‘Come on: cancel me’

‘I grew up in LA where we all thought fame was a joke,’ says Bret Easton Ellis. ‘My class was filled with people from Laura Dern to the girls in Little House on the Prairie. And it always seemed a bit of a joke. I never really imagined that was on the cards for me. And I really haven’t done a lot of the things that you’re supposed to do to stay famous.

‘I haven’t published anything in ten years. I haven’t tried to write that novel that’s going to give critical acclaim or a prize or two — which I’ve never won. And I seem to be continually controversial and rub people the wrong way. And this has been for 35 years now and I can’t tell you why: I don’t know. I mean the big joke is: cancel me. Come on, cancel me if you can’t stand it so much.’

Yet here he is in The Spectator’s offices to record our books podcast: a famous writer. Also one who gets more famous the less he writes and the more people try to ‘cancel’ him. There’s a good bit of the latter going on at the moment. The meandering autobiographical essays in his new book, White, have had some corkingly savage reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in response to passages where he inveighs against millennial culture and liberal hysteria about the Trump administration.

Ellis often seems to revel in poking wasps’ nests. People have crossed the road to baseball-bat this book, I say. Was that what you were expecting? ‘No. Not at all. I’ve never written a more controversial book than this since American Psycho and I am stunned. I saw this as not a political book, and yet everyone takes it as a political book filled with rhetoric and political opinion.