Bret Easton Ellis
An extended interview excerpt with the "American Psycho" author on the violence and sex in his books and the struggles with his editors.
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INTERVIEWER
How did you come up with the incredibly detailed descriptions of what’s happening to these bodies while Patrick Bateman is ripping them apart? Were you completely winging it, or did you hang out with a forensic pathologist for a few months?
ELLIS
When I wrote those scenes I was thinking about a lot of things-the EC comics of my youth, like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, and various slasher movies I saw as a kid and a lot of horror fiction I’d read. Then it was turned up a notch just by being in Patrick Bateman’s mind-set for three years and by imagining how a psychotic who works on Wall Street during the day might describe these things. A lot of those details I couldn’t make up, so there was some kind of FBI textbook I got hold of that went into very graphic detail about various serial killers and how they would torture people. But ultimately I winged it, more or less. It’s fiction.
INTERVIEWER
Did your new editor, Gary Fisketjon, suggest any changes?
ELLIS
Suggestions that I, for the most part, resisted. We almost came to blows over it. I was in L.A. at the time, and Vintage, the Random House imprint that published the book, was on a tight deadline because they wanted to capitalize on the publicity the book had received, so they flew Gary out to L.A. and put him up in a suite at the Hotel Bel-Air-yes, this is how publishers spent their money in the nineties-so that we could go over his edits in person. It was a three-day frenzy of Gary making suggestions and me resisting them. They even put me up in the hotel one night so I wouldn’t have to waste time coming and going from my mom’s house over the hill. The process left him extremely frustrated. I think his plan when he acquired that novel was to radically fix it. The problem was that I didn’t think it needed to be fixed. Gary wrote me a very impassioned letter after the editing process was over. He told me, “You’re going to be very embarrassed by a lot of this book in five or ten years.” And I said, “Well, so what?” And of course that never happened. I was never embarrassed. I saw the violence as an integral part of the novel. He saw the violence as tasteless and juvenile. I consented to some things he wanted-little cuts, little clarifications, maybe two percent of the book overall-and when I see them now, they still annoy me.
INTERVIEWER
Were his objections to the violence on moral or aesthetic grounds?
ELLIS
He claimed aesthetic but I suspected moral, and it pissed me off. His argument was that these scenes are so shocking, so in-your-face, that they distract from the overall mood of the rest of the novel, which is pretty much 385 pages of a young man in a society he doesn’t believe in and yet wants to be a part of. That’s what the novel’s really about. And then there are these explosions of blood and viscera at certain moments that throw everything out of whack. Gary’s concern was, How are we going to be able to concentrate on the next scene of social satire after we’ve read two pages about how a woman has been nail-gunned to a floor, and raped, et cetera, et cetera? Well, I think you can. I dare you. Deal with it. And that’s one of the things that I still find powerful about that book.
Gary and I have a weird relationship. He’s my friend, and he’s my editor. But except for Lunar Park, I really don’t think he likes my books. We almost came to blows over Imperial Bedrooms, too, specifically over the sequence set out in the desert in Palm Springs with Clay and the teenage escorts. There were a couple of details in my draft that he found repellent, even more repellent than what survived. He was so adamant about those details being removed that I just gave up. I removed them, and I’m still not happy about that. In Lunar Park, I had a lot of one-sentence paragraphs that Gary really disliked. To me it just mimicked the way Stephen King, whose work I’ve loved since I was a kid, would do some of his set pieces. Gary thought the one-sentence paragraph was tacky. He thought it wasn’t literary. Who knows? Maybe he’s right. The three music reviews in American Psycho we discussed earlier? Gary tried to cut two of them. He said that three is overkill, one’s enough, pick one. I refused. The reason they work is precisely because three is overkill. One is not psychotic. Three is psychotic.
I think Gary wants to protect me. He wants me to come off better than I am. He may not like my books, but he is what every writer dreams about in terms of total focus on your book. From the moment he gets his hands on the manuscript, all the way to when it is finally published in paperback, he oversees everything. A lot of editors just read the book once and go, Cool, and then hand it off to copyediting. To be honest, Gary might just as well do that with me, because I really don’t listen to a lot of what he says, and I think he is way too much of a stickler about syntax and grammar. I like the way my narrators talk. I know it’s not proper syntax or grammar. But it’s not supposed to be. My narrators aren’t English professors, and I don’t want them to sound like they are.
