The Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions. Conversations on the legal topics affecting businesses and individuals today.
Sarah Lau, Senior Communication Manager
Mishcon de Reya
Welcome everyone, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon and welcome to this Mishcon Academy session, part of a series of events, videos and podcasts looking at the biggest events, issues, faced by businesses and individuals today. I am delighted to introduce today’s guest, Bret Easton Ellis. A renowned author known for deftly blending satire and social commentary, Bret launched his literary career at the age of 21 with the novel, Less Than Zero. Since then he has published another eight books including his most famous work, American Psycho and worked on countless screenplays. So The Shards is a story that you have tried to write multiple times over the years, what do you think was different this time around?
Bret Easton Ellis
Well, I’m old. I think that was the key to unlocking this book that I first thought about when I was 18. I was already working on Less Than Zero and I was involved in this thing called, I called it the Less Than Zero project but I began when I was 16 years old and I was working on that at 16 and 17 and then a series of events happened when I was a senior in High School, when I was 17 that altered everything. It was kind of the moment where adolescence gets corrupted into adulthood and so I put away Less Than Zero and I attempted to write The Shards which is in many ways a warning about writerly imagination and how it can get away from you and in many ways is about how you can control or have to control your super power, you know, the kind of the origin story of becoming a writer and realising you have to separate fact from fiction. I did a lot of embellishment when I was a senior in High School. I lied a lot, I was a fantasist, you know, I made up things, I wanted things to happen that weren’t true and I wanted to write about that because it caused a lot of damage. I have friends who haven’t spoken to me since, over whatever, things that happened then. And Less Than Zero was kind of like a vibe, it was a vibe novel, it was a hangout novel and I thought okay the 17 or 18 year old can write this book about going to parties, and driving around and just sort of like, maybe doing some drugs and just, just like having this plotless, a non narrative book essentially that I was trying to find a way to express numbness as an emotion. So that began to pre-occupy me much more than this really complicated story with a lot of characters, highly defined in The Shards and so you know, I tried it, I kept coming back to The Shards throughout the decades. Sometimes I would look at it after I finished a novel and it just never, it just never landed and then finally one night during lockdown; it was April of 2020, you know, I was just thinking about my class mates, there was nothing else to do and I think what opened the door was that it wasn’t a 17 or 18 year old boy narrating these horrible events that happened, it was the 57 year old man. That opened the door for me to look back in a very nostalgic way and in a very expansive way about 1981 and Loss Angeles and the freedom of being a teenager there. That opened the door and I felt that by this time I could attempt this rather long book.
Sarah Lau, Senior Communication Manager
Mishcon de Reya
You paint an incredible picture of early 1980’s Los Angeles and there are kind of two quite significant threats that are very much part of that landscape so this, there’s a serial killer and there’s a cult and I am just wondering were these concerns for you growing up in that time?
Bret Easton Ellis
They definitely were, I mean you know, one of the myths that haunted LA and my childhood at that time was the cult of the Manson family and the Tate-Labianca murders and they were cults that weren’t just the Manson family, the Manson family influenced a lot of cults and of course there were serial killers everywhere in California when I was growing up, it was like the wallpaper, it was like the background. There were two or three that were on the nightly news all the time. There was something about the notion of a serial killer when I was 18 and I was following them. Certain narratives would be building that these serial killers were knowingly creating, they were telling a kind of story and I was thinking about that at 17 or 18, I was making this tenuous connection between being a writer and kind of screwing things up with people and my friends and making things up and also the danger I thought of the serial killer narrative and so it became a metaphor for me really early on and it has definitely stayed with me until I finally wrote this book.
Sarah Lau, Senior Communication Manager
Mishcon de Reya
Something you were exploring in a number of your works, I guess is this idea of scratching the surface, that the façade that you mentioned earlier, there is often this idea of presenting things, things look incredibly beautiful or people leaving these glossy perfect landscapes but the idea is there that if you kind of remove a few of those layers or if you look beneath the surface there is this inner world of turmoil and panic. Is that something that personally resonates with you?
