's going to be a very weird list. Sentimental Education by Flaubert. I'd say Ulysses by Joyce, I'm gonna say The Sun Also Rises but Hemingway even though I think A Farewell to Arms is a better book, I think Islands in the Stream is a better book, I think A Moveable Feast is a better book but I'd still have to say The Sun Also Rises. Of course, Play It As It Lays by Didion, as well as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album.

If I had to go with when I was younger and the books that really obsessed me when I was a teenager, I'd definitely put down Salem's Lot by Stephen King (laughs). It was a book I was obsessed with for a year. When that book came out, I think it was 75 or 76, I was about 11 or 12, and, literally, it may have been the only book I read that year. I read it 12, 13, 14 times. That's something I really haven't admitted before.

JC: Do you read poetry?

BEE: I'm continually, always reading a book of poetry, especially when I'm writing because there'll be an image in a poem, or a word in a poem that will spark off something in my head, much more so than prose does. I guess because poetry's so concentrated that the ideas and feelings in a poem go boom, boom, boom, much more quickly than if you read, say, a book or a story where everything is in a much longer form. So I'm always reading poetry, but I never wrote poetry. I never even wrote song lyrics. I wrote music for the bands, but I could never write the lyrics. The one time I tried, it was really humiliating. Maybe if I kept up with it, it would have been great, but I just didn't have the temperament for it.

JC: What do you think is the function of novels, fiction, in society?

BEE: I was on a panel rather pretentiously titled "Whither Goes the Novel" and it was very interesting because we were talking about the best seller lists of 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990. And the shocking differences between even 1970 and 1980 where the top ten books were literary books, Vidal, Updike, Roth, Fowles. These were literary books that were huge. John Updike's Couples was published in 1968 and was on the cover of Time magazine and caused a rift in the culture. Portnoy's Complaint also caused a major rift. Then you look at the lists of the 1980's and it's Clan of the Cave Bear and a lot of Stephen King creeping up and in the 90's it's all Anne Rice and John Grisham. Corporate and fat and shiny books. I don't think there's any literary fiction on those lists at all. None at all. And it's very rare for a huge writer, someone whose going to be in that Pantheon of Letters, like Joan Didion, to get on the best seller list anymore where she would be on it at one time for months and months and months and these books were discussed at parties and everyone was reading them and talking about them as much as they were talking about any of the current movies or current rock music. Now, in the overall culture books play a much smaller role in peoples lives. Even people who don't read books, who don't touch books, I think were at one time touched by the way certain books had an impact on the culture. Now it seems to be very rare. I think books sometimes still have impact, but on a much smaller, more focused group of people.

I actually know people, and I'm shocked to say it, who don't read books, who don't buy books. In fact the guy I dedicated American Psycho to, Bruce Taylor, couldn't even get through American Psycho; he said it was "too hard". He said he read the sex scenes. He also didn't want me to dedicate this book to him, once he found out what it was about (laughs) and he begged me to take his name off the dedication. The book had to be dedicated to him, mostly because he was the one person who really taught me what's funny and what's not. And I always looked at American Psycho, as sick as this might sound, as a really funny book. And I know that all the humor in that book comes from hanging out with this guy, Bruce Taylor, who still is the funniest person I know and he doesn't read books. He has a really dark, twisted sense of humor that I didn't have before I met him. He's still my best friend and he lives out in LA and I've known him since the seventh grade and he doesn't read books, though he's the sort of person who years ago would have.

JC: Where did the first impulses for American Psycho came from?

BEE: When I moved to New York--actually even before I moved to New York in early 87--I wanted to write a book about New York. I visited New York a lot and I knew I wanted to set a book here. The city inspired me, like it does all writers. And so when I moved here, I started meeting a lot of young guys who were working on Wall St. and I thought, great, here's the perfect takeoff point for what I want to do; it's about money, it's about hollow money, it's about how can these kids be making these enormous sums of money during this time. So I'd started planning an outline of the book in December of 86 about New York and tentatively about Wall St., about the whole yuppie situation that was going on, about people who had graduated from college and were rampaging through the city. So it became a book about a guy who worked on Wall St. And so I began to do research, and research is a whole other area we can go into because I'm really not sure if research is such an important part of writing fiction. I knew a lot of friends at Bennington whose brothers were making a fortune on Wall St. and just living the whole 80's life and so I hung out with these guys for about two weeks because I wanted to find out what exactly people were doing. Now of course we all know they're in jail and so I know now why they couldn't talk about certain things, why they didn't take me to their offices, why they weren't extremely clear cut about what exactly their jobs entailed, how they were making so much money, etc.

