Bret Easton Ellis, cult author for Less Than Zero and, above all, for the controversial American Psycho, returns to the novel. With an autofictional and monumental work in every sense. Los destrozos (Random House), six hundred pages starring a 17-year-old teenager who says he lives in 1981 in his last year at a privileged high school. A year that will change him forever, with the music of Blondie and Ultravox as part of a rosary of sexual and sentimental encounters and disagreements. And with the possibility that the Apollinian new boy in the class is a serial killer. Desire, sex, macabre murders, paranoia, pain and, despite the self-deception, love, in an addictive intrigue.
What is your relationship with Bret? Did you need to write a crime novel to talk about your teenage years?
Yes. They are tied. Part of the crime story is that it is a novel about the loss of innocence. A story about corruption in the passage from childhood to adulthood. Crimes are a metaphor for this. At that age I magically felt myself transform, through a series of traumas, from a boyish teenager into a kind of hardened, alienated adult. That being said, a lot of the things that happen to me were real. Unrequited love, not being happy at school, my father’s alcoholism, my parents’ divorce, my homosexuality… And then there are many aspects of my life in Los Angeles at the time that I include: there were cults everywhere, dead bodies on freeway exits, serial killers who scared me and sometimes worked in tandem, like the Hill Stranglers. And that they seemed to have their own narrative, just like me as a writer starting out.
In his narrative he had a girlfriend.
At 17 I was fabulous, I created a lot of things… and I pretended to be the boyfriend of a very popular girl who was in love with me. It was a lie. I never got in trouble for being gay as a kid. I didn’t give a shit. But at 17 I cared. I thought: I’m in love with my best friend, he’s straight and nothing will ever happen. The world is not open to me! I’ll try: get a girlfriend, spend this year… and it didn’t work. So the criminal plot is the metaphor for the entire novel. The murder of Robert Mallory is that of someone I could never have and with whom I was obsessed. He was representative of 97% of men that we gay men will never be able to have. I can accept it now, but at 17 I saw it as terrible and unfair.
In the novel, Bret has sexual relations with the father of the girlfriend, a film producer.
In some scenes that character looks a lot like the father of my girlfriend at the time and in others a producer I knew. That producer took me to lunch at Trumps and the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he proceeded to give me a blowjob. I thought I would make a film of myself at the age of 17. At 17! He wrote to me, he liked the novel. I met him a couple of times in the nineties. It didn’t bother me at all. What really bothered me then was that Ryan Vaughn didn’t reciprocate. This was my trauma. What happened in that hotel room didn’t hurt me. I thought: ‘That’s how adults are, you’re an idiot for thinking otherwise!’ What hurt me is thinking that someone loved me, and they didn’t. That spoiled me, not a blowjob in a hotel. Today this would be reversed. Some would think that that room is what defined their life, that I was raped. It was 1981. Everyone wants to put their pain and their version of 2022, and it doesn’t work. I was talking to a woman my age who wanted to be an actress in her eighties and she said, ‘If only I had known that I could blow that producer and get the part instead of auditioning for two months and not getting it, I would have done it’. But that’s Generation X and our reaction to things. You mention it to a millennial and they melt. Gender roles, patriarchy, the patriarchy! Ten!
Is this work born of nostalgia?
I hate to say pandemic shutdown, I hate to say covid. But I wonder if I would have written it otherwise. I ended up on the internet, where I’m never. And I thought: ‘My God, 1981 was so fucking better than 2021’. I started looking for colleagues and listening to music from then, and I recovered the summary of Los destrozos that I wrote 30 years ago and left. And I saw the problem: it was narrated by an 18-year-old boy; I had to be 56 and look back. Realizing this there was a flood, I wrote the book quickly and it has been cathartic.
Have the problems you experienced as a teenager changed today?
There has been a 5,500% increase in teenage suicides. Was that time better? Yes. I didn’t know any medicated guys, there were no school shootings. We had freedom to express ourselves and be ourselves. There is a huge, horrible difference. Today you can be gay on a high school team, but compared to all the crap out there…sorry. And take being gay as your identity? It didn’t even occur to us. I had a bad year at 17, when I wanted to be someone else. And that’s what I wanted to write about here. I have a lot of nostalgia; I realized that I would far rather live in 1981, even as a closeted youth, than be a teenager now.
What happened from Generation X to Generation Z?
There is no freedom. It has been blocked. Everyone’s identity has become the problem. Your victimhood, your pain, is your badge of honor. In the eighties we grew up in Eden by comparison. I don’t envy them.
In 1981, Reagan just started a revolution, but he only mentions it.
I was too privileged. Why should I be interested in politics? And as my boyfriend tells me, don’t vote, leave it to me because I don’t have money and I have a lot of social concerns. He is right. And that I got into a good mess trying to understand Blanco why people voted for Trump. I became a traitor, it couldn’t be done. Now I don’t even see news. We live in a country where 92% of the population does not trust the media. it’s scary
Trump is back, why are they voting for him?
It is as it seems. People like that. He’s strong, he doesn’t act like a bureaucrat. And then something has happened to the left that makes even people like my partner, who was a wild socialist, understand Trump and feel that the left is the problem. In the name of progressivism there is a nightmare for free speech. You cannot live under that authoritarian government of language, with the cancellation of jokes and shows destroyed because they are considered racist without having been written. The canon can be dismantled, it is white and old, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dickens, who had an 18-year-old mistress. Oh, God! Maybe Huckleberry Finn shouldn’t be the greatest American high school novel because it has the word black, when it’s used in every hip-hop and rap song of the past year. Where are we?
