“The Informers,” an ensemble film set in nineteen-eighties L.A.—Ray-Bans, chopper soundtrack, drugs, rock, vodka in the tub, spiritual alienation rendered as standing on the sidelines of a foursome, clothed—maintains a certain fidelity to that world as it is witnessed by Bret Easton Ellis, the postmodern pastiche author who wrote the short stories on which the film was based. Ellis wrote the stories during long winter breaks from Bennington College, while back home in his childhood bedroom in Sherman Oaks. They came out as a book in 1994, after his best-known novels, “Less Than Zero” and “American Psycho,” had already been published; he wrote the screenplay with Nicholas Jarecki several years ago, and both writers are credited as executive producers on the film.
Bret Easton Ellis: 'So you're a misogynist, a racist – so what? Does it make your art less interesting?'
This article is more than 13 years old
The American author on how pain is the inspiration for all his books, getting off drugs and telling the truth
Decca Aitkenhead
Monday 26 July 2010
W
hat is it aboutBret Easton Ellisthat sends people mad? Readers love him or hate him with a violence seldom found in the literary world; all the friends I canvassed either went dark at the mention of his name, or giddy with excitement. For 25 years Ellis has provoked wildly mixed reviews – on balance more bad than good – and has never won a major literary prize. Yet the author still inspires the kind of ferocious frenzy more typical of a rock star.
Bret Easton Ellis: ‘I connected with Quentin Tarantino’
The US author on discovering Stephen King, being inspired by Joan Didion, and losing himself in film criticism
Bret Easton Ellis
25 AUGUST 2023
My earliest reading memory
The Poky Little Puppy by Janette Sebring Lowrey, illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren. I was probably four or five, and I read it with my mother in my parents’ bedroom. I still remember the drawings today as if I were back in the safety of childhood.
My favourite book growing up
Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. I read a lot of horror and SF and fantasy when I was a kid but placing vampires in a recognisable and completely realistic world was singularly terrifying, and I went back again and again.
The book that changed me as a teenager
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. I read it in my early teens the night before we were going to discuss it in an English class – and then read it immediately again. After staying up all night, I realised the possibilities of the novel and there was no going back to the books of my childhood. It was a before-and-after experience.
The writer who changed my mind
The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who pulled me out of the burgeoning middlebrow world of my youth and showed me how trash and pop could also be invigorating and vital art and nothing to feel guilty about.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. After I read this collection of essays I understood what a sentence could do. It was the book through which I discovered how style and voice sells everything – style and voiceisthe meaning.
The author I came back to
Charles Dickens, who I was taught way too young – who gives a 12-year-old David Copperfield? I had other painful experiences with him when I was a teenager. I came back to Dickens in my late 40s and was stunned by the scope and genius and the pure readability of his greatest work.
The book I reread
F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, every 10 years or so, ever since I first read it in high school. It feels different each time and keeps reaffirming itself as the key American novel of the 20th century.
The book I could never read again
Probably something by Robert Ludlum, whose mammoth super-violent bestselling thrillers from the 1970s were a staple with my father (The Gemini Contenders, The Holcroft Covenant) and later with me – dense, tightly plotted, often gory, cinematic. I was fascinated then but picked one up a couple of years ago and could barely get through a chapter. Plot isn’t enoug
The book I discovered later in life
Well, there are many of them but one of the most profound was Edith Wharton’sThe House of Mirth– I have no idea why I hadn’t come to it earlier. It seems that everyone I know had read it decades ago and I only discovered it in my 50s.
The book I am currently reading
World’s Fair by EL Doctorow. I bought it in 1985 and found it when I was cleaning out the library at my mother’s house – it was one of those rare hardbacks that for some reason had never been cracked. I’m also reading Quentin Tarantino’sCinema Speculation. I have never connected more intimately with a book about movies – we’re the same age and our childhood moviegoing experiences are almost identical.
My comfort read
David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. I can open it at any page and become completely immersed in it. The first time I read it was a profound education. The hundreds of times I’ve flowed through it – or parts of it – have been pure pleasure. I agree as often as I disagree with his takes on movies, directors and actors, but it’s always informative and completely transporting.
From Karl Ove Knausgård to Marguerite Duras, the French author Nina Bouraoui celebrates the writers whose stories are told without invention
Nina Bouraoui Wed 16 September 2020
A
n autofiction is a work of truth; the author is not hiding behind an invented character, she is that character. The character’s spiritual and philosophical quest is the author’s own; the “I” of the narrative is the author, recreating the world according to his or her own experience.
She delivers the truth, without altering or falsifying the facts, as if putting together a police report. The power of autofiction comes from its universality. When she tells her own story, the writer describes an expanded world, one that unites us all.
The writer’s own story is the human story, with the same structure and complexity. Autofiction doesn’t arise from the urge to invent, to create a fictional other and tell a tale according to the rules of a particular form. It’s more a way of experiencing the Other as a being similar to oneself: “when I speak of myself, I’m speaking of you.” It may not be the absolute truth the author is telling, but it is her truth as she lived and experienced it.
