Bret Easton Ellis’s stint of publicity in the UK for ‘Imperial Bedrooms’ includes a video interview with the Guardian in which he develops some of the topics that were up for discussion in last week’s reading and Q&A in the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
You can view the video here.
It’s interesting viewing for anyone who missed out on the LLF event as he’s such a dry, sarcastic character- really what you’d expect from reading his novels. Susie Feay, our chair for evening, got some great answers out of him including the information that ‘a novel comes from pain and chaos’, which really does nothing to dispel the myth that creative people are all manic depressives. My regret is not asking Ellis what he meant by stating in the audience’s Q&A that he didn’t see what was so wrong with misogyny. I hope he was joking, just as he pretended not to know who Baudrillard is, but Ellis pointing out that Hemingway was a misogynist in his time does in no way mean that it’s acceptable in ours.
The audience’s Q&A did descend into comedic chaos as one…two…three questions about Ellis’s fondness for reality television show ‘The Hills’ were asked, and the ‘American Psycho’ author had no qualms about rejecting questions about his philosophical influences that he didn’t want to answer. It was hilarious, but also a shame as for a person who has never been a huge fan of Ellis’s, I was looking forward to finding out more about the man who writes the most brutal sex scenes I’ve ever heard of. That’s why I find this video interview so compelling. At Southbank Centre he touched upon the violence within his work, drily saying that ‘I guess I should have known that people are emotional even though a book is made up with made up people’ and here he goes a little deeper with the Guardian in his discussion of the link between love and sadism.
All credit for the title to Charlotte, my fellow Storyboxer.
Filed under: London Literature Festival 2010 Tagged: | Alex Rowse, American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis, Susie Feay
