In a 1998 Rolling Stone interview, Ellis teased a memoir, titled Where I Was I Would Not Go Back. What was it about all these empty, beautiful characters, so intimately linked yet hopelessly isolated from one another, strangers even to themselves, bi-sexual, casually tyrannical, stoned on levels I didn’t even know existed, that spoke to me, that held me in their thrall? Who was this writer? What had he come up on? What was he saying? These questions have never ceased to interest me. A window into an alien world.Īlmost immediately The Rules of Attraction was in my hands, and later, American Psycho, then The Informers. For that last one, it turned out I bought a signed copy at Bibelot Books (R.I.P.). It was glacial, unsparing, and utterly removed from anything I knew or understood as a bookish African-American teenager growing up in Owings Mills, Maryland. Neither of us had any idea what Less Than Zero was, but it blew my mind. He’d do this from time to time, cherry-picking displays, even though I was already a voracious reader. Less Than Zero was in a pile of novels my father brought home from the Pikesville Library for me when I was an early teenager.
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