Original subtitles

people are afraid to merge on freeways in los angeles

this is the

first thing i hear when i come back to the city blair picks me up from lax and

mutters this under her breath as her car drives off the on-ramp she says

people are afraid to merge on freeways in los angeles

though that sentence shouldn't bother me it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably

long time nothing else seems to matter not the fact that i'm eighteen and it's

december and the ride on the plane had been rough not the warm winds which seem

to propel the car down the empty asphalt freeway or the faded smell of marijuana

which still faintly permeates blair's car all it comes down to is that i'm a

boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom i haven't seen for four

months and people are afraid to merge

First sentence of Lesson Zero, which is people are afraid to merge on freeways

in Los Angeles. To me, it was just a nice opening for the book. And I really

didn't realize until the book was finished how that dovetailed very nicely

into, you know, the theme of disconnectedness and that sort of

permeates the book.

I don't know. I think it also has to do with the way that the city is so spaced

out.

It's so much larger than any other city. And there is a real sense of

disconnectedness. There is a real sense of people not merging with one another

in the city.

That idea has, it just stuck with me and it seemed right through the novel.

Lesson Zero is about Clay, a college freshman who comes back home to Los

Angeles during Christmas break and renews his ties to his girlfriend and I

guess a friend of his who is kind of careened into drugs and hustling. And

it's basically just a view of Los Angeles during the early 80s.

Well, I would describe Clay as a conceptual character.

Someone who really did not resemble what I was about.

growing up here in Los Angeles.

He looks different from me. He's got a different attitude about life than me.

He's definitely much more depressed and lost than I was, even though I was

depressed and lost at one time as well. But I was writing all the time, and that

was something that kind of saved me, in a way, from a certain kind of life that

was going on at the time.

Clay, to me, was kind of like every boy in L.A. I mean, I remember sitting at...

So many dinners or parties or hanging out in Los Angeles, seeing the same type

of guy everywhere.

I wonder, what is he thinking about? What's going on in his head?

What do you care about?

What makes you happy?

Nothing.

Nothing makes me happy. I like nothing.

Did you ever care about me, Clay?

I don't want to care.

If I care about things, it'll just be worse. It'll just be another thing to

worry about.

It's less painful if I don't care.

Part of that conception is the idea of passivity.

And also just not really caring about anything.

And that, I think, tunes into the idea of his sexuality.

I never really thought of Clay as bisexual or gay or straight. He was just

sort of this person who really didn't care who he slept with. And to me, that

kind of seemed like there was a moral void there.

She reaches into the drawer by her bed and brings out a tube of bandy soleil

and she hands it to me.

and then she reaches into the drawer and brings out a pair of wayfarer sunglasses

and she tells me to put them on and i do and she takes the tube of sun-tan lotion

from me and squeezes some on to her fingers and then touches herself and

motions for me to do the same and i do after a while i stop and reach over to

her and she stops me and says no and then places my hand back on myself, and

her hand begins again, and after this goes on for a while, I tell her I'm

going to come, and she tells me to hold on a minute, that she's almost there,

and she begins to move her hand faster, spreading her legs wider, leaning back

against the pillows, and I take the sunglasses off, and she tells me to put

them back on, and I put them back on, and it stings when I come, and then I

guess she comes too.

Bowie's on the stereo, and she gets up, flushed, and turns the stereo off and

turns on MTV.

I lie there, naked, sunglasses still on, and she hands me a box of Kleenex.

I wipe myself off and then look through a Vogue that's lying by the side of the

bed. She lights a cigarette and stares at me.

And then I call a cab and finally take the Wayfarers off, and she tells me to

be quiet walking down the stairs so I won't wake her parents.

I also knew that this was a character who, the more I worked on the book, I

realized was very passive and really wasn't going to say a lot and really

wasn't going to talk a lot about his feelings, but was going to act sort of

like a roving camera, just, you know, taking these snapshots of everywhere he

was and not really feeling that much about them. And I thought that was kind

of powerful to do in a work of fiction. Because it was written by somebody so

young, I think Less Than Zero was...

managed to, as it were, annul Schiller's distinction between naive and

sentimental art, you know, that it was both very knowing and very, very

unknowing at the same time. And I think, I mean, I haven't reread it recently,

but I have reread it, so it obviously bears rereading.

It had this wonderful sense of just cinema verite

realism, you know?

I mean, I...

It wasn't a documentary, but it seemed like one.

And it was very impressive for, you know, such a young writer.

I used to pass the school often.

Every time I drove my sisters to their school, I would always make sure to

drive past and I would catch sight of small children getting off yellow buses

with black trim and teachers laughing to each other in the parking lot before

classes.

I don't think that anyone else who went to the school drives by or gets out and

looks around since I've never seen anyone I remember.

One day, I saw a boy I had gone to the school with, maybe first grade, standing

by the fence alone, fingers gripping the steel wire and staring off into the

distance, and I told myself that the guy must live close by or something.

And that was why he was standing alone, like me.

One of the passages that I remember most vividly from Brett's days as a student

here, It's from an essay he wrote called Writing of the Grotesque, an appropriate

title for him. And in it is this passage, which really captures that

sense of disconnectedness, that sense of aloneness, alienation.

It was that I just didn't care. This feeling has overcome me quite frequently

within the past several months, a feeling that I can't quite connect with

anyone.

Therefore, I don't care to.

It's not that the people I try to connect to are so worthy.

They aren't.

It's just that my inability to connect with them worries me.

The passage is so typical of Brett because it's in the simplicity of the

language, the directness, and yet the complexity of emotions working at that

one time. That really struck me when I read that 15 years ago.

I'm not happy being back here. I really don't like it. It makes me tense. The

happiest days of my life were not spent in high school.

And there's my locker. There's locker 107. That's where my locker was.

I don't know. It just makes me nervous to be back here. It looks pretty much

the same.

One of the things that stood out about Brett as a student, while he was

reacting to everything in his environment, he wasn't a part of any of

it. He had a small group of friends who were...

I don't want to use the word alienated, but that's what they were. They were

alienated, and they seemed to exist in the same place, but

in a different place entirely at the same time.

Buckley, very Hollywood, now playing images, 1982.

That gives you a really good sense of what Buckley was like. And the whole

issue, the whole yearbook was done sort of like as a, I don't know, a movie, a

production.

booklet or something for like a film. And so it was kind of like seniors. It

says starring.

I don't know. We were all living in some kind of like weird movie. It's

interesting.

Yeah.

I haven't seen this in a long time. In fact, I don't even have my senior year

book. I don't have a copy of it. This is the first time I've seen it in years and

it's mildly upsetting.

Actually, the irony of my parents removing me from a public school and

putting me into Buckley was that they thought public school was eventually

going to be a more dangerous kind of worse influence on me. And I guess they

were sort of naive in a way because they didn't realize that actually the kids at

Buckley were much more hardcore than the kids were at, you know, say, public

school because they had more money.

