Ellis is off on one. But he does, after all, have a reputation for courting public controversy and gladly assumes the role as a provocateur in the culture war. Five years ago, the author issued a written public apology in Dear Kathryn Bigelow: Bret Easton Ellis Is Really Sorry  after insulting American filmmaker, Kathryn Bigelow. “[She] would be considered mildly interesting if she was a man but since she’s a very hot woman she’s really overrated,” Ellis tweeted.

In his 2019 book of essays White the author expressed his outrage at politically correct liberal America. “I was going to call the book Privileged White Male, because that is what I am,” he says. “But this identity tag has become for many the epitome of evil.”

Some critics pointed to the book’s most illuminating theme: visceral anger. “I wrote the book during 2018, at a moment when everybody was angry,” Ellis admits. “I’m so not there anymore.”

Born in L.A. in 1964 into a well-off family, Ellis wears his Gen X identity tag as a badge of honour. “We lived in the most profane, offensive time when you could say whatever you wanted and nobody cared,” he says.

Millennials, by contrast, are a bunch of attention-seeking, whining cry-babies, who always play the victim card, the author claims. “These people believe anyone who disagrees with them should be cancelled. Oh, the horror, the horror,” he says, breaking into convulsions of laughter. “It’s absurd. I’ve been cancelled three times. For my Twitter account. For White. And for writing American Psycho.”

The controversial 1991 cult novel (which later became a successful movie) describes the life of a New York narcissist, Patrick Bateman. By day, he works as Wall Street investment banker. By night, he drinks his own urine and roams the streets of Manhattan looking for women he can slash the throats of. One reviewer in The New York Times described the book as “a gratuitous degradation of human life, of women in particular”.

Loading

“The critics are all wrong,” says Ellis. “Depiction of misogyny is not an act of misogyny. American Psycho became my quest to understand Patrick Bateman’s madness.”

Ellis was then in his late 20s, living a carefree hedonistic lifestyle in Manhattan. He didn’t care what the American literary establishment thought about him, or his books. “I wasn’t worried about my career,” he says. “I just wanted to have sex. I was really into drugs, and I liked to go to clubs.”

Back then a coke binge could go on for four days straight. But Ellis insists that he was always back at his desk early Monday morning to knuckle down to what he did best: writing fiction. “The coke years were roughly from 1988 to 2002,” says Ellis. “Writing was more fun than doing coke, so when I moved back to L.A. I stopped.”

“I’m now 58,” says Ellis philosophically. “The thought of going out and doing coke makes me nauseous. I like a nice wine. The occasional cocktail. If I can’t sleep, an Ativan. Sadly, that’s where a lot of us end up.”

The Shards is published by Swift Press at $32.99.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.