-- Bret Easton Ellis at The Paris Review (2012)
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INTERVIEWER
How did you come up with the incredibly detailed descriptions of what’s happening to these bodies while Patrick Bateman is ripping them apart? Were you completely winging it, or did you hang out with a forensic pathologist for a few months?
ELLIS
When I wrote those scenes I was thinking about a lot of things-the EC comics of my youth, like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, and various slasher movies I saw as a kid and a lot of horror fiction I’d read. Then it was turned up a notch just by being in Patrick Bateman’s mind-set for three years and by imagining how a psychotic who works on Wall Street during the day might describe these things. A lot of those details I couldn’t make up, so there was some kind of FBI textbook I got hold of that went into very graphic detail about various serial killers and how they would torture people. But ultimately I winged it, more or less. It’s fiction.
INTERVIEWER
Did your new editor, Gary Fisketjon, suggest any changes?
ELLIS
Suggestions that I, for the most part, resisted. We almost came to blows over it. I was in L.A. at the time, and Vintage, the Random House imprint that published the book, was on a tight deadline because they wanted to capitalize on the publicity the book had received, so they flew Gary out to L.A. and put him up in a suite at the Hotel Bel-Air-yes, this is how publishers spent their money in the nineties-so that we could go over his edits in person. It was a three-day frenzy of Gary making suggestions and me resisting them. They even put me up in the hotel one night so I wouldn’t have to waste time coming and going from my mom’s house over the hill. The process left him extremely frustrated. I think his plan when he acquired that novel was to radically fix it. The problem was that I didn’t think it needed to be fixed. Gary wrote me a very impassioned letter after the editing process was over. He told me, “You’re going to be very embarrassed by a lot of this book in five or ten years.” And I said, “Well, so what?” And of course that never happened. I was never embarrassed. I saw the violence as an integral part of the novel. He saw the violence as tasteless and juvenile. I consented to some things he wanted-little cuts, little clarifications, maybe two percent of the book overall-and when I see them now, they still annoy me.
INTERVIEWER
Were his objections to the violence on moral or aesthetic grounds?
ELLIS
He claimed aesthetic but I suspected moral, and it pissed me off. His argument was that these scenes are so shocking, so in-your-face, that they distract from the overall mood of the rest of the novel, which is pretty much 385 pages of a young man in a society he doesn’t believe in and yet wants to be a part of. That’s what the novel’s really about. And then there are these explosions of blood and viscera at certain moments that throw everything out of whack. Gary’s concern was, How are we going to be able to concentrate on the next scene of social satire after we’ve read two pages about how a woman has been nail-gunned to a floor, and raped, et cetera, et cetera? Well, I think you can. I dare you. Deal with it. And that’s one of the things that I still find powerful about that book.
Gary and I have a weird relationship. He’s my friend, and he’s my editor. But except for Lunar Park, I really don’t think he likes my books. We almost came to blows over Imperial Bedrooms, too, specifically over the sequence set out in the desert in Palm Springs with Clay and the teenage escorts. There were a couple of details in my draft that he found repellent, even more repellent than what survived. He was so adamant about those details being removed that I just gave up. I removed them, and I’m still not happy about that. In Lunar Park, I had a lot of one-sentence paragraphs that Gary really disliked. To me it just mimicked the way Stephen King, whose work I’ve loved since I was a kid, would do some of his set pieces. Gary thought the one-sentence paragraph was tacky. He thought it wasn’t literary. Who knows? Maybe he’s right. The three music reviews in American Psycho we discussed earlier? Gary tried to cut two of them. He said that three is overkill, one’s enough, pick one. I refused. The reason they work is precisely because three is overkill. One is not psychotic. Three is psychotic.
I think Gary wants to protect me. He wants me to come off better than I am. He may not like my books, but he is what every writer dreams about in terms of total focus on your book. From the moment he gets his hands on the manuscript, all the way to when it is finally published in paperback, he oversees everything. A lot of editors just read the book once and go, Cool, and then hand it off to copyediting. To be honest, Gary might just as well do that with me, because I really don’t listen to a lot of what he says, and I think he is way too much of a stickler about syntax and grammar. I like the way my narrators talk. I know it’s not proper syntax or grammar. But it’s not supposed to be. My narrators aren’t English professors, and I don’t want them to sound like they are.
-- Bret Easton Ellis at The Paris Review (2012)
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