“People like this idea of me as an anti-millenial.”
The book, American Psycho, was very close to not being published. The original publisher pulled out at the last moment, leaving author Bret Easton Ellis in the lurch before Vintage chose to take over the publishing at the last moment.
Even then it wasn’t all smooth sailing as a series of death threats sent to Ellis meant he had to sign a declaration ensuring he had read them all to absolve the publisher of any blame should he be killed.
The book caused some controversy but was later made into a movie starring Christian Bale, but Ellis was surprised by the reaction to the violence in the book.
Although he previously admitted in an interview with the Guardian that he wasn’t sure if the book would be published if he’d written it today.
Ellis has also drawn some criticism for his opinions on millennials in recent years, but he addressed the idea that he is “anti-millennial” during his interview with Dion Fanning on Ireland Unfiltered.
You can read what he had to say below.
Bret: People like this idea of me as an anti-millenial. Well, this idea of me as anti-everything, as some sort of like dark controversial figure. I did do these ‘generation wuss’ tweets four, five, six years ago that I thought were really funny and my boyfriend thought were funny too. I think that rubs millenials the wrong way. And also millenials are very sensitive, very entitled and they don’t like to be criticised that way, even made fun of, even joked about and maybe that’s part of it.
I’m going to have to clarify the millennial thing certainly, on Sunday in New York I’m doing a Times talk, where for 30 seconds I talked about millennials but BOOM; it’s the headline of the piece and an army of millennials. Something like “Millennials Don’t Read Anymore” … it’s 20 seconds in a 2 hour conversation I had with whoever wrote it and then of course an army of millennials start coming after me on Twitter, but of course none of them read the article because it was behind a paywall. So they don’t really know what the rest of it is and they’re all flailing into space.
It had been pointed out to me by someone in our office, when you were coming in, that they do read more than ‘Gen Xers’.
It’s kind of what they read but it’s not what, you know. I mean, if you look at the top ten books, they’re a lot of young adult or whatever. And also, you have to understand that a lot of millennials are still in school, so you have those four years of people still reading and stuff. Look, they do read. Apologies to millennials who are offended by that. I don’t know a lot of millennials who read personally, but if this is true I apologise.
Ireland Unfiltered, brought to you in partnership with Carlsberg Unfiltered, will be available everywhere you get your podcasts and on YouTube every Tuesday.