I mean, I felt alienated for a lot of reasons. I was reading books constantly.

I was writing a lot.

Automatically, that alienated me from most of my friends who were much more

interested in, you know, sports or, you know, playing games or just hanging out.

last summer things i remember about last summer hanging out at clubs the wire

nowhere club lands in the edge an albino and cancers around three in the morning

huge green skull leering at drivers from a billboard on sunset hooded holding a

pix bony fingers beckoning Saw a transvestite wearing a halter top and

lying at some movie. Saw a lot of transvestites that summer.

Dinner at Morton's with Blair when she told me not to go to New Hampshire.

I saw a midget get into a Corvette.

Went to a Go-Go's concert with Julian.

Party at Kim's on a hot Sunday afternoon.

B-52s on the stereo.

Espacho. Chili from Chasen's.

Hamburgers. Banana daiquiris. Double rainbow ice cream.

Two English boys lounging by the pool who tell me about how much they like

working at Fred Siegel. All the English boys I met that summer worked at Fred

Siegel. Thin French boy who Blair slept with smoking a... joint, feet in the

jacuzzi. Big black rottweiler bites the water and swims laps.

Rip carries a plastic eyeball in his mouth. I keep staring past the palm

trees watching the skies.

Less Than Zero definitely was semi-autobiographical. I mean, it is a

work of fiction, but I think that Brett looked at the people around him and took

certain character traits from some people he knew and combined them with

others and then embellished it all. It captured...

I don't know, it captured the sense of what it was like to be that age in Los

Angeles during that time.

My friends and I had actually led a much milder existence than the characters in

the book did.

And I wouldn't say it sensationalized, but I think the feel of the book was

something we were feeling, all of us collectively, even though we weren't

really, you know, having orgies and, you know, mainlining drugs.

But there was that sense that that was what.

community was about there was a sense of decadence there that even if we didn't

partake in it it it veiled everything she pulls up her sleeve reaches for a

belt in the darkness finds it and wraps it around her upper arm i spot the

needle tracks look over at blair who's just staring at the arm what's going on

here kim asks muriel what are you doing

Muriel doesn't say anything, just slaps her arm to find a vein.

She holds the syringe, and Kim whispers, don't do it, but her lips are trembling,

and she looks excited, and I can make out the beginnings of a smile, and I get

the feeling that she doesn't mean it, and as the needle sticks into Muriel's

arm, Blair gets up and says, I'm leaving, and walks out of the room.

Muriel closes her eyes, and the syringe slowly fills with blood.

Spit says, oh man, this is wild.

The photographer takes a picture.

Sterling Lord, his agent, sent me the book.

I guess by this point, it must have been 1984.

I circulated it to the ten senior editors or executive editors or whatever

they were called that sat on the editorial board, and you would get back

comments, and I remember...

Two or three of the comments were so strongly negative. One of them said that

if there's a market for books by cock-sucking, coke-snorting zombies,

then by all means we should buy this book, but if we do, I resign.

About a year after the book came out and had become a bestseller and it was

published in all these languages and all this stuff was happening with it, I

completely fell apart and became a wreck and I had terrible panic attacks and I

thought I was losing my mind and I couldn't get out. of my room, and I, you

know, it was, I don't know, it was scary to have so much attention placed on you.

I was always a fairly shy, retiring person.

I know it's hard to believe that, but it's true.

And when this happened, there was a lot of attention focused on me that I, first

of all, felt was unwarranted, and I didn't understand why this was

happening. And I went through the whole rigmarole of thinking, oh, why this

book? Why me? I mean, there were a hundred other books published that year.

Why did this book take off?

And it changes your take on fate and luck.

The book that I would have the most problem with was the first one because

everyone assumed it was so autobiographical. My family is really

nothing like the family in that book.

So that was the one that I thought might have been hardest for you and Dad to

take because it was, to an outsider, what seemed the most autobiographical.

I don't think the content, the content didn't upset me. I mean, the fact that

it was such a tremendous hit and affected you so much at such an early

age, that had much more impact on me than the content of what you had

written. People hearing that might be a little disappointed because I think they

would like to think that I had a much darker, weirder childhood and that we

lived in some sort of like, you know, Addams Family type of gothic house, but

we really didn't.

I mean, except for...

The black, of course, but you know.

That was before it was trendy also.

I think it's fairly easy to understand how someone like myself could end up

having a fairly dark sensibility.

I mean, I grew up in LA for one. My parents went through a horrendous

protracted divorce, which was very upsetting for me and my sisters.

Growing up in a household like that, where your father is an alcoholic and

there's a lot of tension between your parents, definitely conspires against

you and does create a certain kind of that is not as cheery, I won't say

flippant, but it's just not as optimistic as someone who grew up in a

more stable environment.

There was some tension and fighting in the house, and so that's absolutely

true. And I don't think he exaggerated.

I think he probably embellished for the books a lot on certain scenes.

I guess there was a lot of anger in me, and if you looked at the, actually the

books that I wrote when I was a child, there was a lot of violence in them. One

of the books was, I think, called Harry the Flat Pancake, which is about a boy,

oh my, I'm sure a therapist would have a field day with this, which is about a

boy who wakes up one morning and realizes that he's this flat.

pancake-like thing, you know, and walks around. He just has his normal day as a

pancake. I think people, I'd have to take a look at the book again, but I

think people like Jason down the street want to eat him or pour syrup or butter

on him or something, and I don't know. I mean, listen, someone 10 years older

than that, there's a lot of anger there.

My father's offices are in Century City.

It doesn't bother me that he leaves me waiting for 30 minutes while he's in

some meeting and then asks me why I'm late.

I don't really want to go out to lunch today. I would rather be at the beach or

sleeping or out by the pool.

But I'm pretty nice and I smile and nod a lot and pretend to listen to all his

questions about college. And I answer them pretty sincerely.

And it doesn't embarrass me a whole lot that while on the way to Montmaison, he

puts the top of the 450 down and plays a Bob Seger tape as if this was some sort

of weird gesture of communication.

It also doesn't really make me angry that at lunch my father talks to a lot

of businessmen, people he deals with in the film industry, who stop by our table

and that I'm introduced only as my son.

And the businessmen all begin to look the same, and I begin to wish that I had

brought the rest of the Coke.

My father looks pretty healthy if you don't look at him for too long.

The autobiographical elements in my work They're not that apparent to me. I

really tend not to write about my life at all. People point to the story in the

Informers called In the Islands, which is about a father who takes his son to

Hawaii rather forcefully for a vacation.

And people tend to think that that was about my father and myself. I don't

think my father and I ever went to Hawaii to get there alone at any time in

my life. That just didn't happen.