Towards the end of the 1990s I was asked by the French writer Christine Angot to write an autobiographical novel for her series of autofictions with the general title of Sujet(Subject). I had just started therapy and the analysis spilled over quite naturally into my writing.
I was driven by a genuine craving to write about my origins, my identity, my dual nationality, my sexuality. I felt that in getting to the heart of my own truth, I was also touching on what seemed to be a universal truth. After that I wrote three auto-fictional novels, bringing together my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood.
In 2008, I came back to the more traditional novel, inventing characters and stories that weren’t part of my own experience. I wrote All Men Want to Know 10 years later, perhaps as a response to the times. On the one hand gay rights had become more widely recognised and defended, at least here in the west, but at the same time, we were witnessing a rise in verbal aggressions towards minorities in France, as well as a surge in violent homophobic assaults.
I can lay claim to having a triple status: I’m a woman, I’m of mixed race and I’m gay. With the rise of the extreme right, I felt it was important to tell my parents’ story: a French woman marrying an Algerian man, my mother’s arrival in Algiers after 1962, a time when the French were all leaving Algeria; our life there, full of beauty, poetry and sometimes, danger; the discovery of my sexuality. It takes courage to step outside of the norm and become the person you are. I wanted to affirm once and for all that one’s sexuality, one’s identity has a story of its own, that it doesn’t arise from nowhere, that it is not something one chooses.
I feel affection and admiration for all writers of autofiction and for the books they write. It takes a certain kind of courage to deliver up the truth about oneself. I see it as a kind of political act, too: in declaring who you are, you’re also saying something about other people and about the world we inhabit.
Guibert is the father of autofiction, the master of finding that perfect balance of truth and beauty. In this book, he tells the story of his illness, Aids, in the late 1980s. He tells of how life with the virus became an existential adventure, how it affected a generation, how it stole his friends and lovers, and how writing was for him a bulwark against death and destruction. It’s the story of an era, a turning point – when Aids transformed our relationship with desire and sexuality forever.
Zorn could be Guibert’s brother. A somewhat mysterious figure, who only wrote this one novel, Zorn writes of his strict, repressive upbringing and denounces the hypocrisy of bourgeois Zurich. He writes in clinical, icy terms of his cancer, in which, to his great surprise, he found a kind of salvation. This is a book about the prison of the family and the veiled violence within it. A masterpiece.
Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this great writer. In Practicalities, Duras tells of her childhood in Indochina, her relationship with alcohol, her experience of the second world war, of religion, love and the solitude in which books are born. She writes about the places that mattered to her – her house outside Paris, her apartment on the Rue Saint-Benoît. This is Duras as seen by Marguerite, an intimate and major work.
Norwegian writer Knausgård has constructed an autofictional edifice. The master of detail, he writes not only about life as it is being lived, but also about the roots of that life: childhood, adolescence, the death of his tyrannical father. Knausgård’s work, considered by some to be sensationalistic, is the ultimate in provocative, brutally honest autobiographical writing.
This short work tells the story of a woman’s great love. Ernaux’s unadorned prose lays bare the madness of love and the workings of the flesh: expectation, physical tension, surrender – written, as always, with consummate skill. Ernaux never tired of writing of passion and lost love, of the female body and its vertiginous relationship to the male.
With great courage, Angot writes of how an incestuous father ruptured a soul’s equilibrium to the core, fracturing its relationship to love, to the world (in this instance, a conflicted relationship with a woman) and to other people. A work unequalled in its power to give strength and comfort to all abused children.
In 1957, Sagan was involved in a car accident and spent several months in hospital recovering from her injuries. During that time, she kept a journal in which she reflected on pain, writing and morphine. This previously unpublished journal throws light on the work of Sagan, who almost died at the height of her fame and who found herself caught in the infernal cycle of drug dependence.
The story of a generation (the 1980s again) and the key to all of Ellis’s work. This is Ellis from the inside: the origins of Less Than Zero, the success of American Psycho, an overview of our time, Ellis predicting the end of the novel, perhaps, and revealing his desire to tell it all the way he sees it.
A love story about a young reader (Yann Andréa Steiner) and his passionate admiration for a woman who writes: Marguerite Duras. This is their story, set in Paris and Trouville, told in words and silence. A window on the world of Duras: a world of books, films, plays – and alcohol. Yann Andréa was Duras’s young gaycompanion, her first reader and her great love.
10. Consent by Vanessa Springora translated by Natasha Lehrer The autobiographical account of a woman, who at the age of 14 was allegedly groomed by a man in his 50s, the writer Gabriel Matzneff. It tells the story of an adult’s hold over a young girl barely out of childhood. This extraordinary book could not have appeared without the #MeToo movement and the power it gave to women to speak out.