Glamorama has been a long time in the making. Why did this book take you longer to write than your others? And generally, what are your writing habits? I started Glamorama in December of 1989, right after I completed the final draft of American Psycho and I assumed it would probably take me three to four years to complete. But a lot of unforeseen events occurred that hampered its writing. First was the pre-publication controversy surrounding American Psycho which distracted me from writing for about a year. When I finally got back to Glamorama in the summer of 1992, my father suddenly died and another year was lost. A relationship I had been in for about seven years was ending and there was a lot of emotional turmoil that usually I'm able to incorporate into my work, but this was just too messy and painful. In 1994 I published a collection of short stories, The Informers, and went on my first American book tour. So all of these things got in the way of my finishing Glamorama. But it was also a much bigger book than anything I'd done before and because its narrative was so complicated it took a long time to complete. I hate telling people that this book took eight years to write because people's expectations get elevated and when they hear it takes place within the fashion industry I can just imagine their thoughts: "It took Ellis eight years to write a book about models--couldn't he have done that in eight months?!?" My writing habits have always been fairly basic. I wake-up, I have breakfast, I start writing in the morning and I finish in the early evening. It's an all day thing. I try to stick to the same kind of schedule my friends who have an office and go to work keep. When I'm in the process of finishing a book I'll spend my nights at home a bit more. I'll also wake up earlier and actually set my alarm so I'm up at a decent hour. And usually I write at my desk or on my bed or standing at the counter in my kitchen. And everything is written in longhand--usually two drafts--before I put it into the computer. How would you say Glamorama differs from your previous novels and how is it a continuation of ideas you've expressed in other works? Well, to put it bluntly, it has a plot, or at least an identifiable narrative that my other novels really don't have. With the first three books, narrative wasn't something I thought about or was particularly interested in. As a satirist I was more interested in milieu and behavior and skewering the times I lived in and identifying certain attitudes that I thought were prevalent in society. And though I'm still interested in all those things, I also think that as I've gotten older, the idea of narrative appeals more to me. It wasn't something I planned. It was just an impulse: something intuitive. I think that as you get older you start to see that lives have a certain narrative shape to them that when you're younger and haven't had that much experience you don't see. And I think that affects your work. Also, if you're writing about a conspiracy--which is really what Glamorama is about--you can't help but have a narrative. The conspiracy dictates it. So in that respect the book is different but it's also a continuation of my earlier work in that it chronicles certain elements of my generation and sums up my feelings about where we are today: either by ridiculing the things we seem to find important or the way we're obsessed with surfaces and glamor and status. And of course it's written in what has become, I suppose, my trademark style: present tense, first person. A recent documentary, This Is Not An Exit, was made about your life and work. What was your reaction to the film? I hate seeing photographs of myself so you can imagine what my reaction to an eighty-minute documentary starring me would be like. As someone who has chronicled our obsession with models, movie stars, and millionaires, what's your guess as to why we're all so fascinated with celebrities? I have no idea. Though it's true I've chronicled our interest in them, I haven't found an answer. I haven't really looked for one. Celebrities are projections of our own fantasies--what our ideal notion of our selves are: heroic, handsome, brave, cool, etc. and we react to them accordingly. I don't have a problem with celebrities, but our blind hero worship of them is problematic. And the fact that so little of our infatuation has to do with genuine accomplishment--but with what's basically known as "cuteness"--is ugly. The hypocrisy inherent in the media's portrait of celebrity--magazine covers and 6,000 word profiles on a girl with a nice bod--is really hard to deal with. Lately I've been thinking that maybe countries with the most leisure time are the countries that have the biggest fascination with celebrity. Victor Ward, the main character in Glamorama, moves from the hotbed of celebrity life in New York City to a surreal world of extreme terrorism and violence. Are you suggesting the flip side of celebrity is violence and terror? Not necessarily. I think the connection I'm making has to do with the tyranny of beauty in our culture and the tyranny of terrorism. Of course that's a metaphor and the idea of models actually blowing up hotels and airlines is farfetched. But the idealization of beauty and fame in our culture drives people crazy in a lot of ways: we resent it, we want it, we love it, we hate it. And the psychological toll it takes is pretty big. What the media and the fashion world does is remind us everyday that we aren't beautiful enough, that we need to be better-looking, that we