Ellis shuts down the interview machine – and reveals the darkness that drives him
Bret Easton Ellis, the voice of a generation’s ennui, has issued a startling decree: he’s done with interviews. After 40 years of fielding questions about his provocative and unsettling novels, the 62-year-old author has declared a formal ceasefire, politely requesting that Vogue – and anyone else – simply ‘don’t expect an interview.’
A decade of silence – and a surprisingly candid revelation
Ellis’s abrupt retreat, documented in a recent Vogue profile, is both intriguing and revealing. He admits to a profound weariness with the relentless scrutiny that has accompanied the success of Less Than Zero, the novel that launched his career and cemented his reputation as a chronicler of decadent youth. ‘I just stopped two or three years back from…exhibiting myself,’ he confessed, a blunt assessment of a life perpetually under the microscope.
The echoes of didion and hemingway
But the story doesn’t end with a simple refusal. Ellis, characteristically, offers a subtle twist. He concedes he ‘can talk to you over the phone about Less Than Zero,’ promising ‘to break my own rules once or twice a year.’ This guarded willingness, coupled with a poignant reflection on his early influences – the stylistic precision of Joan Didion and the raw energy of Ernest Hemingway – paint a picture of an artist wrestling with his legacy and, perhaps, a lingering discomfort with his own notoriety.
A childhood shaped by darkness
Ellis recounts a formative period spent devouring the works of these literary giants, confessing he ‘stole’ from Hemingway and Didion, adapting their voices and techniques to capture the atmosphere of 1980s Los Angeles. Less Than Zero, he explains, was born from this process – a culmination of observations, a distillation of the ennui and emptiness he witnessed, and a desperate attempt to find a voice that could articulate it. ‘I wanted to have numbness as a feeling,’ he says, ‘and I wanted to see if you could perfect a style that exudes it from the book you’re reading without hitting it too hard on the head.’
The brutal truth of re-reading
However, revisiting his own work is a profoundly painful experience for Ellis. ‘Re-reading is just too painful,’ he admits. ‘There’s a point when the book is done: You’ve gotten to the end of the road. Let’s move on.’ He last reread Less Than Zero in 2008, while working on the sequel, Imperial Bedrooms, a project that only intensified his anxieties about his early work. The book, he says, represents ‘a younger person that I was,’ a figure he now finds both unsettling and distant.
A dark legacy – and a surprisingly honest assessment
Despite his reticence, Ellis’s refusal to engage in further interviews doesn’t diminish the impact of Less Than Zero. Its themes of alienation, excess, and the hollowness of the American Dream continue to resonate today. And, perhaps, this quiet withdrawal is a testament to the enduring power of his work – a power that doesn’t require constant explanation or validation. As he concluded, with a characteristic lack of sentimentality, ‘It’s just what I’m interested in and this is where I’m at.’