American, but not so psycho

Bret Easton Ellis's new novel is about an author called Bret Easton Ellis being haunted by characters he has created. So where does fiction stop and life take over? And is the writer of American Psycho a 'method writer'? He tells all to Nicola Reddy

Bret Easton Ellis lounges back in a chair in his suite in the Merrion Hotel, with ill-fitting complimentary slippers on his feet and surrounded by half eaten fruit plates and coffee cups. He has been away from his homes in New York and LA for two months now, doing a world tour of readings, signings and interviews for his new book, Lunar Park.

Lunar Park is a seemingly autobiographical horror story, narrated by a character called Bret Easton Ellis who has retreated to suburban life, after decades of decadence, to try to build up his fragile relationship with his wife, Jayne, her daughter and his son, Robby. (These characters are fictional.) The narrator finds himself haunted, literally, by the ghosts of his father and the characters from his previous books, including American Psycho's infamous Patrick Bateman.

The Bret Ellis that sits here now seems a million miles away from his crumbling namesake in Lunar Park: handsome, self-deprecating and utterly approachable, he nonetheless has a twinkle in his eye that makes you wonder if, even in person, you're truly seeing the real Bret.

"I was actually going to be fake Bret during this entire tour. For the first two interviews I did, I was the Bret from the book. I thought, that would be a fun way to get through the tour – talk about Jayne, talk about Robby, talk about... how I felt about releasing this memoir, how everything in the book was true... It was so exhausting and stupid and boring I couldn't keep it up.

"And I also thought, why am I hiding? There's a lot of stuff in this book that I'm dealing with and that's important to me. I feel very open and vulnerable at this point in my life. I don't feel like lying in interviews anymore – I used to do that all of the time. I don't have the patience to lie like I used to, to make up answers to questions I didn't understand... So I'm just going to be the real Bret. If there is one, I don't even know anymore."

His previous books – Less Than Zero, American Psycho, Glamorama and The Informers – were derided by much of the media and many readers for their graphic scenes of violence, sex and drug taking. The New York Times headlined its review of American Psycho: "Do not buy this book". Lunar Park is stripped of these trappings: so has the reaction been better?

'The media reaction, as usual, has been mixed. But as long as Stephen King liked the book, that's the main thing. He reviewed it for Entertainment Weekly, and I cried. I was on a plane and I was drunk. I saw my name and I'm like, 'Hey!' He calls it 'a triumph'! He says 'Bret Easton Ellis has a surprisingly large heart!'... I managed to kind of hold it together, but I was losing it. When we landed I ran into the bathroom and sobbed, while my handlers waited outside. That was a surreal moment."

In Lunar Park, "Bret" is also haunted by some grotesque characters from the darkly comic stories he wrote as a child.

"That is all true. I wrote lots of short stories and they were all dark. One was about a boy who wakes up and he's a pancake; people chase him around a try to eat him. Another one I did was called 'The Angel's Trip' about an angel that falls to the bottom of the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve and has to make her way back to the top of the tree by the next morning when the family gets up. But there's a conspiracy among the ornaments – they want someone else to be the angel, so they try to kill her. It was like an action story – loads of ornaments are killed and fall off the tree. The evil Santa Claus figure has orchestrated this conspiracy. Dark stuff!

"Why was I so dark at such an early age? Well, I wanted to escape my father. I lived in a scary house. Also though, my mom was a big reader so there was a lot of books around. I liked books so much that I wanted to write stories, it was a great way of escaping."

Bret's first serious novel, Less Than Zero, was written in 1985 as a class assignment while he was attending Bennington, a liberal arts college in Vermont.

"I wrote a terrible first draft of it, and then my teacher helped me edit it down. He submitted it to his editor and his agent. Half of the publishing house hated it, and half loved it. The younger guys wanted to publish it, the older ones hadn't seen anything like it before. I quote one of them in Lunar Park: 'if there is an audience for coke-snorting, cock-sucking zombies, then let's publish the damn thing'. In the end they gave me a pittance of an advance – no money – and they decided to just throw it out there, about 2000 copies. And it took off from there."