Bret Easton Ellis
I think it personally resonates for everybody. I think it is just part of life. I mean I think worry and panic and stress are just things that we all live with daily and you know, it depends on your personality, your way to navigate through them or to you know, to deal with them. I think something that influenced me a lot when I was growing up was coming of age in this beautiful city, Los Angeles. It was paradise and yet there was a lot of unhappiness and there were you know, there was a disparity between the beauty of the place and also some, this pain that a lot of people went through. There was something about it in Los Angeles that just made it seem stranger, more painful in a way, weirder like how could this be happening in this setting and so I think I was drawn to that notion and that was kind of what Less Than Zero was about. It really is what my LA novels do kind of traffic in a little bit, Pure Bedroom certainly does, The Shards certainly does so yeah, that, that was impactful.
Sarah Lau, Senior Communication Manager
Mishcon de Reya
You mentioned The Shards started originally serialised on your podcast. Did that influence the shape of the story in any way, choosing that kind of serialisation?
Bret Easton Ellis
No, not at all. The plot The Shards I had outlined in 1982 and so I knew the events were… the events kind of if you start the book realise have this kind of inevitability, it’s just, it’s got, it’s starting in this place you kind of get what’s beginning to happen and then you realise, oh my God this is where it’s going. So I was about 250 pages in to writing The Shards when you know, it was lockdown. We had no podcast guests, no one was coming over, I was tired of doing these monologues about the virus and the season of the virus and how hysterical it was to have to wait in a breadline to get into a supermarket and all of this stuff that just seemed crazy to me and so I told my producer, I said, ‘you know, I am working on this novel, no-one has ever serialised a novel, let’s do it’ and it didn’t affect the book at all. So no.
Sarah Lau, Senior Communication Manager
Mishcon de Reya
Good to know.
Bret Easton Ellis
The book was the book, it was the book. It was just like there was nothing else to do.
Audience Member
Hi, this is a question, a slightly more technical question but it relates to what you were talking about, about the pleasure and the fun that you have when you are writing which I think really comes over to me as a reader, I think the pleasure of reading your fiction is, is, huge and I think that, that quality of being a page turner which I really associate with you, that kind of sense of wanting to gobble a book up is really strong in this book but it really interests me that you say that you, you seem to be saying that you don’t re-draft your writing and you use unreliable narrators and you withhold a lot of information and that drip, drip, drip of information is key I think to the pleasure that you create for the reader. So I am just wondering, can you explain how you know, if, if your writing is so emotional and so kind of forward, it has a lot of forward momentum, how do you create that very careful skilled withholding of information?
Bret Easton Ellis
First of all, I don’t know. I can’t, I really can’t answer that. I do know that there are two phases for me writing a book. Outline. Outline is almost the first draft for me. My outline for American Psycho is almost as long as the book. I had so many examples of how, I was trying, how do you put madness on the page? How do you do it without going all Stephen King and you know, how do… and so I had all of the examples, is it microscopic attention to detail, is it over observation, is it, is it… whatever it was, whatever the things I was thinking of in order to do it in an original way, what happens is that is a very emotional first draft and this was as well. There is another draft, the cool technician comes in and the cool technician wants to make sure that stylistically its working, he does a lot of editing, he re-arranges things but again as this dedication to this book says, for no-one, it really isn’t. It’s for me, it’s the book for me and that’s the only way I can write.
Sarah Lau, Senior Communication Manager
Mishcon de Reya
Thank you so much Bret, we really appreciate, I think some fascinating insights into both The Shards as well as your process and we’ve covered quite a lot in today’s conversation. Thank you everyone who has joined us today, we are standing room only here and to everyone who’s joined us online as well. Bret I do understand you have a little bit of time if people do want to get The Shards autographed.
Bret Easton Ellis
Yes of course. No problem
Sarah Lau, Senior Communication Manager
Mishcon de Reya
So they can come up and do that. But otherwise, thank you all so much for joining us and we look forward to seeing you at another Academy event soon. Thank you.
Bret Easton Ellis
Thank you.
The Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions. To access advice for businesses that is regularly updated, please visit Mishcon.com.