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Brett Easton Ellis Revisits American Psycho
From: www.writerswrite.com

" Here's an example of a great save by a journalist. Journalist Peter Madsen of The Daily Iowan conducted an in-depth phone interview with Brett Easton Ellis (American Psycho, Less Than Zero). But when he got back to the office, he discovered that his tape recoreder had totally failed. Facing the wrath of his editor and his possible firing, Madsen drove to a booksigning Ellis was doing and tape-recorded the audience Q and A, in which Ellis talks about his work.

Audience Question: What do you feel is your most autobiographical book?

Ellis: They're all autobiographical in a lot of ways, but if I have to look back, I would have to say that American Psycho is probably the most autobiographical of all the novels. And I know that causes consternation and people getting upset... I was writing about my dad, I was writing about myself, I was writing about a lifestyle that I was living that wasn't really unlike Patrick Bateman's. I mean, I didn't have all that money, but the yuppie movement was huge at that time in New York - I mean, everyone was trapped in it. If you go out to clubs, everyone was wearing suits. What can I tell you? It was that kind of era. But it was also a portrait of self-loathing and anger. I had gotten out of school [Bennington] and came to the city, and even though I had a career, I had been cocooned for about 22 years. And when I got out, I said, 'My god, this is society? This is what society demands of me? This is what it means to be a man? This is what I have to do? This is what the real world is about?' And it was shocking, and it was upsetting, and the punky little nihilist in me wanted to complain about it: the consumerism and life in the '80's, Reagan to a lesser degree, and Wall Street and yuppies, but I was also there. Someone asked me, 'Why didn't you ever write that memoir that you talked about?' At one point, about seven years ago, I talked about writing a memoir, because some people wanted to write a biography about me, and someone else was like, 'Why don't you just write a short one yourself?' And I realized that I had written my autobiography, if you had read all my books. All those books map out who I was at every stage of my life. It's all there. It's all out there. Emotionally, you can tell where I was at any given time. So, I don't know if that really answers the question as well as it should have.

"Well, 'Midnight' came out in January 1994," the author says, speaking by telephone from his Manhattan home. "For two years, I was taken up with the aftershocks. I always wanted to write another book, so I had to back up and ask, 'What worked?' It was characters, place. So I thought, 'What other place?' "

Berendt gravitated to the city of canals and black gondolas because, as a frequent visitor, he was mesmerized by Venice's grandeur, history and intrigue. "To me, Venice was not merely beautiful; it was beautiful everywhere," he writes. He saw parallels with Savannah in that "they're both isolated cities . . . geographically, emotionally and culturally. They're both steeped in history and tradition and inwardly looking." Just as Savannah locals view themselves as a breed apart, he says, "Venetians look to themselves as Venetians first and Italians second."

There were problems. The deadline for "City" came due two years ago. Berendt admits he finished the book just months before publication. "You have to allow for laziness," he says. "And I bought a house, and before I knew it, it was 11 years."

Weiner followed up Good in Bed with In Her Shoes, in 2002. It's the story of two sisters living in Philadelphia who have nothing in common but their shoe size: Rose, the average-looking, responsible overachiever, and Maggie, the aimless, irresponsible beauty.

It just so happens ... "Oh, it's all true," says Molly Weiner, Jennifer's younger sister. At first, she was not happy about it. But a second reading of the book, not to mention having an A-list actress as her alter ego - "What can I say? Cameron Diaz is playing me. It's a dream come true" - made her change her mind.

"(Maggie) comes out good in the end - just like me," says Molly Weiner, 34, an actress based in Los Angeles.

Joss Whedon: Have they ever asked you to write your own?

Neil Gaiman: I did Death: the High Cost of Living, which New Line are meant to be doing next year. They're going to call it Death and Me. I did that mostly because it was one of the things I'd done that was small enough and short enough and actually had a story shape and I could expand it into a movie rather than looking gloomily at something huge and trying to work at what to throw away. I liked that.

But that's barely even a fantasy movie. I mean, it's a story about a depressed sixteen-year-old who runs into a girl who claims to be Death, having her one day off every hundred years, and who may or may not be. It's kind of fun.

But Sandman movies, they just got increasingly appalling. It was really strange. They started out hiring some really good people and you got Elliot and Rossieau and Roger Avary came in and did a draft. They were all solid scripts. And then John Peters fired all of them and got in some people who take orders, and who wanted fistfights and all this stuff. It had no sensibility and it was just...they were horrible.

Joss Whedon: I find that when you read a script, or rewrite something, or look at something that's been gone over, you can tell, like rings on a tree, by how bad it is, how long it's been in development.

His book, Pays Perdu (Lost Land), paints a brutal but comic portrait of the 10-house hamlet at the end of a winding track in the hills of central France. The words "alcohol", "solitude" and "merde" all feature prominently. Written in the style of a novel but based on real characters and events, it focuses on a young girl's funeral attended by one-toothed peasants, raucous shepherdesses and village idiots.

The 25 members of the five families that live in Lussaud only read the book a year after it was published. They were outraged. Their community, they discovered, resembled "a hamlet of bandits in the Pashtoun tribal zone. Even those who live in the neighbouring village consider people here as foreigners, some kind of outlaws." Locals do indeed eye strange cars with suspicion. Just when the visitor feels like turning back, stone houses with the region's typical lava slated roofs appear. Beyond a cemetery and an ancient bread oven an old farmer tends to his flowers to the sound of cow bells, barking sheepdogs and cockerels. The smell of manure and hay is strong.

*****

His main crime in the village's eyes was to have recounted tales gathered from years of talking in confidence. "I naively assumed that any story told to me in such a tiny place was common knowledge," he said. But one case of alleged adultery going back 40 years was unknown to the former lovers' respective children until the book's release. Worse, the children had ended up marrying each other.