Gimme Some Blo'

The subheading has been answered: Bret Easton Ellis has come out of his Prada-leather-lined hole in the ground to publish a book called Lunar Park. It is apparently an autobiographical novel. The gut reaction to that style is a swift kick to the shins, but eschew for a moment your vision of an autobiographical novel, the endless parade of personal memoir that seem to need their own section in Borders (headlined "Wine about Life"). Consider that this is written by the man who has written of supermodeling anarchists, cork-snorting teens, and found the most despicable way to feed rats.

The most public aspect of this book's press junket is that Bret is gay. This wasn't exactly revelation. More surprising was the context of Bret's relationship with Kaplan died in January 2004, prompting a long mourning spent completely out of the limelight. He did not attend the funeral in Michigan, he said, because he could not even bring himself to leave his room - the room in his mother's house in the San Fernando Valley, where he grew up. And he stayed in Los Angeles for 19 months, shuffling from mother to sister to friend and finally a series of hotels, suffering what he calls "a midlife crisis."

So, perhaps we won't be expecting the same noncommittal slash-and-burn, choose your poison version of literature. How the personal events in Bret's life will effect his new direction remains to be seen; Lunar Park was largely finished at the time of Kaplan's death, though he has admitted to the death being the catalyst for finishing the book. Ellis seems to be working hard to distance himself from his bad-boy party-boy image:

"My worry is that people will want to know what's true and what's not," he said recently. "All these things that are in the book - my quote-unquote autobiography - I just don't want to answer any of those questions. I don't like demystifying the text."

- Read excerpts of Lunar Park
- Audio interview on Bookworm (realplayer)