However... The feelings in that story and the emotions in that story

definitely had a lot to do with my relationship with my father. And I can

point to that story and not find a single scene or a single reference to

any dialogue my father or I might have had, but also completely every note of

that story comes from my relationship with my father.

when we get off the plane a pretty sweet-faced hawaiian girl purple lays

around our necks and we meet the chauffeur at the gate and he gets our

luggage and we sit in the limousine not saying a lot barely even looking at each

other and as we drive through the humid mid-afternoon along the coast Tim

fiddles with the radio and can only get a local station from Hilo playing old

60s songs. I look over at Tim as Mary Wells begins to sing My Guy, and he just

sits there, the purple frangipani lay already starting to brown, hanging

limply around his neck, his blank eyes staring sadly out the tinted windows,

looking over the sweeps of green land, the GQ still clutched in his hands, and

I ask myself if this is the right thing to do.

Tim glances over at me, and I avert my gaze, and an imagined sense of imposed

peace washes calmly over the two of us, answering my question.

You know, The Informer, the story that a lot of people talk about is a story

called The Up Escalator, which is about a lonely Beverly Hills housewife who

drones on really more or less about the emptiness of her days. And there's a

sequence where she's out by the pool.

And she's eyeing the pool boy who's cleaning the pool and seems to have

found something that's stuck in the drain of the pool.

And people always ask, well, where did you get that story from? Where did you

get that idea from? Where was that image coming from? Who was that woman? A lot

of people assume it was my mom or, you know, someone close to me or a sister or

something. It wasn't. I mean, it was just sort of she represented a certain

kind of loneliness, a certain sort of specific L.A. loneliness in a way that,

I don't know, I felt very empathic toward.

The poor boy begins to raise his arm out of the drain, and he lifts two large

gray rags up and drops them, dripping onto the concrete and stares at them.

He stares at the rags for a long time, and then he makes his way toward me.

I panic for a moment, adjusting my sunglasses, reaching for the tanning

oil.

Pooh boy's walking toward me slowly, and the sun is beating down, and I'm

spreading my legs and rubbing oil in the inside of my thighs, and then across my

legs, knees, ankles.

He's standing over me.

Vowing him taken earlier disorients everything, makes backgrounds move in a

wavy, slow motion.

The pool boy opens his mouth, the lips full, the teeth white and clean and

even, and I overwhelmingly need him to ask me to get into the white pickup

truck parked at the bottom of the driveway and have him instruct me to go

out to the desert with him.

His hands, perfumed by chlorine, would rub oil over my back, across my chest,

my neck.

And as he looks down at me with the rock music coming from the cassette deck and

the palm trees shifting in a hot desert wind and the glare of the sun shining up

off the surface of the blue water in the pool, I tense and wait for him to say

something. Anything, a sigh, a moan, I breathe in.

Stare up through my sunglasses into the pool boy's eyes, trembling.

You got two dead rats in your drink.

I don't say anything.

There were about 20 stories that I was going to put in the informers. When I

laid them out all together and actually cut it down to the 13 that are actually

in the book, certain motifs started to make themselves apparent to me, and I

realized that there were a lot of similarities between the stories.

And so when I was reworking them and rewriting them, I was very conscious of

the similarities, the idea that there were these characters who were narrating

these stories who were not really so aware of what was really going on at the

heart of the story, but were telling the reader just the surface transactions

that were going on.

And that were basically lying to themselves in a lot of ways, that

weren't really aware of the situations but thought they were.

And so that's where the title The Informers came from, which is kind of, I

guess, ironic in a way.

September 4th, 1983.

Dear Sean, LA is something else.

I got into LAX last Tuesday afternoon, half crazy from lack of sleep and

wondering what the hell I was doing here.

It was like walking into another world.

LA is an exciting place and my depression has left.

But there is a difference between visiting here and staying, living here.

I don't think I could stand being here forever.

L.A. is like another planet.

All these thousands of blonde-haired, blue-eyed, tan surfers. I'm

collaborating on a screenplay with this guy I met at the studio named Tad.

I can't really talk too much about it, but it's about these camp counselors,

and there's a big snake, and it's really scary.

Maybe I'll send you a copy.

If I had stayed in Los Angeles after high school and attended either UCLA or

USC or any of the colleges around here, it would have been four or five more

years of high school. It would not have been to me a college experience because

everyone I knew from high school was going to these schools, and it would

have been just five more years of partying here.

And so I was intent upon leaving Los Angeles for myriad reasons, from getting

away from my father, from getting away from what I thought was a very unstable

situation in this house, and also because there was a certain darkness

that was entering my friend's life. that I just wasn't able to deal with or

function around.

So I was intent upon going back east to college. In fact, all of the colleges

that I applied to, I think all of them were back east.

I wanted to get as far away from LA as possible.

There was a song I heard when I was in Los Angeles by a local group.

the song was called los angeles and the words and images were so harsh and

bitter that the song would reverberate in my mind for days the images i later

found out were personal and no one i knew shared them the images i had were

of people being driven mad by living in the city images of parents who were so

hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children images of people

teenagers my own age looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun

these images stayed with me even after i left the city

Images so violent and malicious that they seem to be my only point of

reference for a long time afterwards, after I left.

Judy and I smoke pot, get high, make bloodies, try to write a list of all the

guys we slept with, but the list gets screwed up by hazy memories and the pot

and nervous expectations a Friday night party brings.

And so often we write down Jack's friend or guy from the limelight, and the whole

thing depresses me.

Maybe I should sleep with that French guy.

Rules of Attraction was my second book, and I started writing it...

actually before Less Than Zero was even published.

And it's a book about my college experiences, I suppose. There's really

nothing in it, again, that is that autobiographical.

The mood is, the feeling is, and I think the sort of frenzy, the sexual frenzy

that the characters are in probably more often than not mirrored the experiences

of a lot of people I knew at the college I went to, at Bennington College.

And it's...

It's told in a variety of different voices, and it was universally reviled

when it came out.

Let's not forget that Brett was in college when he was writing, and it's a

college novel. It's a novel actually more about character and relationship

than some of his other books.

And it doesn't have quite the social reach of Less Than Zero or American

Psycho, but it's an interesting piece of work and a writer developing his talent.

Go back to my room and decide to skip video class and take a bath instead.

Clean the tub out first.

The dorm's quiet.

Put her on at classes or maybe still sleeping.

Great hot water.

Bring a pad and some charcoal in my box and put some Ricky Lee Jones on.

Smoke a joint and lay there.

Tried calling Victor last night when I came back from Steve's room, crying.

Couldn't stop, but there was no answer at the house in Rome. He said he would

be staying out on this date.

Remember my last night with him.

Touch myself.

Think of Victor.

I hate Ricky Lee Jones.

Turn the radio on instead.

Wash my hair.

I turn the volume up.

Bad station, top 40, static.

But then I hear a song that I remember listening to when I was seeing Victor.

It was a dumb song, and I didn't like it at the time, but it suits the moment now

and makes me cry.

I want to write this feeling down or draw it out, but then I feel like that

would make the whole thing seem impure and artificial.

I decide it will only cheapen the feeling, so I lay there in the white

brightness and think of memories the song brings me.

Victor.