JC: So you were hanging out with them at the end of the day?

BEE: At the end of the day, it was always meet at Harry's, meet the new bimbo they're dating, what's the hippest restaurant, talk about buying a car, talk about houses in the Hamptons they wanted to rent, which club to go to, where their dealer was, buying suits, clothes, trips, etc. So after two exhausting weeks of hanging out with these people I understood that my narrator would be a serial killer. I don't know where I made the connection, it just seemed logical that one of these guys would be driven so nuts by how status obsessed everyone is, that it would incite him into becoming a murderer. It just was a logical connection to me as a writer. And so I took off from there. I also think that the book was informed by a severe depression and black period I was going through, and I still maintain that it's the most autobiographical of all my novels because the mood of the book completely mirrored the mood I was in the three years it took to write it.

JC: That's a dangerous statement. Some people will misinterpret it.

BEE: Well, that's the risk you take. And I'm not really sure I'm interested in those people.

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.

JC: This is the first book you've written that relies heavily on plot. Was your approach in writing this book different than books you've written previously?

BEE: I wanted to write a book that took place in Europe. I also wanted to write a book through the voice of Victor Johnson who was a character in THE RULES OF ATTRACTION. Those two things came together. And lastly I wanted to write a novel about a conspiracy. Then I asked myself "What does Victor do now?" I thought maybe he'd be involved in the fashion world. He might even be a model. But models are so annoying and it's horrible how obsessed our culture is over them that I made a connection between models and…terrorists. The models in this book were going to be terrorists. And I started to back down and have second thoughts because that's a pretty loopy theory and I knew I had to be very careful in order to pull it off. I had to ask myself, "Are you sure you want to invest this much time in writing a book about this?" And in the end I did. And I when I made the decision to actually write the book, a story just unfolded itself to me.

The outline I did for GLAMORAMA wasn't necessarily more detailed than the outlines I did for previous novels. Mostly because the story dictated where the book was going to end up. With a non-narrative book like AMERICAN PSYCHO or LESS THAN ZERO I felt I had to be very careful with the scenes I chose to write about because there was no story progression. What you're hoping will happen with a book like that is that a series of carefully chosen scenes will accumulate into something bigger and you'll feel something because of those scenes. This time around it was pretty easy to follow the outline, even though it changed a little bit as I wrote. The main thing that changed was the conspiracy theory at the heart of the novel. I had to put the brakes on it because it was getting out of hand--which is what naturally happens with a conspiracy; that's the nature of a conspiracy, they never end. So I was implicating everybody in this massive conspiracy and it was just getting too complicated. I was the one writing it and even I couldn't follow it anymore. So I had to draw a border around it--literally. The conspiracy and all its major players and sub-players were on a chart I had drawn up on a giant white piece of construction paper. It started in the center and kept spreading out. So I took a black marker and drew a box in the middle of that paper and I decided I was only going to deal with what was in that box and ignore whatever was outside of it and if there were loose ends and stuff wasn't answered, well, that's what a conspiracy's about. That's how I approached it.

The outline for this book might have been shorter than other outlines I did even though it's by far the longest book I've written. With AMERICAN PSYCHO for instance, the outline for a simple scene where Patrick Bateman gets a massage might be longer than the scene itself because of all the reasons I wrote down in my notes why I think that scene should be there. What does it tell us about this man? What does it tell us about this world? Etc., etc. I really didn't have that dialogue with myself while writing GLAMORAMA because each scene basically progresses to the next, like a chain. The most detailed outlining was for the first section which takes place in New York. But because the time-frame for that section is about thirty-six hours it became very apparent to me what was essential and what was not. Plus that time-frame helped because I was afraid that section was getting too long anyway and the time-frame really helped me focus.

JC: How did you approach the action sequences? it's one thing to say that a book is written cinematically but it's another to make a book do what cinema does so well.

