Lunar Park

“I want you to realize some things about yourself. I want you to reflect on your life. I want you to be aware of all the terrible things you have done. I want you to face the disaster that is Bret Easton Ellis.”

I stood up. “What do you mean? Is this Clayton or not?”
“I’m everything. I’m everyone.” A static-filled pause. “I’m even you.”

The writer disliked me because I was trying to follow a chart.
I was following an outline. I was calculating the weather. I was predicting events. I wanted answers. I needed clarity. I had to control the world.
The writer yearned for chaos, mystery, death. These were his inspirations. This was the impulse he leaned toward. The writer wanted bombs exploding. The writer wanted the Olympian defeat. The writer craved myth and legend and coincidence and flames. The writer wanted Patrick Bateman back in our lives. The writer was hoping the horror of it all would galvanize me.
I was at a point where all of what the writer wanted filled me with simple remorse.

Start over. Get younger. Absorb yourself back into the world of teenage flameout and the curving murals of scorched corpses—the things that had made you a youthful success. Continue your refusal to embrace the mechanics of East Coast lit conventionality. Streamline yourself. Stop shrugging. Eliminate chic. Avoid all fey irony. Erase the jacket cover with the fuchsia lettering you had once desired. Get the full body wax and the spray-on tan and the tattoo in serif scarring your biceps. Act like you’ve just blown in from nowhere. Push the gangsta attitude with a very straight face. Force them to take the cover story seriously, even though you knew how awful

And at that point I realized the grim fact that as hard as you try, you can hide the truth from children for only an indefinite period, and even if you do tell them the truth, and lay out the facts for them honestly and completely, they will still resent you for it.

for a brief moment, thought I saw myself lying on that chaise longue, looking back up at myself. It was only a flash, but suddenly I was that silhouette from last night, the shadow that I had dreamt. (In the same flash I had suddenly become that boy sitting next to Aimee Light in her BMW.) I moved around the room, replicating the shadow’s movements, wondering what it had been looking for. Nothing seemed to be missing from my closet or drawers, and there were no visible footprints on the carpet (though in my dreams they were in the living room and they were now in my office as well). I

But this is what a writer does: his life is a maelstrom of lying.

yet the half world of the writer’s life encourages drama and pain, and defeat is good for art: if it was day we made it night, if it was love we made it hate, serenity became chaos, kindness became viciousness, God became the devil, a daughter became a whore.

I concluded with an aching finality that the could-happen possibilities were gone, that doing whatever you wanted whenever you wanted was over. The future didn’t exist anymore. Everything was in the past and would stay there.

Exploring that kind of violence had been “interesting” and “exciting” and it was all “metaphorical” anyway—at least to me at that moment in my life, when I was young and pissed off and had not yet grasped my own mortality, a time when physical pain and real suffering held no meaning for me. I was “transgressive” and the book was really about “style”