Victor's hands.

Victor's leopard-skinned pants, ripped army boots, and his pubic hair.

His arms, watching him shave. At the Palladium, how handsome he looked in a

tuxedo, making love in his apartment. Brown eyes.

What else?

He starts to fade.

I get scared. I get scared because while I'm lying here, it suddenly seems as if

he doesn't exist anymore.

It seems as if only the song that's playing does, not Victor.

It's almost as if I made him up last summer.

Well, when I was working on Rules of Attraction, I actually was in college,

and most of the people I knew, my friends, were in college too. And I

don't think it was specific to just Bennington, this kind of the party-like

atmosphere, the nonstop sexual goings-ons, and the drug-taking. That

was just not endemic to Bennington. That was only people at UCLA, at NYU. It was

really across the country. There was this really...

heavy duty um you know party thing going on and that's where the book just took

off from sean

Go to Denton's room. We drink some cold ones and smoke some pot and talk, but I

can't deal with the friend's death story and the Duran Duran music and his weirdo

stares, so we talk a little while longer and I get wasted. Then I leave and

wander around campus. There's a keg in Stokes since the party in Booth died.

The guy from L.A. is standing in the hallway wearing shorts and sunglasses

and a polo shirt. He doesn't smile when I pass him by. He just says, hey, dude,

one of the girls I scored for earlier who has short, spiked hair and wears a

lot of black coal and is holding her pet snake named Brian Eno, leaning against

the wall. calls me over, and we talk about the snake.

Her friends join us, all in ecstasy, but they don't have any left, and I'm too

wasted to complain.

I suppose people could have found it annoying, because of course

here, Brett was willing to use these techniques of repetition in order to...

convey a sort of grinding eternal now that in Psycho come right to the fore.

But I remember it as being, you know, at one and the same time, quite a good

naturalistic book as well. That's what American College is like.

When Rules of the Trash was published in 1987, I can't say that its

really horrible critical reception depressed me any more than anything

else that was going on in my life at the time.

When I first moved to New York, I was 23 and it was 1987, and I basically did

what I felt every other 23-year-old was doing, which was, you know, you move to

New York, it's an exciting place, and you go out at night and you go to clubs

and you go to parties and, you know, you just, you hang out. And I think I was

inordinately vilified by the press and the media for this, that they did not

think that a young...

Suppose a serious writer should be seen at nightclubs and, you know, dancing

around and, you know, getting drunk and, you know, whatever.

Whatever it was I was doing.

And to me that always just seemed so ridiculous because I think it was just

the fact that I was of that age where, you know, everyone does that.

The inspiration for American Psycho, I think, when I look back... truly

believe. It came from, I think, the life that I was actually living in New York

City. I mean, everyone, I did want to write a book about Wall Street, and I

did want to write a book about what I felt was going on in the country I was

living in at the time.

But ultimately, I think it really became a book about my problems with being a

young man with a lot of money in Manhattan.

American Psycho is the story of Patrick Bateman, who works on Wall Street by day

and is a serial killer.

When I started working on American Psycho, I was actually very interested

in Wall Street.

as a backdrop and for having the novel take place with all the guys in the book

working on Wall Street. And I really was interested in the business aspect of it.

And I was also very interested in how it connected to the culture and how young

people in America were making so much money on Wall Street. And so when I

started doing research on the book, I hung out with guys.

This was 1987, I guess, who worked in firms and on the stock exchange and

stuff. And I really wanted to find out what they were doing.

actually, to make so much money.

And so when I was hanging out with them, though, I would ask them questions about

their jobs. No one really wanted to talk about their jobs. They wanted to talk

about their clothing, their house in the Hamptons, who could get a better table

at which restaurant. It was really about status.

And that's when the book began to shift for me and began to take shape, that it

really wasn't so much about Wall Street. That was just the backdrop for it. But

it was really about status, and it was about people's insecurity about that.

Even the worst parts of the 80s, I mean, you couldn't really help with the

exclusivity, the status of where people sat, complaints about tables, booth A,

booth B. There was still something.

There was, no matter how repellent I might find it now, there was a sort of

charge about being here at that time and being let through or being brought in.

Now I'm a little embarrassed to admit, but at the time it was fun.

Yeah, and I think we have better. excuse for a misspent youth than most people

because we made we made books out of it you know it was great material i think

there might have been an element of wanting to satirize what i've met in my

generation were like um impressed with and felt were important at that time you

know everything about that going to the gym making yourself look as good as

possible the kind of vanity and narcissism of that time that was a

target i think for santiago

I used to have a personal trainer whom Louie Carruthers had recommended, but he

came on to me last fall and I decided to develop my own fitness program which

incorporates both aerobic exercise and training.

With weights, I alternate between free weights and weight machines that use

hydraulic, pneumatic, or electromechanical resistance.

Most of the machines are very efficient since computerized keypads allow me to

make adjustments in weight resistance without getting up.

The positive aspects of the machines include minimizing muscle soreness and

reducing any chance of injury.

But I also like the versatility and freedom that free weights offer and the

many variations in lifting that I can't get on the machines.

It's really not about Patrick Bateman killing anybody. That was like the least

interesting aspect of the book to me was the fact that he murders people.

Everything else about the book interested me much more. His attention

to detail, his obsession with surfaces.

I remember reading it and falling out of my chair with laughter and thinking that

it was absolutely brilliant. The textual exegesis of the music of Huey Lewis and

the news.

The, you know, 17 pages about the accoutrements of sort of male health

care and beauty products.

I mean, it was like flipping through a Christmas issue of Vogue or just the

stuff of 80s culture.

In the shower, I use first a water-activated gel cleanser, then a

honey almond body scrub, and on the face, an exfoliating gel scrub.

Vidal Sassoon Shampoo is especially good at getting rid of the coating of dried

perspiration, salts, oils, airborne pollutants, and dirt that can weigh down

hair and flatten it to the scalp, which can make you look older.

On weekends or before a date, I prefer to use Gruen Natural Revitalizing

Shampoo, the conditioner, and the nutrient complex.

These are formulas that contain D-panthenol, a vitamin B complex factor,

polysorbate 80, and natural herbs.

Patrick Bateman in the book was really obsessed with a lot of moisturizers and

facial stuff and skin emollients and cleansers.

And I never really was for some reason. It never really struck me as that vital.

Though this morning when I looked in the mirror, I really thought maybe I should

be a little bit more interested in it than I really am.

But definitely during the 80s, this whole thing really did start coming

about. Male vanity, male narcissism, men being really obsessed with...

you know, their skin tones, the dryness of their skins, but not for me, really.

I don't know.

I mean, it sounds like quite a bizarre thing to say, but I think it's

absolutely true, is that you really can't get American Psycho unless you can

read pretty fast. You have to be able to read it in four or five hours to really

get the laughs thick and fast, because the laughter depends upon a mounting,

almost zen-like...

state in which each of the methodical and repeated phrases to do with products

and to do with attitudes and to do with describing people in terms of their

clothes, etc., etc., etc., becomes almost like a mnemonic.

