Bret Easton Ellis: "The character of the serial killer is like a kind of evil double of the writer"

It is in his suite at the Parisian palace Madame Rêve that Bret Easton Ellis receives, dressed in his strict uniform - jogging and hoodie - while the television, his coupe, broadcasts Good Bye

.

While confessing a crush on lead actor Daniel Brühl, the

author settles down on the couch to strike up a conversation with his usual outspokenness and prolixity, only interrupted by the room service that comes to him. brings a third bottle of gin when he says he only ordered one…

To discover

• The 3/4 Beckhams, a dream family?

The novelist is now publishing

, which recounts his senior year in Los Angeles, within the posh establishment of Buckley, embellishing it with a touch of

.

Because if it deals with the transition to adulthood and the loss of innocence of Bret and his friends, this book of great power also features a serial killer who comes dangerously close to this seductive little clique. , wealthy and sexually very active, if we judge by the narrator's frank account of his own turpitudes.

Interview with a writer who became a literary superstar from the publication of his first novel,

, when he was only twenty-one years old.

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Madame Figaro.- Why did you mix fact and fiction in

The book is personal but it is not an autobiographical account

because of the symbolism with which it is impregnated, and metaphors like the character of the serial killer, the Trawler, which for me is similar to a kind of evil double of the writer.

He himself also considers himself an artist: he dismembers bodies to transform them by reassembling the parts;

break into houses, and build a story in his own way, stealing a pen here and sticking a poster there... However, I did want to evoke events that happened to me when I was seventeen .

Initially, the narrator was not called Bret but Clay, and I had adopted a

 "I'm driving towards the barn.

It's a sunny day.

Debbie stands in front of her horse…” But it didn't work.

It had to be a man of a certain age who remembers and tells.

From then on, things fell into place and as I went on, I thought that this book contained so much about myself, that it spoke so much about my life, that there was no reason for me to ' call other than Bret Easton Ellis, and that I give another title to the first novel of the narrator than

...

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Where does your predilection for serial killers come from, from

They haunted my Californian childhood – I keep in mind the murders perpetrated by the Manson family or those of the Strangler of the Hills (serial killers who raged in 1977 and 1978,

).

However, the central subject of Les

, is obsession and how it can spiral out of control and cause you to lose your judgment as well as your sense of reality.

The novel is about a young man, Bret, who is obsessed with a newcomer to campus, Robert Mallory, whom he resents for multiple reasons - he desires it without being reciprocated, Mallory begins a story with his best friend, Susan, breaks up the couple she formed with a friend of Bret, etc.

The narrator then begins to tell a story about him, to imagine connections between the serial killer and this young man, and wants to convince the reader like all those around him that all of this is true.

This is the key to the book, and Bret's central problem: how to master the superpower of

writer – his imagination – as Luke Skywalkers and other Marvel superheroes learn to control their own.

Because in this mythology, if you don't succeed, people can be hurt... A friend joked after reading the book: "I never imagined that you wanted to write

 !

But even though the plot does indeed include a bloody climax, I thought I'd write mostly about the characters of Ryan, Matt, Debbie, those who inspired them and were such a big part of my life, and Buckley , and finally on Los Angeles.

The city is a character in its own right in the novel…

Absolutely, and one could say so for my two other novels set there,

and

.

My books are also works on the places where they take place, from Bennington University of

to Manhattan of

.

In many ways,

is an act of meticulous recreation of a period at a specific time - 1981 - in a specific place - Los Angeles - with all the films and songs of the time - someone counted one hundred and forty-four titles... Because that's what we did in those days: we listened to it all the time.

I remember a teacher who observed about my first short stories: "But why do you always mention the song playing in the background?"

But because there was always a song playing in the background!

He continued, “You are wrong to do that.

By mentioning movies, fashion, current bestsellers, you're dating yourself!

No one will be interested in your stories in two months!

Literature must be out of time…” This is not my opinion.

Brands are part of life.

I wasted my time churning out 20,000 pages of Hollywood scripts that will never be produced.

Bret Easton Ellis

How is

I wanted with

to make fun of myself, to satirize "Bret Easton Ellis", and in addition to playing with the codes of a Stephen King, it contributed to the pleasure I had to write it down.

is a more honest and authentic book.

I stopped hiding things, as I adopted the cool guy pose in

, where I avoided including events that happened to me, like this relationship with a producer in a bedroom. hotel that I describe in

.

I thought he was going to make me work on a script when he just wanted sex.

I was disappointed, without being traumatized: I just told myself that I was an adult and that in the adult world, these were things that could happen.

includes a scene where my character, Clay, observes Julian sleeping with a businessman in a hotel.

At the time, I could never have been a participant – I could only be a witness.

While today, as I turn fifty-seven, I have succeeded, as I had dreamed of for four decades, in writing the scene as it unfolded.

Was this novel also a way for you to resurrect an adolescence that you are longing for?

Absolutely.

You know, it's an emotional experience, not an intellectual one, to write a book.

You would have told me two days before I started

that I was going to start

, I would have told you no.

Only I obsessively thought about the teenager who inspired me Matt Kellner, whom I hadn't seen for 40 years, I thought about sex, about what it was like to be young, to lead this life... And I couldn't believe this had been my life.

The thoroughness and vividness of the descriptions comes from feeling an influx of emotions wash over me one night in April 2020. I need to “feel” my books to write them.

I wish it were otherwise: it had been thirteen years since I had written a novel... It may also be due to the fact that I wasted my time laying out 20,000 pages of screenplays for Hollywood that will never be produced.

Who knows if I do

Les Éclats, Bret Easton Ellis, translated from English by Pierre Guglielmina, ed.

Robert Laffont, 616 pages, €25.90.