Word: bret
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Bret Easton Ellis keeps getting up to go to the bathroom. He gets up three times during the course of a two-hour lunch. And he's kind of sniffly too--keeps blowing his nose. So, naturally, I ask him if he's doing coke in there. Ellis thinks this is funny...
Lunar Park is about a novelist named, not coincidentally, Bret Easton Ellis. The fictional Bret has written the same novels the real one has. The fictional Bret cavorts with celebrities ("Jean-Michel Basquiat, Molly Ringwald, John McEnroe, Ronald Reagan Jr. ..."), has numerous affairs with both sexes and is perpetually strung out on coke, tequila, heroin, cosmopolitans and crystal meth. He even has a novelist pal named Jay McInerney. (According to Ellis, McInerney was not thrilled with his cameo appearance. "Really, out of all the s_____ things that have been written about him, this is the lowest? I guess...
...wouldn't be hard to read all this as breast-baring confession, or at least rueful self-parody, except that it quickly veers into fiction. Bret (this is the fictional Bret) has managed to sire a son with an actress named Jayne Dennis, and when he flunks out of his umpteenth rehab he decides to save himself by marrying her, moving to Connecticut and becoming a regular suburban dad. But Bret brings his demons with him, both figuratively--he can't kick the sauce and he's haunted by his late alcoholic, rageoholic father--and literally: the Connecticut McMansion...
...that guy--the repentant, demon-chased Oedipal wretch Bret--the real Ellis? There's certainly a strong family resemblance. Ellis had a difficult, angry, alcoholic father. He dates both men and women. He has lost some of his lust for fame (although the real Ellis still lives in Manhattan, not Connecticut). "There's a heavy dose of self-loathing about celebrity," he sighs. So what does he not loathe? "Um." Long silence. "Ah, I like to write. I love to read. I like to go to movies. I like to go to museums." He's trying for a straight answer...
When Leonard looked around, he should not have been so astonished to see that all the Paul Splittorffs and Larry Guras had given way to Bret Saberhagens, that Leonard's entire class had graduated. "It doesn't seem that long ago," he thought, "when I was the young pitcher." Without any quarter, he made the team, but Danny Jackson had to sprain an ankle to secure him a start. On April 12 the Royals played the Toronto Blue Jays a game that for melodrama eclipsed all their October playoffs...