You're reading it so fast that it just forms a different sort of pattern

because they're repeated so much. It's almost as if you're reading those tropes

and phrases as if they were one word.

How do I respond to the absurd attention to detail in American Psycho? Well, you

know, I always thought that you can skip it. You know, you can just really skip

it. If you get it the first go-around, the first 20, 30 pages, I think a

healthy mind would tend to skip those passes and say, okay, I get it.

Patrick's going to go into one of his fits again and just describe, you know,

the inside of someone's CD case for 40 minutes. So just skip it.

Well, I think satire needs to be very sharp, and one of the things that's

wrong with this book is not only its length, but a certain kind of crudity of

method. You can imagine him justifying everything he does in it.

As a reader, you say, well, hang on, aren't these people very shallow?

And you can imagine him thinking, well, that's okay, because, yeah, I'm showing

shallow people. They're a product of a shallow society.

Or as a reader, you might think, God, this is nihilistic.

And he would say, yeah, but this is the nihilism that I'm observing.

So every kind of flaw becomes almost a tribute to the integrity of the book.

But in the end, you have to say, as a read, it's too long, it's too crude, and

there's quite a lot wrong with it.

You should match the socks with the trousers. Who says?

Now listen, if you wear grey trousers, you should wear grey socks.

It's as simple as that. But wait, what if the shoes are black?

Well, that's okay.

But then the belt has to match the shoes.

So you're saying if you're wearing a gray suit, you can either wear socks

that are gray or black?

Uh, yeah, I guess. Did I say that? See, Hamlin, I disagree with you about the

socks since they're so far away from the belt line. I think you should

concentrate on wearing a belt that coordinates with the trousers.

He has a point.

I mean, it's strange.

I don't own a lot of clothes. People assume that because of how fashion

conscious the people in my books are, that I shop a lot. But I basically own

like three black suits and like 20 white shirts, and that's basically it. So I'm

really not like a clothes horse. I really don't buy a lot of clothes.

$1,300 for this Prada suit? This is so ugly. I can't imagine.

What I really like about... his portrait of all the men, and they're all these

macho Wall Street guys, but they're fantastically queen-y, you know.

It's actually a very kind of homoerotic, very gay culture.

But, of course, they just, like, beat up anybody who was gay.

And I think he caught, Brett caught that perfectly. He caught something about

very macho, competitive male culture that I really hadn't seen before.

And it's narcissistic in a way that it actually resembles the stereotype of

female culture.

Narcissistic, bitchy, all the rest.

Listen to me, Bateman. The only reason chicks exist is to get us turned on.

Like you said, survival of the species, right?

It's as simple as that.

Do you know what Ed Gein had to say about women?

Ed Gein?

The maitre d' a canal bar? No.

Serial killer.

Wisconsin in the 50s. He was an interesting guy. You have always been

interested in that stuff, Bateman.

Bateman reads these biographies all the time. About serial killers.

Ted Bundy and the Son of Sam. Charlie Manson.

Fatal Vision.

All of them.

So what did Ed say?

He said when I see a woman walking down the street, I think two things.

One part of me wants to take her out, talk to her, treat her real nice and

sweet. Treat her right, you know?

And what does the other part think?

What her head would look like on a stick

Everyone

seems to forget or doesn't want to know this that American Psycho is in many

ways an autobiographical book and when everyone talks about the misogyny in the

novel About men's attitudes towards women and so forth. I really have

to look back and look at my father in a lot of ways who uh is now dead but his

attitude towards women which did border on the misogynistic influenced and

informed this book and i think in a lot of ways when i was writing about patrick

bateman it was really a lot of it was about my dad and my feelings about um uh

him what surprises me in the great feminist attacks on american psycho is

that no one said but this is such a scathing portrait of male behavior.

It's such an attack on male behavior. It's such a brilliant satire on male

vanity, on male competitiveness, on male paranoia, on male status seeking.

And also, you know, what Patrick Bateman is, is like these bred for

success, bred for competition, young, you know, upper class American males

taken to the most psychotic level.

after the office i worked out at exclusive and once home made obscene

phone calls to young dalton girls the numbers i chose from the register that i

stole a copy of from the administration office when i broke in last thursday

night i'm a corporate raider i whispered lasciviously into the cordless

telephone i orchestrate hostile takeovers

What do you think of that?

And then I'd pause before making sucking

noises and freakish pig-like grunts and then ask, huh,

bitch?

Most of them I could tell were frightened, and this pleased me greatly,

enabled me to maintain a strong, pulsing erection for the duration of the phone

calls until one of the girls

Hilary Wallace asked, unfazed, Dad, is that you?

When all my enthusiasm I'd built up plummeted.

Vaguely disappointed, I made a few more calls, but only half-heartedly.

And I finally hung up in mid-sentence when I came across a personalized

reminder from Clifford, the guy who helps me at Armani, that there was a

private sale at the boutique on Madison two weeks ago.

And though I realized that one of the doormen probably withheld the card to

piss me off, it doesn't erase the fact that I missed the fucking sale.

Pondering over this loss as I wandered down Central Park West, somewhere

around seventy fifth seventy sixth street it strikes me profoundly

that the world more often than not is a bad

and cruel place

When it comes to the misogynism, I would argue that American Psycho is a

misogynistic book in some very important ways.

And I suspect, though I'm perhaps going somewhere out on a limb here, and I

don't like as a rule to make ad hominem comments about writers, I suspect that

it may have something to do with the author's own sexuality and his own

perception and the questions he may have been grappling with about his own

sexuality while writing the book. I mean, it's very speculative, it's not

something... But I think that that's my hunch.

The trouble is that those sort of, in a way, those are quite virtuous problems

to grapple with in respect of this subject matter.

And if you want to write a book in which you really, really capture a certain

form of disgust and revulsion from women, then there's a certain advantage

to feeling it yourself, obviously, the method.

You know, I have been accused of not liking women, and people keep pointing

at American Psycho as this raging example.

I actually grew up in a household with my mom and my two sisters, all of whom

I'm incredibly close to, and I feel in so many ways growing up with these women

that I understand women better than a lot of men I know.

So... The fact that people get mad at American Psycho, which, by the way, I

think is basically almost a feminist track.

Everything terrible about men is in this book. And I really did assume that women

would get the book even more so than men would. So, you know, that's just the

idea that I'm like Patrick Bateman or something, because I described a woman

-hating man, that I am that man as well, is just a load of bunk.

Weddings are so romantic.

She had a diamond engagement ring.

You know, Patrick, I won't settle for less.

It has to be diamond.

And it was a sit-down dinner for $500. No, excuse me, it was $750, followed by

a 16-foot-tiered Ben & Jerry's ice cream cake.

And the gown was by Ralph, and it was white lace and low-cut and sleeveless.

It was darling.

