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| Hearsay: |
Bret Easton Ellis, who I will hence refer to as BEE, has set the Guardian abuzz by saying he wouldn’t be an artist if his daddy hadn’t smacked him around. You know, I can relate to this. I’d probably have been a computer programmer if I hadn’t wanted to write angry prose about my batshit crazy mother. Sigh. I’m one lighter-handed maternal figure away from being happy and rich.
“Mostly, in my case, writing comes from pain, confusion, stress,” he says, before helpfully reciting a list of motivations: “I have father issues. Somebody didn’t love me. I became famous too young…”
Mostly, though, his writing seems to centre around those pesky paternal issues: Ellis’s property developer father, Robert, was an abusive alcoholic who died in 1992. “I hated my father,” he says blankly. “If you’re a dude and you’re super-successful, the chances are you have something to prove to Daddy… would I have become an artist without my father’s influence? No, I probably wouldn’t.”
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July 19th, 2010 at 10:14 am
ok. that’s why i can’t write. too freaking well adjusted.
July 19th, 2010 at 12:49 pm
I did write more as my own mother’s crazy amped up. While it makes me feel better that I’m not the only writer who fell from a nut tree, I don’t think it precludes mentally healthy writers from talent.
July 20th, 2010 at 8:41 pm
My writing is powered by the painful realization that my parents cruelly attempted to block my writing career by refusing to abuse me.
July 21st, 2010 at 12:11 pm
perhaps that’s the fuel i need, Andrew. I’ll write a tell-all memoir about my happy childhood. They could sense my leterary genius, and wanted to squash any potential of mine.