American Psycho

I was given this book many years ago and have NOT read it.

Author Bret Easton Ellis initially imagined a disillusioned but nonviolent protagonist. After a dinner with friends who worked on Wall Street, he decided to make him a serial killer. Patrick Bateman’s idolization of Donald Trump is based on his friends’ respect for and envy of the mogul. Ellis researched murders at the New York Public Library. His first draft of American Psycho left out all the grisly scenes, which were to be added in later. In 2010, in conversation with journalist Jeff Baker, Ellis commented:

[Bateman] was crazy the same way [I was]. He did not come out of me sitting down and wanting to write a grand sweeping indictment of yuppie culture. It initiated because of my own isolation and alienation at a point in my life. I was living like Patrick Bateman. I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself. That is where the tension of American Psycho came from. It wasn’t that I was going to make up this serial killer on Wall Street. High concept. Fantastic. It came from a much more personal place, and that’s something that I’ve only been admitting in the last year or so. I was so on the defensive because of the reaction to that book that I wasn’t able to talk about it on that level.— Bret Easton Ellis

P.S. I’ve been to Wall Street. It’s TINY. Not exactly the City of London/Square Mile/Financial District.

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