BEE: When I look back at the book I don't really remember writing "action" scenes. Writing can be such a slow, laborious process that when you're writing a sequence that could be termed an action sequence--it could easily take you a week. It doesn't zoom by you. So the writing of that sequence doesn't really feel like an action sequence, meaning it doesn't write itself as quickly as it takes to read it. And I didn't approach them any differently than, say, writing a scene that takes place between two people in a restaurant. The same rules apply. I think you just hope it doesn't sound silly. Keep the language as simple as possible, don't fall into hyperbole, don't use exclamation points, don't use capital letters when someone's yelling. Also, there's this notion in GLAMORAMA that perhaps what you're reading might in-fact be a movie and that freed me up a bit. Toying with that idea--is this real? is this a movie?--let me take chances. It enabled me to write very cinematically without worrying if anyone thinks it's too movie-ish.

JC: How did you come up with the frame of the narrative?

BEE: When I first started writing the book, the idea of a film crew entered my mind. I began incorporating them into the outline, asking myself questions like "When should they appear?" and "How often should I show them?" and then "Is there a second film crew?" and then it progressed to "Is there a third film crew?" and then it progressed into "Well, are they part of the conspiracy?" and dealing with this just became overwhelming. So I decided then to just play it straight and tell the story without the film crews. But I couldn't get around the fact that Victor isn't an aware narrator--and I didn't want to corrupt the purity of his character by making him know more than he would. So I brought the film crews back in, which seemed to solve some technical problems, at least in terms of relaying information. But it also seemed very suggestive to me--the fact that we basically perform all the time in our daily lives and just taking that idea one step further. There's so much surveillance in the world: in airports, banks, malls and this alters the way we move and talk and interact with each other. It's very subtle but there's a degree of acting going on in society. So I wanted to capture that and that performance idea meshed with how dramatic the characters in the book act.

JC: The narrator in GLAMORAMA is a minor character from THE RULES OF ATTRACTION. And often characters from one of your books makes an appearance in another book, or they run into each other or know each other. Do you think of your characters as sort of a fictional family?

BEE: I suppose it's to remind me that all these books are similar in a way; it reminds me that the books are all connected somehow. There's no grand plan--it just makes sense to me as a writer. Often it can be for very cheap reasons. I couldn't get a sentence that I thought Patrick Bateman would say to a woman out of my head--"I like to keep abreast"--and I kept resisting the impulse to drag him into GLAMORAMA but I couldn't help it; I caved in, not really caring if people thought it was gimmicky. But once I did it I liked the idea that Patrick Bateman had moved into this fashiony world and by extension that he could probably inhabit any world. There are also a lot of signifiers that refer to my earlier work. Near the end of GLAMORAMA, Victor comes across the words "Disappear Here" painted on a bedroom wall. My point being that the worlds or LESS THAN ZERO and GLAMORAMA aren't really that much different. After fourteen years I've changed in some ways but the fictive universe I'm creating really hasn't. The concerns are the same, the themes are the same, the tonality of the writing is the same.

JC: At a certain point in GLAMORAMA a character is asked about his modeling career and the character says "I've completed that part of my life." Do you imagine, as a writer, only having a certain number of stories to tell? Can your life as a writer ever be "completed" in that sense?

BEE: You're asking this question to a person who has never actually told a story before and is now telling one in a novel for the first time. I never liked a novel because of its story. A story was not the reason why I would respond to a book. That was never a criteria for me. I would respond to a book because there was an attitude or a sensibility or a way of writing that I thought was cool. And I've come across books that have great stories or interesting plots that are just plain flat-out boring. You need more than that. You need a vision. And I want to feel the pulse of a writer who is so excited by what he's feeling that he has to put it on paper. Now that's interesting to me. But I do know that at 34 I don't think I'll write a book again that doesn't have a story or some kind of narrative. And I think that just has to do with aging, really. I don't think it's that my aesthetic has changed. It has more to do with the fact that when you're young you really haven't experienced enough to know that lives actually do have narratives, that there is an overall narrative arc to a person's life. (Reading a lot of biographies can help you realize this as well.) There is a first act and a second act and third act to people's lives. But when you're in your first act in your early 20's, you just haven't experienced enough to realize this. You simply don't know enough. And that's why I think the books I wrote in my 20's were really more about behavior and attitude and hopelessness.

