Author Appearance: Bret Easton Ellis at UCLA’s Hammer Museum

Last night I drove over to the UCLA Hammer Museum to see Bret Easton Ellis read from his new novel, Lunar Park, a wildly embellished memoir. Seating was limited, so we got there a whole hour early, which I thought was being excessively cautious, but there were already thirty people ahead of us in line when we got there. Maybe a hundred or two more showed up. While Ellis was reading, someone’s cell phone kept ringing loudly. Ellis finally stopped and joked, “You know, I decided I didn’t really want to read this part anyway, so if you want to take that go ahead,” and flipped to the next chapter. During the Q&A, someone asked him about the ways in which music influences his writing. He said, “I tend to write characters that I don’t like, so I give them musical tastes that I don’t like either. The best example of this would be Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. You know, people always ask me, ‘Is it difficult for you to write these violent scenes of torture and dismemberment?’ but let me tell you, that’s nowhere near as traumatic for me as having to spend a week listening to Whitney Houston and Genesis and then writing about them.”