Oh, Patrick, what would you wear? I would demand to wear Ray-Ban sunglasses.

Expensive Ray-Bans. And I'd want a Zydeco band, Patrick. That's what I'd

want. A Zydeco band. Or mariachi. Or reggae. Something ethnic to shock Daddy.

I would like to bring an AK-47 Harrison assault rifle to the ceremony with a 30

-round magazine.

So after thoroughly blowing your fat mother's head off with it, I can turn it

on that fag brother of yours.

And though personally, I don't like to use anything that's Soviet-designed, I

don't know.

The Harrison somehow reminds me of Stoli. Oh, and lots of chocolate

truffles. Godiva. And oysters. Oysters on the half shell.

Marzipan. Pink tents.

Hundreds, thousands of roses.

Photographers. Annie Leibovitz. We'll get Annie Leibovitz. And we'll get

somebody to videotape it. Or an AR-15.

Evelyn, you'll love it. It's the most expensive of guns, but worth every

penny. What's the problem with the book?

is that we have these strong male characters, and particularly Bateman, we

don't have any forceful women.

The women are all very shallow, and I think something's gone wrong there.

You know, to split it down the middle and say, well, you know, American

Psycho's an appalling book because the women in it are so, you know, silly and

they're torn apart and they're killed, and then not to feel the same way about,

to be even harder on the men in this book who are just as vapid.

But also murderers, there's something going on then in the culture that I'm

just, you know, I guess I don't get.

I awaken only when one of them touches my wrist accidentally.

My eyes open and I warn them not to touch the Rolex, which I've kept on

during this entire time.

They lie quietly on either side of me, sometimes touching my chest, once in a

while running their hands over the muscles in my abdomen.

A half hour later, I'm hard again.

I stand up and walk over to the armoire, where, next to the nail gun, rests a

sharpened coat hanger, a rusty butter knife, matches from the Gotham Bar and

Grill, and a half-smoked cigar.

And, turning around, naked, I explain in a hoarse whisper,

We're not through yet.

By the time I got to writing the violence scenes, which was actually at

the end of the three-year process of writing the novel, I thought that I was

distant enough from this fictional world I created that it was not going to

bother me at all.

It, in fact, ended up bothering me a lot. It was very hard to write some of

the sentences, and some of the scenes are insanely gruesome, and there was a

lot of pain.

involved in them, and they were upsetting to the light.

While she's still conscious, I roll her over, and spreading her ass cheeks, I

nail a dildo that I've tied to a board deep into her rectum using the nail gun.

Then, turning her over again, her body weak with fear, I cut all the flesh off

around her mouth, and using the power drill with a detachable massive head, I

widen that hole while she shakes, protesting.

The violence in American Psycho to me is metaphorical violence. It really is not

at all about real-life violence. The book is basically about... And it kind

of preaches my aesthetic in a way that in this society, everything, when you

look at it on a surface level, everything is flattened out to such a

degree that the murder of a young woman with being enraged at where you're

sitting at a certain table or a Huey Lewis in the new CD... is really flanned

out to the same effect.

And that's really what American Cycle is about.

Well, you know, I think it is genuinely disturbing.

I think people have to face up to that. I think the material in the book is

genuinely disturbing. The sheer sort of beats per minute of violence that there

are in the text makes it an experience of wading through a kind of grignole of

some sort.

And I think that's fair enough.

I mean, I think that people find it very hard to say, I find this really, really

disturbing and upsetting and funny.

I find this really, really disturbing, disgusting and repugnant, but I can see

the value of it. You know, people think these are contradictory statements, but

of course they are.

I start by skinning Tori a little, making incisions with a steak knife and

ripping bits of flesh from her legs and stomach while she screams in vain,

begging for mercy in a high, thin voice.

And I'm hoping that she realizes her punishment will end up being relatively

light compared to what I planned for the other one.

It is so over the top.

Maybe if you dialed it back any, it would almost seem that it was realistic

in a way, to where you do it at this extraordinary level of hyperbole.

And it works for his methods. You could easily have that book just have words

that say, shopping, shopping, shopping, clothes, clothes, sex, clothes, clothes,

murder, clothes, clothes, shopping, murder. You know, it's not about

violence towards women. It's not about violence at all. I really

don't see American Psycho as a book about violence.

It isn't.

Can I be more adamant? I don't think so. I don't think I can be.

As an individual, I object to the violence in the book because I find it

hard to take, but I defend to the death Brett's right to do it, and I believe

in the sincerity of his intentions.

On a moonless night, in the starkness of the locker room at Exclusive, after

working out for two hours, i'm feeling good the gun in my locker is an uzi

which cost me seven hundred dollars and though i am also carrying a ruger mini

469 in my bodega veneta briefcase and it's favored by most hunters i still

don't like the way it looks there's something more manly about an uzi

something dramatic about it that gets me excited

And sitting here, in a pair of $200 black lycra bicycle shorts, a valium

just beginning to take effect, I stare into the darkness, tempted.

The reaction that American Psycho generated, even before it was published

in 1990, was really confusing to me. I mean, I didn't understand why, for

example, the guy who had designed my first two covers

refused to work on this one. He said he was disgusted with himself for reading

this book.

I heard about angry staff meetings at Simon & Schuster where assistants

refused to work on the book, refused to edit the book.

What I realized and what initially happened and came to be was that the

book came true, in a sense.

I mean, the book is really about surfaces and being swayed by surfaces

and believing everything.

about surfaces and nothing beyond that. And that's what happened with American

Psycho, I believe. I believe everyone looked at the surface of the book, saw

the violence, saw the sexuality, saw the two intertwined, saw its gruesomeness,

and couldn't see beyond that. And therefore, that's the hysteria. That's

where the reaction came from.

So it was initially, I guess, confusing. Then it was depressing.

And then, to me, finally, I guess it was just boring.

It was taken in so many quarters as a sort of manual for murder or something.

It shocked me that in this country, our literary

establishment, as little as I value it and credit it, that they were so literal

in their reading of this book.

I mean, it was just unbelievable, the reaction to Brett's book.

It was...

For weeks, it was all anyone talked about, and Brett had to go into hiding,

and the women's groups were calling for his head on a platter.

I received many, many death threats from various people who actually, which is

odd for death threats, who left their names and addresses on the return, on

the envelopes, that were really...

so gruesome and vicious and so much worse in a way than anything I described

in the book because actually these people wanted to do these things for me.

And that included anything from raping me with a nail-studded baseball bat to

doing various things with a power saw.

to my genitals. There was a kind of venomous hatred being poured at him that

no writer ought to have to endure.

And, you know, the writing of this book was an extraordinary and brave. I mean,

for him to go the places that he went in his mind to produce this book is

extraordinary. But then I was saddened by the...

the reaction and the reaction from the literary community very few people

coming to his defense very few people coming to support him um and i think

that they should be ashamed of themselves and i think quite honestly

now most of them probably have a different opinion about the book when

the book came out i took against it quite strongly it seemed to me that it

it mirrored all the faults that it was trying to diagnose in american society

there was an excess about it There was a lack of anything sharp and fine and

sensitive. The kind of values that I felt he might be interested in were not

present in the writing. There was too much excess. It was too over the top.