JC: And things seem to happen randomly.

BEE: You see the world as a disconnected place. Well, not to sound simplistic--but because you haven't connected with it.

JC: GLAMORAMA is imbued with the same detailed descriptions of clothes, food, products, etc. as AMERICAN PSYCHO was--though not as obsessively described. Is this technique assimilated forever into your fiction?

BEE: I really don't see GLAMORAMA that way at all. The uninitiated might come to this book and feel that way but as the writer I feel it's very different from AMERICAN PSYCHO in that respect. But then Victor Ward is a fashion zombie and though he would know the designers that people are wearing, he wouldn't describe those clothes with the same maniacal attention to detail that Patrick Bateman would. And it's really just about staying true to your narrator. When I write a piece of journalism or a profile of someone or a travel piece of something in my journal--I don't think I ever comment on the way people are dressed. But because of the world I describe in my fiction and because of who the narrators are--it seems apt.

JC: You also continue with the technique of pornographically described sex scenes. Do you feel that the approach to writing a sex scene is dependent on what emotion the writer is trying to evoke with respect to the scene. In other words, is your use of graphic detail specific to the characters you're writing about?

BEE: Those scenes are often the most technically complicated to write. My reasons for having that long sex scene in GLAMORAMA are probably too complicated to verbalize but, well…because the world I was describing is such a fantasy in a way--everyone's a model, everyone's beautiful, everyone's living this jet-set life--I assumed as a reader (I know I felt it as a writer) you'd find something definitely alluring and sexy about it and so it seemed logical to complete this portrait of showing these people having sex and just go all out. Really fulfill the fantasy. A sex scene poses the following problem: it can be so distracting that it can make it difficult for a reader to concentrate on anything happening after it. But I thought enough was going on in this book so that it really wouldn't be a problem. Also, I'm interested in how pornography affects a reader. It's such a consumer item. It does what it's supposed to do. Like toothpaste or coffee or clothing. It's cold you, you wanna stay warm, you put on a sweater. You're tired, you need to wake up, you have a cup of coffee. You want to be aroused and climax, you purchase pornography. Since it's such a consumer good and because the book is so full of consumer goods, why not throw in some porn amidst all the clothes and all that useless hipness.

But there's also a lot of technical difficulties that you need to overcome if you're to write a successful sex scene. In terms of the prose--it should be very simple, almost scientific, totally unadorned. Metaphor in a sex scene--I think--tends to destroy it. It's best just to state the facts. Maybe if I hadn't been so clinical, people would not be as scandalized or think the scene is as "filthy" as they seem to. It's always interesting to me when people--and this was true for AMERICAN PSYCHO as well--are far more bothered by a sex scene than they are by descriptions of violence. The sex scene in GLAMORAMA might be the last one I write--the sex scene to end all sex scenes--just because it becomes kind of unbecoming after you reach a certain age to write scenes like that. You run the risk of sounding like a dirty old man.

JC: In GLAMORAMA confetti is everywhere. It's in the streets, at parties, in hotel rooms, and tracked into apartments. It's also strewn across murder scenes, disaster areas and sites of complete holocaust. Can you talk a little bit about your use of confetti as a metaphor in this novel?

BEE: Writing a book is an intuitive, impulsive process and so many of the motifs that pop up every now and then come from within that process, so as much as I would love to be able to tell you what they mean--I can't, because there really wasn't an intellectual approach to that metaphor. Confetti is a frivolous, useless invention and using it as an element in scenes of torture just felt right. I really don't know why every room in this book is freezing and why steam is constantly coming out of people's mouths. Where did that come from? I don't know. You could make a facile connection and read into it that since it's such a "cold" world, it makes sense, but that's not what I was thinking. It was more that that image seemed suggestive to me. That's it. Plus it's always so much more interesting when a reader gives his own interpretation.

JC: In AMERICAN PSYCHO you make the analogy that a stockbroker has the proclivities to become a serial killer. With GLAMORAMA you make a connection between models and terrorism. One of the characters explains that models are perfect terrorists because "as a model all you do all day is stand around and do what other people tell you to do." These analogies may seem exaggerated to the point of distortion to most people. Can you talk a little bit about the inspiration for this idea in GLAMORAMA?

