What an incredible profile. I love Bret Easton Ellis, think he is one of the most important writers of the last thirty years, but hadn’t delved fully into the lore. Was fun to see Alexander Sorondo summarize it here.

It’s interesting—very few artists get full-length biographies, and usually not until they’re dead. This piece is probably the closest that Ellis will get to a bio.

Enjoyed this section, late in the profile, about his essay collection, White.

Ellis had discovered a lucrative new talent: enraging young people. “Millennial hysteria!”

In encountering so many Millennials, and living with his Millennial boyfriend for almost a decade, Ellis says he found one of their most distinct qualities to be “a love of rules,” a belief “that rules offered a kind of pathway, a narrative that wasn’t . . . otherwise [there], and that all of these rules about what you can say, what you can’t say, how you can express yourself” were a way for these panicked young people to keep a grip on that “narrative pathway.”

Narrative, he could tell them, is not what they should cling to; it’s voice.