Bret Easton Ellis: 9 things you might not have known

His first novel since 2010’s Imperial Bedrooms, The Shards takes Ellis back to Los Angeles and the early 1980s as a group of privileged high school friends deal with both a new and mysterious student, and the looming presence of a serial killer on the city’s streets.

You’ll undoubtedly know Ellis as the author of the controversial American Psycho, and other works including his debut Less Than Zero, further novels The Rules of Attraction and Glamorama, and the mock memoir Lunar Park. But how much more do you know about the man behind these books? Ahead of his appearance in our Queen Elizabeth Hall we picked out some potentially lesser known facts about this remarkable chronicler of American culture.

He’s not the only notable alumni from his High School

Born in Los Angeles in 1964 and raised in the nearby San Fernando Valley, Ellis attended The Buckley School in Sherman Oaks. However, the author is far from the school’s only famous graduate with its other attendees over the years including actors Matthew Perry, Alyssa Milano and Tatyana Ali, producer David Niven Jr, and socialites Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. Those who attended around the same time as Ellis have noted the similarities between Buckley and the fictional high school in his debut novel Less Than Zero, particularly child actor Danny Bonaduce whose autobiography states, ‘When Less Than Zero came out, all my classmates were pissed. Not because it was an exact portrayal of our school – but because we failed to get any royalties.’

His first novel was published when he was just 21 years old

After graduating from The Buckley School, Ellis crossed the United States to Vermont to attend Bennington College. At Bennington he initially studied music, before gravitating towards his foremost passion of writing. It was whilst still studying at Bennington that Ellis first novel, Less Than Zero, was published in 1985. A tale of disaffected, rich teenagers in Los Angeles, Ellis had begun writing the book during his second year of high school. The critical success of Less Than Zero, enabled Ellis to write full-time; ‘It gave me the freedom to work on my fiction and that was the most important thing that happened out of the success of that book’.

His most famous book almost wasn’t published at all…

Ellis followed Less Than Zero with The Rules of Attraction in 1987, and then with 1991’s American Psycho. But such was the controversy over the content and themes of the latter that he had received 13 death threats before it had even been published. The backlash led to publishers Simon & Schuster withdrawing their support for the book at the last minute, and it was only released instead by Vintage. The National Organisation for Women called for a boycott of the book – and indeed every other book published by Vintage – with NOW’s then president Tammy Bruce telling The Times, ‘this is not art. Mr Ellis is a confused, sick young man with a deep hatred of women who will do anything for a fast buck.’

…though his original idea for American Psycho had been for something much less shocking

With American Psycho, Ellis initially set out to write something much more realistic; a New York novel that centred on the life of one of the many yuppie bankers of Wall Street. But whilst spending time with the bankers as research he noticed their obsession with one upmanship. This, coupled with Ellis’ own experience of isolation at the time, took the concept in a different direction, as he pulled on these two threads. As he explained in a 2010 interview, ‘I was living like Patrick Bateman. I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself. That is where the tension of American Psycho came from’.

Music is a prominent motif in his books

In American Psycho, music helps not only to timestamp the book, but also serves to highlight the consumerist nature of central character Patrick Bateman who places a weighted gravitas on contemporary pop music, particularly that of Phil Collins and Huey Lewis and The News. But the connection between music and Ellis’ novels doesn’t end here. Both Less Than Zero and 2010’s Imperial Bedrooms take their names from Elvis Costello records, with the latter setting scenes through nods to music from Bat for Lashes, The National and The Fray. And the connection also flows in the opposite direction with Bloc Party, through their ‘Song for Clay’, and Manic Street Preachers with ‘Patrick Bateman’, both recording tracks inspired by Ellis’ characters.

He is a prominent podcaster

In 2013 Ellis launched his own podcast, uncryptically titled The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, as a vehicle for discussion on film, television, music, literature and pop culture. Promoted as an ‘audio trip inside the mind of the controversial best-selling author’ the podcast has seen Ellis in conversation with a broad range of guests, including Quentin Tarrantino, Kanye West, Peaches, and Marilyn Manson.

He has exhibited as an artist

Ellis met the pop artist Alex Israel in 2010 when he interviewed the author for Purple magazine. The pair hit it off, with Ellis also appearing on Israel’s YouTube show As It Lays in 2012, and in 2016 their connection became a creative one, as they combined to produce California Uber Alles, a series of artworks designed to evoke the double lives of Los Angeles people. Each of the large-scale pieces features an evocative sentence from Ellis, printed over stock imagery of Los Angeles sourced by Israel. ‘We are two people creating work together as one artist,’ Israel told The Guardian, ‘we share this interest and passion with the city and, coming together, we found a middle point.’

The worlds in his novels often intertwine

Ellis novels feature a number of recurring characters and locations. The fictional Camden College, inspired by Ellis’ own alma mater of Bennington, is the setting for The Rules of Attraction, but also earns mentions in Less Than Zero and American Psycho. Less than Zero’s Clay goes on to narrate a chapter of The Rules of Attraction; a protagonist of which, Sean Bateman, also appears in American Psycho, which of course centres on his brother Patrick Bateman. Likewise, Patrick features in The Rules of Attraction, and both brothers appear in 1998’s Glamorama. 

He grew bored of social media

‘Twitter I once loved, now I’m bored by it,’ he told The Guardian in 2016. ‘We live in a touchy world but you can’t be too opinionated’. Ellis had been a prominent poster on the social media site in the early 2010s, and his willingness to talk about whatever was on his mind – from celebrity drug use to Grindr to the prominence of people likely to vote for Donald Trump, but not admit it – saw him draw inevitable controversy. An aspect which undoubtedly led to his weariness of the platform as, just as with his novels, generating controversy was never part of Ellis’ plan. As he told the New York Times in a 2019 interview ‘I never care about riling up anybody, that’s a waste of time. It’s always been about purely wanting to express myself, and not really thinking about the audience at all.’