BEE: Why did I see models as terrorists and the fashion world as a form of terrorism? Well, there's a tyranny to the fashion world in the way it extols an ideal beauty above all else that I think damages us. That has been a form of torture for women for decades and now it's increasingly happening to men. This obsession with looks that the fashion and photography worlds have taken to an extreme, psychically damages the culture. Period. That's a fact. I know we're not talking about actual violence--which is the terrorists goal--but emotional violence. Both worlds want you to be emotionally violated in the end. When I began planning GLAMORAMA the culture's fascination with models had reached a fever pitch and at the same time there was this terrible reckoning with terrorism and the connection I made seemed plausible.

JC: The terrorists in GLAMORAMA only recruit famous people because "celebrities have instant cover." Do you think the cult of personality is such in our current culture of fame worship that the average person can't believe a celebrity would behave badly, or that people are quick to forgive famous people for their transgressions?

BEE: Well, if you're whole basis for being is just as an image, or as a surface, then you're not flesh-and-blood to people--and that's what celebrity does to people: it flattens them out and we never know what they're really like because it's not their job to tell us. So we do a lot of guess work and we project a lot of our own fantasies onto them. So in a way we invent them. And if they do something bad or behave recklessly often we'll forgive them because it comes ricocheting back at us. I think we absolve ourselves when we forgive a celebrity.

JC: Victor has been recruited and told he's perfect as an accomplice in international terrorism because he's unaware or politics. Do you think ignorance of politics makes people more complicit in what goes on in government than people who actively participate in the political process?

BEE: I think the point of the book is: just be aware in general. The book is criticizing being obsessed with the wrong things. It's saying: be careful. It's saying: hey--don't be an asshole. I don't think that if Victor was more politically aware this whole terrible thing wouldn't have happened to him. His flaw is that he's so focused on the things that are really useless (hipness, coolness, trendiness, cuteness) that he doesn't realize it when dark forces swirl around him and prey on that weakness. After all, it's much easier to get a dumb person to do something than a smart person.

JC: Previous to GLAMORAMA your books have ended with a sense that the characters are trapped or that situations can't be resolved and will only continue to spiral downward with no clear sense of the future or even that there is a future. But in GLAMORAMA the book seems to end on a note of optimism. The word "future" is even used in the last sentence. Which is maybe odd considering where Victor is at the end of the book. Is this by way of suggesting that things aren't always so hopeless, that the world isn't aggressively nihilistic?

BEE: This is the most emotionally felt of the books I've written. And for all its post-modern touches, it seems to me to be the one that's most about real people. No matter how beautiful they are or how outlandish the situations they find themselves in. Of all my narrators, Victor is the only one that really changes in the end, or comes to a realization that change him. Even if it might be too late. When I started writing this book I knew that the first word was going to be "specks" and that the last word was going to be "mountain" and I felt the book was a progression from one to the other. Emotionally, Victor learns a lot more about the worlds and himself and I think this corresponds to the fact that maybe I'm a little bit more optimistic about my life than I was previously. Maybe not an optimism but a sense of acceptance that I don't think I had before. Because I have a lot more knowledge about the way the world works. I seem to be able to maneuver through it with more ease than I did when I was in my 20's. And this, I think, is reflected in my writing.

JC: It's been more than ten years since Less Than Zero. Have you reread it recently? What is your relationship to that book now?

