In December, the much-feted author of American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis tweeted
Yet it turns out that may have been premature. Assuming that anything that the notorious writer claims can taken with a modicum of trust, he now says that he is writing a new novel, and that the idea for it began in January, "while I was stuck in traffic on the 1-10 merging into Hollywood after I’d spent a week in Palm Springs with the 26-year-old and a friend I’d gone to college with who was now losing her mind."
Between the bouts of fear and the phone calls from the production company and the rewrites, the thought that I might never write a novel again began to announce itself more loudly than it had in years (the last novel I wrote had been finished in 2009)...
For the past five years I didn’t want to write a novel. I didn’t want to be constrained by the form. I had convinced myself it didn’t interest me anymore, and I had said this firmly in interviews during the world tour for that last novel I’d written, during press junkets in Spain, in Copenhagen, in Melbourne. But out in the desert last January that feeling began to evaporate, and between the notes calls and the fear and the desert surrounding the house darkening beneath the late afternoon skies, the first sentences of a novel began to take shape.
Easton Ellis told New York magazine, in a profile published last month focusing primarily on his controversial tweets, that “each book comes from a place. A place of pain or confusion."
The profile stated that Ellis, whose last book Imperial Bedrooms was published in 2010, "has always been, when you think about it, more of a conceptual artist than an author."
Whatever emerges, like Easton Ellis himself, promises to get plenty of attention.