will never live up to whatever the physical ideal of the day is. Fashion--and what makes us attracted to it--is all about insecurity. The fashion world presents unattainable ideas of beauty to women--and now men--and it takes a strong person to reject them. I think we all fall into wanting to be more glamorous, better-looking, cooler than we really are and the fashion world feeds off that insecurity. This is not a healthy trait but it's one that exists in all of us and I think we're all affected by it on a daily basis. It exposes our worst sides; it makes us think about things and want things that we wouldn't normally covet. The point of terrorism is to make us insecure about our safety. What I did in Glamorama--or what I propose--is that these two things can be linked; there is a connection. But do I think that Christy Turlington is actually planting bombs at The Ritz in Paris? No. There are scenes in Glamorama that are laugh out loud funny and others that are gruesome and disturbing. Is it difficult, as a writer, to switch gears from one to another? It's difficult to write a scene where two people are sitting down somewhere talking to each other. It's difficult to write an "action" sequence where two people are fighting. It's difficult to write something funny. It's difficult to write a flashback. The point I'm making of course is that writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of dedication and concentration that always surprises me. I guess because my temperament is such that I don't really notice "switching gears" from comedy to horror, they're often intertwined in my work. I think in Glamorama, however, that it's a gradual shift in tone that the reader is better prepared for it than they might have been with my earlier novels. The first part of the novel is light and funny and then it slowly darkens into something black and disturbing. The two quotes at the beginning, one from Krishna, the other from Hitler, foreshadow that. Your work, most notably American Psycho, has caused considerable controversy in the past. Do you anticipate any such reaction to Glamorama? Well, I automatically want to say, "No" but if you had asked me that same question months in advance about Less Than Zero or especially American Psycho I would have answered, "No" as well. In retrospect the controversy over American Psycho has a narrative that makes sense, though at the time it totally confused me. There's an arc to the story--assistants at Simon & Schuster refusing to work on the book, leaks to the press, unfavorable articles months before publication, the top brass cancelling the book, the National Organization of Women boycotting the book, death threats--that now seems very clear and delineated. Less Than Zero was controversial, I suppose, just because of how young I was coupled with what was at the time graphic subject matter. I've never searched for controversy. It's not something I'm interested in generating while I'm working on a book. Though I have to admit that the controversy surrounding my work has probably in some ways given me a broader readership. The fallout, however, is that I think there are people who take me a lot less seriously because of all the screaming about my work: screaming that tends to blur what my actual intentions as a writer are. So no, I don't expect any controversy over Glamorama unless certain celebrities are offended that they happen to be mentioned within the overall fictional context. What do you like to read and who are some of the writers who have influenced you? I like to read the writers of my generation. I tend to read everything they publish. Not because it's all so great but because it's good to keep in touch with what other artists your age are thinking and feeling and sometimes it's surprising how their work can illuminate yours. I can't really single anyone out, though the last book I really liked was Lorrie Moore's collection Birds of America. When I was younger Hemingway was a big influence, as he is for so many young male writers. They think they can mimic what they mistake for simplicity. But in the process of uncovering that you can't, you learn the hows and whys of putting words together. Joan Didion's essays and fiction appealed to the Southern Californian side of me and I think as a prose writer she's a genius. And I completely ripped her off when I wrote Less Than Zero, and I'm proud of it. Movies had a big influence on my writing. So did rock music. When I was in college I read Ulysses and it still remains for me the most thrilling thing I've ever read. I'm not sure Joyce influenced my writing as much as he just opened my eyes to what the possibilities of fiction writing were. Lately, after I thought I couldn't be influenced by anyone anymore, I started seriously reading Don DeLillo. I couldn't get him out of my mind while I was writing Glamorama, which was a really great thing because I think he's probably our best living novelist. After DeLillo, I'm not sure I can be influenced by a writer anymore. You develop your own style. Reading in general always inspires me: if a book is great it makes me want to write and if a book is bad I want to write because I know I can write better than that. What do you hope someone reading Glamorama will find themselves thinking about when they've finished the book? Whatever they want. That's something I don't think about as the writer of the novel. The one thing I hope someone takes with them when they finish a novel of mine is that it gets them hungry to read more books.
		Photo credit © Quintana Roo Dunne