BEE: The last time I reread it, I remember thinking, you were too young to write this book and then I was also thinking, you shouldn't have listened to a lot of the advice you received from the editors who edited the book. It was a book that when I first wrote it was very, very long and a lot of melodramatic things happened within this very long book. But that was sort of the point. These melodramatic things drifted in and out of the action and the power of what happened to certain people in certain incidences was completely diminished because of all the fluff that's surrounding their lives. So someone could be murdered, someone could be raped but there is all this other garbage floating around them and that garbage mutes the power of horrifying things happening to people. This is something that interested me a lot when I worked on the book. When the book became pared down--and it was pared down a lot--after it went through the editing process at Simon & Schuster, there exists a thirty page sequence near the end of the book that I can't read, that I just think is way too melodramatic, way too over-the-top. I'm pretty much with the book up until then, but then I just found it to be a little embarrassing. I think the character of Julian, in my initial draft, was much more of a periphery figure who was sort of just wandering around and wasn't a major character. He wasn't the focus of the book but in the end he sort of becomes a symbol for the downfall of everybody else: he gets raped, he gets shot up by his dealer. None of that was my intention at first. Everything pretty much reads as how it originally did, but since a lot of stuff was cut out of it and it's all slammed together in the last thirty or forty pages, it bothers me, or did bother me when I last reread it. I also think that probably helped make it a more noticeable book and it helped make it a more successful book than it perhaps would've been if I'd gone my way with it. It seems very far away from me now. It seems like a book that I definitely would not have any interest in writing now and I do think out of everything I've written, it's the least of the books.

JC: If you had to rank your books according to how successfully you completed what you started out to do, how would that list go?

BEE: You have an idea for a book and you're really lucky if you get fifty or sixty percent of that idea down. In your head, you have this grandiose idea of a great, awesome book where you're going to write about this, or this, or this and when you start writing, reality sets in and you kind of get to the point where you think, "Okay, if I can just get through this, if I can just move it on to here, I'll have done some work and it will have worked out." Sometimes writing a novel can be so overwhelming and so exhausting emotionally that you're really lucky if you can get fifty or sixty percent of what you really wanted to initially do on paper. I think, for example, The Informers by far is probably sentence by sentence the best writing I've done. I don't know if it's the best book, but I do think that the writing is, let's just say, very unembarrassing to me. I still think The Rules of Attraction is the one book that I really got down everything that I wanted to do. I wrote a book that really threatened to annoy a great many people. At the same time, I just really have a soft spot in my heart for Rules. That might be because Less Than Zero and American Psycho were these big bullies that could take care of themselves. The Rules of Attraction was so slammed because it was about these really annoying, atrocious kids nattering on and on about their lives at college and "oh, he doesn't love me, or she doesn't love me or whatever." It got a tremendous amount of flak that I thought really wasn't due the book. So I sort of have a soft spot for it. GLAMORAMA took so long to write and it was dictated by its narrative that I probably don't give myself that much credit for the actual writing or it because it was this marathon and it took eight years to complete. A lot of what I had to write was dictated by the plot, the conspiracy and so I don't know if I really give myself credit for doing it. I don't think it's a book that's as abstract or stylized as the earlier books, certainly not as much as AMERICAN PSYCHO or THE RULES OF ATTRACTION or LESS THAN ZERO to that degree. I think the language in GLAMORAMA has a much more easy vibe to it and it's not so constricted probably because there's so much motion going on, people are running around, etc. and that freed up what could've been at times in the earlier books me being too conscious of language. In the new book I really concentrate on movement, momentum seemed very important to me. And in the end because I'm 34 now and I'm a lot older and I know more about writing now, I can't necessarily say this is the best book I've written but I can say it's the most careful book that I've written and the book that I gave the most thought to.

I really can't reread the books, it doesn't really interest me that much. They define a certain time of my life and what was going on during that time of my life and I don't know, to me they're not that interesting to reread again. They were interesting to write, but to reread them...I don't know if I'd get that much pleasure out of that. Or if it would be particularly instructive.

JC: Did you write a draft of the screenplay for Less Than Zero? Were you involved with that process?

BEE: I was still in college when I found out they were going to turn it into a movie. I was sent a script by someone, I saw a couple of more scripts, but I was not involved in the process. I didn't want to be involved.

JC: From the beginning? You didn't think you might want to be involved?

BEE: When I was first asked if I wanted to be involved, I realistically didn't think I could do it because I was finishing up school and then I did go back a week later to my agent and said, "Well, maybe I do want to do this." She said, "It's too late, I already told them you don't, and you should finish school anyway." But you know what? I would've done the first draft and it would've been very close to the book and there's no way they would've made it. This was a movie that should never have been made by a big studio, and it should never have been a big, glossy Hollywood movie filled with a lot of stars, directed by a very slick video director. It just shouldn't have been done. It probably would have been much more successful if it had stayed true to the book and was made on a very low budget. There was no way that a big Hollywood studio run by the parents of the children in the book were going to make an honest movie out of that book. So it was hopeless anyway. I could've written a draft but it wouldn't have mattered.