The huge success of Less Than Zero, and of the subsequent Hollywood movie, led to the young Ellis being labelled "the voice of the MTV generation" in 1980s America.

"It was very flattering at 21. I thought I WAS the voice of my generation. I believed the hype. But then as you get older you realise, no, I'm not the voice of a generation. I'm a voice, I guess, but then – wait! – there are no other voices. I always thought that musicians were the voice of a generation anyway, that rock stars had really overtaken books and that records were the new novels."

Ellis' second book, American Psycho, caused a huge outrage even before its release. It's the tale of Wall Street executive Patrick Bateman, a man obsessed by status, money, Donald Trump, and his hair – who also happens to be a brutal serial killer. Many found it hard to see past the violence and misogyny to the innate humour and ambiguity of the book and, 14 years on, the writer has begun to see why.

"I think that's okay. Really. I re-read it two years ago and it really upset me, I was very shocked by it. It's a very funny book and if you're not laughing at it, then you will find it upsetting. It was released during this really politically-correct era: Madonna videos were being banned on MTV, Robert Mapplethorpe exhibitions were being shut down, Tipper Gore was demanding that parental advisory stickers be put on CDs. There was this huge child-proofing – or adult-proofing – of society. I don't think that a book like that would make such a stink now. Young people seem to get the book."

Many parts of the character of Patrick Bateman were influenced by Ellis's own father.

"My father was a very insecure man. He was obsessed with status – he thought that the right table in a restaurant would make him happy, that buying the right car would make him happy, driving a Ferrari, wearing the right suit, buying the hippest art. And it all made him miserable. Patrick Bateman is not a happy character, and he does all of these things that society tells him is going to make him happy and cool and desirable and it's not working.

'The other part of him is based on me. I had a similar life to Patrick Bateman at that time. The people I was around might have been writers, but that was a very materialistic, yuppie time in Manhattan culture, and it affected the art world, the publishing world, everywhere. I felt infected by it and went along with it. I wasn't happy either. I clearly saw society for the very time in my life – you look at it and say, 'Jesus, are these the things that society values? This is what we have to do to make ourselves happy?' Society's full of shit with its rules. So I'm 22, 23 and out on my own and I realise this about the world and I that was that was part of Patrick Bateman."

Was it therapeutic to write under the veil of an alternate Bret in Lunar Park?

"Yes, that was very liberating. And it was fun to make fun of myself. To spoof myself was fun. Really I was making fun of the other writer, but at the same time I was making fun of myself but doing it from a distance.

Some of the encounters between the character Bret and his son Robby in the book are heartbreaking. Where did that come from?

"It came from getting older. Feeling more open. But quite honestly, it's not totally true. It just seemed to be what this novel was about – about ghosts and fathers and sons. It was just the way I felt about this material. I wanted to write a scary book, a Stephen King book, and ultimately, as I worked my way through, I thought, well, it's a ghost story, I'm haunted by a ghost, that ghost is my father. I'm haunted by the relationship we did not have, I'm haunted by all of the things that I have done in the past that were caused by him. Patrick Bateman, all of those stories I wrote as a kid – they were all based on him, of my fear of him. So that all came out, and it was moving to me."

Did he consciously stay away from the violence and grittiness of his other books?

"No, it just didn't call for it. And I'm not going to just write about it. In fact, I can't ever imagine writing that stuff again. Who knows, but I just don't see myself going back there again. I'm a different person now."

How does he approach the novel-writing process?

"Never let it flow. No, no. They are all really carefully plotted out, graphed, charted, outlined. I know the first sentence and the last sentence maybe two years before the writing begins. I know too many writers who just start writing and at page 100, they're like, 'where can this go?'

"I'm not a method writer: 'If that character has stayed up for 24 hours, I have to stay up for 24 hours.' 'If that character has had sex with a chicken, I am going to have sex with a chicken.' I don't do that. Plus I'm usually writing about myself at any given time, whether it's Patrick Bateman or Victor Ward in Glamorama or this Bret Ellis character. I'm pretty good at turning it on and off. Writing's done for the day and then it's off to see friends and have some cocktails."p

Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis is in shops now, €13.50, Picador