Author of the week: Bret Easton Ellis

Bret Easton Ellis is finally getting over himself, said Nelly Kaprièlan in Vogue Hommes International. The onetime paragon of the literary world’s 1980s “brat pack” says he was, until about a year ago, “a prisoner of my own massive ego.” But Ellis has learned “not to relate absolutely everything to me,” and the change has been calming. It was “very painful, ” he admits, to realize that being an “icon” didn’t guarantee that the people he cared about would treat him well. But accepting that “people are neither horrible nor marvelous; they’re just what they are” has allowed him to reduce the drama in his life. “Perhaps it’s more boring to live like that,” he says, “but that’s how things are.”

Ellis has been working for the past three years on a sequel to his 1985 novel, Less Than Zero. The longtime New Yorker moved back to Los Angeles to start the project because, he says, L.A. is “the most perfect city for addressing a symptom that’s so now: narcissism.”

Ellis expects to finish the book in time for it to be released next year, said Larry Carroll on MTV.com, and he’s hoping that the actors who starred in the original Less Than Zero movie—including Andrew McCarthy, Robert Downey Jr., and James Spader—might be up for shooting a sequel. A sequel to an ’80s coming-of-age film might “seem really gimmicky,” Ellis admits. “But I think it would be of interest.”

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