In 2003, I was a recent college grad living in New York. During the day I worked as a grant writer for a nonprofit while, by night, I chipped away at a first novel that fell squarely in the genre of (surprise) Recent College Grads Living In New York. The circumstances by which I met Bret Easton Ellis were as unremarkable and clichéd as many first drafts of first novels. My then-boss knew the author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho socially and had invited Bret to a fundraising event that spring. Near the end of the party, this boss, tipsy, introduced us and suggested that, hey, maybe I could send Bret my unagented, unpublished manuscript. Bret was on his way out of the crowded venue and I stood there, shrugging and nodding and trying to appear casually confident as opposed to starstruck and sheepish. Bret wore the dark overcoat that had become a fixture of his media coverage throughout the prior two decades. While frequent profiles depicted a serious and elusive artist, in person he was disarmingly warm. He said sure with a graciousness that shocked me, as if he actually would be glad to read the half-baked draft of an employee of an acquaintance of his.
The next day, I attached the work-in-progress—a sort of love quadrangle loosely based on former college classmates—to an aw-shucks email and he replied, Happy to take a look. B. I did not expect to correspond with him ever again, but I still experienced a substantial thrill at having a true literary figure’s name in my inbox. I was 22 and had been writing since I was 14. Even the cursory exchange seemed like movement in the city’s opaque publishing apparatus.
Every couple of months, we grabbed a meal. These get-togethers were stressful, because he was particular about where he ate—not just the food but the service, acoustics, the space between tables and even the angles of tables relative to windows. We met at The Harrison in Tribeca a few times, which has since closed, and Pete’s Tavern in Gramercy Park. During those hours away from the text itself he somehow managed to frame a gentler, broader belief in the novel’s value and, maybe, mine. We talked about where we had grown up, and family dynamics, regrets, aspirations, books we’d read, movies we’d seen, why people write, and what it signified to desire deeply to accomplish this thing and no other thing.
I remember realizing during those conversations that it must be difficult—a tremendous amount of work and effort and toll—to be as intelligent, observant, and feeling as Bret is.
What motivates a person, spread thin by the demands of success and ambition, to invest a tremendous amount of time in another person’s work? How does the beneficiary tally the level of giving? How to pay it back, or pay it forward, when one had neither means nor influence to do so? Bret himself would grow irritated and disinterested whenever I harped on these questions, so I stopped doing so out loud.
But maybe as an expression of gratitude, I read his books carefully and in sequence during that year. Doing so caused a strange dissonance. Scenes of rape and dismemberment and a relentless focus on viscera tended to be the point for many reviewers and outraged op-eds, but that content served a clear a role in his storytelling and didn’t unnerve me. Rather, I struggled to wrap my head around the apathetic and cruel ways with which many of his characters behaved towards each other. These patterns contrasted with the gentle, thoughtful guy I now knew. I wanted to elbow my way into literary salons to proclaim that the writer whose mind conceived of monstrous Patrick Bateman was a considerate listener who opened doorways in conversations, and that you could read Less Than Zero and see not just Didion and Delillo but also Dickens and Nabokov. This urge that was self-gratuitous to be sure—especially since Bret himself didn’t seem at all concerned with the noise his work generated.
He and I moved to Los Angeles at around the same time, 20-plus years ago, and lived about a mile and a half apart. We had dinner a few more times, once at a small Italian place in Sherman Oaks. I can’t recall the name of the restaurant, but he’d grown up right around the corner on Valley Vista and I remember being moved by the way he spoke of Los Angeles as sprawling and gorgeous. The last gift he gave to my first novel was its title, The Tourists. I labored over writing the book’s dedication to him, and maybe that was why he didn’t like those sentences—too wordy and earnest, he said in one final editorial note that was maybe the only one I didn’t take.
And then we lost touch for the most part. My own career swerved into nonfiction when my college roommate died tragically and telling his story seemed like the thing I could do to honor him. Writing that book, getting married, and raising young kids took up the remainder of my time and thought.
Now and again I would reread Bret’s books. They offer new truths as you age, and they become more poignant. I’d buy the newest novels as they came out: Lunar Park, Imperial Bedrooms. I realize that I’m now older than Bret was when he took me on as a project, but running a random errand in LA that takes me past an intersection he has described in his fiction remains thrilling in the blithe, youthful way that receiving his first email was thrilling. When I happen to be driving west along Ventura Boulevard from Laurel Canyon toward Encino, I’ll play “Don’t Change” by INXS as loud as I can bear and I’ll remember reading Less Than Zero for the first time.
Killing time in a book store in the Hartford airport a couple years ago, I found The Shards displayed prominently by the register. The striking cover featured a man’s eye tinted crimson in multiple images of intensifying focus. I was a little embarrassed that I hadn’t known a new Bret Easton Ellis novel was forthcoming. Only after buying the book did I realize that the image used on the cover was his actual face.
I started reading at my departure gate, finished about half of the 600-plus pages on the plane and the rest within a few days. The meditative thriller moved me with its emphasis on what we carry, what we discard, what morphs and expands and cracks along the way. The scenes that held me most were not the bloody or cruel ones. Repeatedly throughout the book its narrator, a teenaged character named Bret Easton Ellis who is an aspiring writer, disengages from all the dramatic events surrounding him so that he can work on his novel in seclusion. That person, I felt, was someone I knew.
