But I'm pretty sure he's one of the most disingenuous people I've ever met.Įllis hasn't slept for 48 hours when we meet at his Mayfair hotel, on account of a transatlantic flight. I spent a week following Ellis about, reading him and re-reading him, trying to work it out – and I'm still not sure what I think. Is he a misogynist? A monster? Or a master satirist? Is he a genius? Is he a fraud? Variously constructed as a hip literary bratpacker, an enfant terrible, a drug-gobbling party boy, the Ellis identity is endlessly contested. So we have the paradox of a writer whose voice is absent from his novels – even though they're all about him – yet whose personality is a literary sensation, arguably even more of a phenomenon than anything he's ever written. His books read less like novels than an unconventional form of autobiographical therapy. The parallels between the lives of his narrators and the author come so close as to verge on farcical Lunar Park is about a writer called Bret Easton Ellis who wrote a notorious book called American Psycho. On the other hand, Ellis's novels are entirely about him.
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