Madrid, June 6.- Bret Easton Ellis admits he's a storyteller drawn to violence "and I don't know why," which is why his books are filled with scenes of extreme rawness, pain, dramatic memories—like the ever-present figure of his alcoholic father—and a trail of unsolved murders. The American novelist presented his new novel in Madrid, breaking a 13-year silence, Random House, in which he interweaves his experiences as a teenager searching for his own sexuality with drug use and extreme sex. "It's a pleasure to write every book. When I'm sitting down to write a novel, it's the best feeling I've ever known," he said at a press conference at the Telefónica Foundation headquarters.
Easton Allis was born in Los Angeles, USA, in 1964. From a very young age, he knew he would be a writer. During his childhood, "I tried to turn everything that happened into a fable or a story. I started adding things I made up to those stories, and that's how I became a very convincing liar." Almost all of his stories are rooted in his personal biography, especially the family environment that marked him forever: an alcoholic and abusive father, his parents' divorce, and loneliness.
Review of a generation
The Wreckage follows the publication of several titles that have become classic works that describe a generation, such as American Psycho, Less Than Zero, and The Laws of Attraction. In this new installment, Easton Ellis delves into his late teens and early adulthood, when he was a 17-year-old who still didn't know he was gay and had the "prettiest girlfriend in school," a time when he turned to sex, drugs, and alcohol to cope with the decline of his own family.
“I'm drawn to violence, and I don't know why I am like this,” he explained at a press conference, where he remained elusive with photographers. His novel, based “50 or 60 percent on my autobiography,” is “a love letter to those people who were part of my life and who now, 40 years later, I remember like this. I was never the same after 1981. There was never a recovery period, and now I can point to the moment I was last happy, or specifically, to the moment when the last vestiges of happiness, even warmth, existed before I spiraled into terror and paranoia, and I began to understand how the adult world truly operated as opposed to my adolescent fantasies,” he explained.