I think, looking back, I was harsh in the review I wrote of it, and I can see

now, particularly, I think, the...

the morality that's there. I mean, I think he is an old-fashioned moralist.

He dislikes the greed and materialism and excess that he sees in American

society. He believes it's destroying it.

But maybe at the time, with all the fuss, I was blinded to that moral vision

of his.

There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is

no real me, only an entity, something illusory.

And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh

gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably

comparable, I simply am not there.

It is hard for me to make sense on any given level.

Myself is fabricated, an aberration.

I am a non-contingent human being.

My personality is sketchy and unformed. My heartlessness goes deep and is

persistent. my conscience my pity my hopes disappeared a long time ago

i was arguing with someone the other night at a dinner

And they were saying, oh, you know, the novel that people will read 100 years

from now to know what went on in the 80s is Bonfire of the Vanities. And I said,

oh, no, it's not. It's American Psycho. That gets the dark, psychotic heart of

the 80s much better. I mean, I like Bonfire, but Brett gets the interior

landscape in a way that no other writer did.

So how does it feel to be the it boy of the moment?

Well, fame has a price tag, but reality is still a good friend of mine.

How do you think other people perceive you?

I'm a bad boy. I'm a legend.

But in reality, everything's a big world party. There are no VIP rooms. But

aren't there three VIP rooms at your new club?

Cut that.

Cut that.

Cut that. Cut that.

Glamorama, my new novel, is about Victor Ward.

who was a male model and a sort of minor celebrity in New York, and his

girlfriend's a supermodel.

It's about this whole celebrity-obsessed New York scene in the 90s, and he

ultimately falls in with a group of terrorists.

Even though it's in some ways the simplest book I've written, it's kind of

hard to describe. I don't know why, but it's a surprise.

It's a surprise.

What are your thoughts on fashion?

Well, fashion may be about insecurity, but fashion, it's a great way to relieve

tension. Oh, really?

I'm completely absorbed by fashion. I mean, I seek it, I crave it. 28 hours a

day, seven days a week.

Did I mention I was a Capricorn?

Oh, yeah, and being the best at only one thing is counterproductive.

What really makes Victor Ward angry?

Recently.

Badly behaved bartenders. Missing DJs. Certain gossipy male models.

Media's treatment of celebs. We're thinking more along the lines of the war

in Bosnia or the AIDS epidemic or domestic terrorism.

How about the current political situation?

Um... Sloppy rollerbladers.

Words.com.

Anything else?

Albino. Milardo.

Mosquito, my libido.

I began the book in 1989.

I just finished it November of 97.

And yeah, it took a long time to write. But I also think the reason it took so

long to write was that a number of things had happened to me during those

seven years that were really intrusive in terms of finishing the book.

American Psycho was published and that whole controversy took...

really was incredibly distracting.

My father died.

I was in a relationship for seven years that broke up that was kind of

devastating to deal with.

I had some little run-ins with substance abuse problems, and there was, you know,

this all came together and was very difficult. I also published a book of

short stories. In the meantime, I'd never done book tours, so I went on book

tours. So all of those things added in. If none of that had happened, I am sure

Glamorama could have taken about maybe...

I don't know, three years to write or three and a half years to write or four

years to write. But it ended up taking that long because of a lot of intrusive

things that were going on in my life.

We'll slide down the surface of things.

All you two on the stereo, and gridlock, jams of streets two blocks from the

club, and I'm not really hearing the things that are being said in the back

of the limousine. Just words, techno beats, slamming, moonscapes, semtex,

Nirvana, photogenic, and names of people I know.

Jay Jagger, Iman, Andy Garcia, Patsy Kenseth, the Goo Goo Dolls, Galeano, and

fleeting pieces of subjects I'm usually interested in. Doc Martens, Chapel Hill,

the kids in the hall, alien abduction, trampolines, because tonight, right now,

I'm fidgeting with an unlit joint looking up. through the limo sunroof,

spacing on the sweeping patterns spotlights are making on the black

buildings above and around us.

Baxter and Lauren are sitting across from Chloe and me, and I'm undergoing a

slow motion hidden freakout.

I think the things that interested me while I was working on the book mainly

had to do with things like style, narrative.

Doing a book on a large canvas interested me a lot. And actually

writing a book that has a very strong plot or story, which I've never really

written a book that's had a narrative before, I thought it would be

interesting to do that. So those are the things that really interested me. And of

course, because models and fashion are such a giant part of the culture right

now, that was also attractive.

Backstage pre-show is a blur of clothes racks and taped instruction sheets and

polaroids of outfits and tables of wigs everywhere, along with a lot of fierce

air kissing and hundreds of cigarettes being lit and naked girls running around

and basically no one really paying attention.

A huge poster overlooking the scene screams, work it, in giant black

letters. The soundtrack from Kids plays at an excruciating decibel level.

Rumors abound that two models are missing, either running late from

another show or that the scummy new boyfriends are busy abusing them in a

limo stalled in traffic somewhere in Lexington.

But no one really knows.

I don't know why right now, why I was interested in fashion. I just know that

it was an intuitive response to something that was going on in the

culture, and I connected with it as a writer, and I wanted to explore it and

set a new novel with that as a backdrop.

But I can't give you reasons as to why I think it's so important or why I'm

interested in doing that.

Well, I think Brett's book is more...

directly concerned with the fashion world than mine, but it's certainly a

part of my new book. And I think the reason is very simple, because it is so

inescapable. I mean, fashion in the last 15 or 20

years has become a major force in our lives. I don't necessarily

think it's a good thing at all. In fact, I don't think it's a good thing.

Calvin Klein has become the sort of Andy Warhol or

Norman Mailer of 1998.

Everybody knows something about fashion now. It's just part of the air that we

breathe.

Chloe was born in 1970.

A Pisces and CAA represents her.

Full lips, bone thin, big breasts, implants, long muscular legs, high

cheekbones, large blue eyes, flawless skin, straight nose, waistline of 23

inches, a smile that never becomes a smirk, a cellular phone bill that costs

her $1,200 a month.

Hates herself, but probably shouldn't.

She was discovered dancing on the beach in Miami and has been half-naked in an

Aerosmith video, in Playboy, and on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimwear

issue twice, as well as on the cover of 400 magazines.

A calendar she shot in St. Barts has sold 2 million copies.

Asking price for 10 days of work?

1.7 million. A contract somewhere stipulates this.

Essentially, it still is, I guess, what people would refer to as a Brett Easton

Ellis' fictional world. It still doesn't stray too far from the sort of

characters that I've written about in all the other books, including the fact

that Victor Ward was a character in my second novel, Rules of Attraction, and

he's the narrator for this book. So it's not that much of a departure in the end.

