TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Bret Easton Ellis: 'I was always suspicious of wealth'
His latest novel, "The Shards", sees him revisit Buckley, the posh high school he attended in the early 1980s.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
In this file photo taken on September 20, 2019, US author and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis poses during a photo session in Paris. Bret Easton Ellis writes about the rich because it's funny to see them screw up, says the American writer who publishes his seventh novel “Les Éclats“ which appears on March 15, 2023 in French.
(AFP/Joel Saget)
B
ret Easton Ellis is characteristically blunt about the central theme of all his work -- in his words: "the rich, and how fucked up they are".
His latest novel, "The Shards", sees him revisit Buckley, the posh high school he attended in the early 1980s.
Despite a fictionalised serial killer plotline, much is drawn from his real life, as Ellis and his comrades lounge around their pools and drive to class in sports cars. Sex and drugs punctuate their free time.
"It is a privileged set of characters. I write about the rich and I always have," he told AFP during a visit to Paris.
"We were much more privileged than I ever thought when I was younger. The first time we began to get some acne, boom: expensive dermatologist. In Beverly Hills none of my friends had acne," he said.
Buckley's school alumni include famous names such as Matthew Perry from "Friends" and Kim Kardashian.
But Ellis's family life disabused him of any romantic notion of wealth.