JC: What do you think is the most untrue thing said about you?

BEE: (Laughs) I think everything that's been said about me is pretty much right. I don't think there's been anything said about me that I really have to disagree with. I'd have to say that when I do read articles about myself where I've talked to the reporter and hung out with the reporter and I finally see the article, I definitely don't know that person. I have no idea where this person came from. What happens, I guess, is that the writer's version of you and how they see you comes across and that really isn't who you are. The most shocked I was by seeing how someone else sees me was an article in Vanity Fair about two years ago. This was just definitely not me. I hung out with this guy who wrote it for three days and I thought we talked about everything, we covered everything. Hours everyday. We talked about every possible thing you could talk about. And what he took from it was just really shocking to me. This person--Bret Easton Ellis--was completely unrecognizable. I also can't say there's anything untrue in it. There was just sort of this general lack of truth about who I was. But there wasn't anything patently false or lies. I really don't think there's anything that's been written about me that isn't true. What might not be true is that people assumed I wrote American Psycho for reasons other than the one that I just wanted to write this book. That seemed to me false. Other than that, everything has been pretty much right. There really has not been a lot of rumors or innuendo. People just sort of write about my work and how sullen I am.

JC: What from the 1980's is still true today? How different are things now?

BEE: I guess I can only react on a personal level. Two years ago, against all my better instincts, I went to the 10th anniversary of Nell's. I went there very early with a friend of mine; we thought we'd have a glass of champagne and it would be like the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. I hadn't been there in five years and we realized it would be really scary but we had to do it. We had spent so much time hanging out there with so many. It was really at one point the nexus of publishing for a long time. It was the hub of where everyone who was involved with publishing in New York would hang out. I mean it was much more a place for publishing people and writers than it was for say, rock stars or actors or people from out of town. It was on some nights an incredibly intense publishing scene. Morgan Entrekin was always there. You could walk in on some nights and see Sonny Mehta with his wife wearing a sari, sitting in the front booth, or Raymond Carver would be there with Gary Fisketjon, or you could see all the young writers of that particular moment from Susan Minot to David Leavitt to the ubiquitous Jay McInerney.

So we walk in and there's Morgan Entrekin and Jay McInerney and Gary Fisketjon and we sit in the same booth we always sat in whenever we were there and then we noticed that a couple of us were drinking diet Cokes, people were smoking light cigarettes, no one was doing blow on the table, everyone was checking their watch because, you know, Jay has a wife and two kids now, Morgan's the head of a publishing house now and has to get up early. I guess I'm the only one that could have hung out all night but even I was tired from being the "responsible" person I've now become, I guess. Basically we all felt really old. We all thought, we're never going to the 20th anniversary of Nell's.

There's definitely a different tenor to the times. Everything is more anti-status, but that in it's own way has become it's own kind of status. I guess you can look at the cities I live in now: Los Angeles basically never changes, but New York is a pretty good guide for what's going on in terms of the times and what's going on or going to go on with the rest of the country, and the fact is no one really has the money they used to have in the 80's. I mean everyone was making enormous amounts of money for doing basically nothing. And everyone was controlled by how manic the times were, which sort of demanded that you rush out to every restaurant you possibly could, party with every famous person you possibly could, buy everything you read about in magazines, act this way, look this way, do this. That's not really happening now. I mean, I can only speak for people that I know and it just seems to me as you get older, you have more responsibilities and your body kind of gives out on you. You can't party the way you once did. An since you've done everything anyway, it's really not that interesting anymore.

I'm also a believer that Patrick Bateman can exist at anytime. Patrick Bateman is an example of what Hannah Arendt called, "the banality of evil." That's basically what he is. He could have existed a hundred years ago (he probably existed five hundred years ago). He'll probably exist five hundred years from now. He's just an example of the constantness of evil. He might be a creature of the eighties with all the trappings that implies, but I think he's really a creature of eternity. Man doesn't necessarily change for the better depending upon the decade, or depending upon how ten years have passed. I think man is born and is corrupted and is always capable of badness. (Pause) Capable of goodness, too, but badness gets more attention. We notice it more often. It makes more of an impact on us.