Hey, what's the story, baby?

Are you going to bother to hide your annoyance? You're not going to like

offering me a Snapple? What are you doing here?

Hey, don't freak.

You've got to get out of here.

Hey, can't we just talk for a minute, babes? Talk?

Victor, leave.

I'll vacate. Only after we chat.

Okay. How was the Oldham show?

Very major.

Chatted with Elsa Clench, CNN.

The usual.

How is Elsa?

Elsa and I are both Capricorns, so we get along very nicely.

It's a mere, uh, it's a little cold in here.

And otherwise?

It was, uh, it was, you know, yeah.

It was very important.

Important? Clothes were important, baby.

Clothes eventually clean furniture, Victor.

Lighten up, babe.

Victor, you've got to leave.

Where were you today, huh? Why don't you hit the show?

Oh, I had a photo shoot promoting a terrible movie that I'm in with Rufus

Sewell and Ben Chaplin.

Then I read an article in a magazine on the impossibility of real emotion on the

Upper East Side.

This has been a draining conversation, but one that I'm glad that we had. The

door is over there in case you've forgotten.

You know, listen, as a writer, I guess I tend to be a bit of a sociologist, and I

guess I tend to be drawn toward things that are happening in the culture and

incorporating them into my fiction.

So right now, I mean, I think at this point in American society, and actually

just Western society, I think we're a celebrity obsessed.

And I'm not even quite sure why.

I mean, there's a myriad of reasons.

But that is just reflected in this book. And everyone in it is either a celebrity

themselves or is surrounded by celebrities. And celebrity has a

huge value for everybody in this book. It's almost like a currency that people

use. It's so diabolically crowded outside Bowery Bar that I have to climb

over a stalled limo parked crookedly at the curb to even start pushing through

the crowd while loser paparazzi who couldn't get in desperately try to snap

my photo, calling out my name as I follow Liam Neeson, Carol Alton, Spike

Lee up to Chad and Anton who help pull us inside where the opening riffs of

Matthew Sweet's Sick of Myself starts booming.

The bar is mobbed, white boys with dreadlocks, black girls wearing Nirvana

t-shirts, grunge and homeboys, gym queens with buzz cuts, mohair, neon,

Janice Dickerson.

bodyguards and their models in the shows today looking hot but exhausted, fleece

and neoprene and pigtails and silicone and Brent Fraser as well as Brendan

Fraser and pom-poms and chenille sleeves and falconer gloves and everyone's

smoochy. But also I think at the same time this book really is about, and I

don't want to sound too, this might sound too repellent to some people, but

I do think it is in some ways me writing about my feelings about being famous, my

feelings about being As a writer, you're a very minor celebrity, but you tend to

be written about and you see your name in odd places, and often your picture's

taken. So I think, in many ways, this book is a criticism of what's going

on in my life.

Is there anything to drink in here?

Is there any cocaine?

Bring us some drinks.

But no, but we're talking also about, like, the idea, like, glamorama in terms

of being, like, is it an adjunct to our lives or anything? It's not at all. It's

really a metaphor.

It is our lives. No, I think it's a metaphor for our lives. I don't really

think it's, like, actually what we all do. And the book is, actually, when I

started the book. Well, because we're not models. But when I started the book,

for example, we were talking about it earlier today.

When I started the book, the club that Victor opened.

Wait a minute, Brett, can I just say one thing? There was this guy, Clifford

Street, and Brett and I were in this New York Times article where they claimed

that Brett and I were models.

And there was an incredibly glamorous shot of Brett Easton Ellis.

almost as like a model, and supposedly I was supposed to be a model. And in the

publishing world, there is nothing, there is not a bigger diss than to be

called a model-turned-writer.

In the publishing world of New York right now, yes. If you even remotely

consider that, it is sort of a diss, even though there is this fact that

being a good-looking writer helps you. In the end, I don't really think it

does. No, it doesn't help you. In the end, I think it works against you

because people are so... It won't take you seriously.

But Glamorama is...

everything that you hate about beauty yes now we've had this conversation

before I don't mean to be too pedantic but I think that Cindy Crawford's evil

Brett

you do too Well,

there's a certain kind of beauty that I do consider evil. It's not the beauty

that's so evil, it's our reaction to the beauty that I think is kind of evil.

It's not the person, it's our reaction to it. And what we've been inbred to

believe is, like, attractive and beautiful right now in the culture. So

your feelings are evil?

Our feelings aren't evil.

It's like the message is given out. The message of evil.

It's evil.

About like beauty is like the biggest thing that you can aspire to and most

people can only change that and they can only feel bad.

Right. And that most people respond to and think you're like great for. I think

the key word in Glamorama, that sentence that Victor says is like, the better you

look, the more you see.

I'm kind of burnt out right now and I really don't know if I'm going to, if

writing a book, another book.

It's going to happen for a little while. I'm thinking maybe, to write a word,

maybe just going to Hollywood and writing screenplays.

It seems to be a much simpler and easier way to perhaps make a living. I don't

know. I know that sounds kind of depressing, but in today's marketplace

of the world, I don't know. It seems maybe where I might go.

But I don't know. I don't know.

I always said that...

Well, you know, I always said that Brett was Orson Welles.

Well, you only said I was Orson Welles because of how I looked, rather than how

I wrote or anything. No, but because you're a big genius.

Because I was a big cheese face.

I thought that was what it was.

No, Orson Welles is even gorgeous.

And I love wine and fish sticks. Orson Welles is even gorgeous.

Oh, wait, fish sticks or fist up the butt? No.

Fish sticks, baby.

Have you ever been with a woman?

Yeah, have you?

Actually, ask me that.

Have you ever been with a woman? I have been with a woman.

Candace, it's your turn.

No, I was once, and I have to say, I'm not into it.

I'm not into it. I'm into men.

What do you want to drink?

You

don't

lie and you tell the truth about things.

All those other people lie about themselves. I didn't bite my lip. I just

think that you do lie sometimes.

You know that supposedly Brett, like, lies. I do, I do. He lies more than most

people. He makes up stories.

No, he embellishes. He is the most dramatic, histrionic person I've known.

I don't find that Brett lies.

No, but you're not my better friend.

Larry's like my best friend, and I have lied a lot about him.

I totally make up shit all the time. He does all the time. But I'm a writer. And

it's very funny, but it's like he tells me stories all the time and he draws it.

No,

there's a truth to it, but he exaggerates it to a satiric extreme. And

that is what I mean. I know, but the other thing is, almost all of Brett's

friends or our friends or whatever are writers, so it's a given that you aren't

going to exaggerate someone.

But exaggeration is a lie. But you understand that.

Because I've heard stories that Brad supposedly tells about me that are

exaggerations. I just laughed. Now, Karen Marta, on the other hand, is like,

he's even thinking about... Calm down, everybody.

Calm down. This is the way we are anyway. You have like three bored people

going, like, what are you talking about? Oh, shut the fuck up!