Bret Easton Ellis
By Mark Amerika and Alexander Laurence
He grew up in Los Angeles where he played keyboards for many new wave groups, hung out in the LA punk scene, and now is often nostalgic for that time in the early 1980s. He wrote a few novels at an early age, made it fashionable to go to Bennington, and eventually moved to New York City. He was often attacked for the intolerable violence in his novels, his character's passivity, and his generally "devoid of morals" esthetic, especially in 1991's American Psycho which was so violent that one publisher refused to publish it. Presently, Ellis has been working on a novel about the fashion world and supermodels. So watch out!
Mark Amerika: How did you come to write The Informers? Where did it come from? Did you write this right after American Psycho?
Bret Easton Ellis: It was written over a ten year period of time. I started working on it in 1983 and I finished it last August. It was 50% longer. It was the project I could go to, with no intention of ever publishing it, whenever I got major writer's block with the other novels. I would go back to this book which seemed to be about a group of people that criss-crossed paths in Los Angeles. That would relax and loosen me up, whenever I got stuck or tripped over someone's voice in one of my other novels. The Informers was the place to practice a new monologue or a new voice. It was like going to a gym, or getting in shape for a marathon.
I went down to Richmond, Virginia to finish this novel which I had been working on for a long time. I hoped to finish it by Christmas. It was due to the publishers. A friend had a house down there. I had my own room. I had all my stuff splayed out there. I couldn't write any of this new book, and went back to The Informers . I started to play around with it. It just became more and more apparent to me that if I don't push this book out of my life, then I'm going to be fooling around with it, and I'll never get to this other book that I really want to write. So I offered this to my publishers with the provision that I would be finishing my other book. I said "You don't have to publish it. I'm just making good on my deadline. You can take it, or throw it away." To my surprise, they liked it. There were a few stories, that I wanted in that, we argued over.
Alexander Laurence: You spoke of the Rikki Lake show before. What kind of influence has the media had, growing up watching TV, now being 30 years old--how has that more >>
