A few days ago author Bret Easton Ellis, who is currently touring Australia in promotion of his newest book Imperial Bedrooms, fired off a seemingly innocuous tweet about closet smoker Aussie pop star Delta Goodrem. Miraculously, the tweet, along with an offhand comment about Delta at the Byron Bay Writers Festival, has since earned the discontent of Easton Ellis’ Australian Twitter followers (I’ve lost my faith in this author, oh my god you can’t be serious, your taste is shit, how could you like Delta?) and the attention of Australia’s most hyperbolic headline writers. Sample headlines: American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis has designs on Delta Goodrem and American Psycho author Ellis obsessed with Delta Goodrem.
All very perplexing. Fortunately though, the author, in a book talk/signing held in Sydney Tuesday night, took some time from regaling awestruck Sydneysiders with tales of fan-assisted coke binges (inducing a few hundred idol boners, I’m sure) to talk about the strange machinations of the Australian media, the fickleness of fanboys, the disparity between the public and private self and Delta Goodrem.
Says Easton Ellis (thanks to Hungry Beaster/freelance writer Elmo Keep for transcribing Easton Ellis’ talk in an article for The Awl): “Out of control. This is out of control, I’m in my hotel doing press all day. I keep my TV on Music Max in my room-whoa, dangerous livin’! It’s crazy in that suite! So this video comes on, and there’s this very attractive woman on it, and she’s stomping around, and she’s talking about how this is her life, and her persistence has made a difference. And she’s stumbled and she’s fallen and she’s back on her feet again, and I’m thinking, ‘Really? What is going on with that?’”
“And she’s throwing her hair back and waving her arms around,” he said, “and it’s very dramatic and kind of sexy and I’m thinking, ‘Who is that?’ I have never heard of this person at all. I have no idea who it was and I tweeted about it that night. I was just listing what songs I was listening to. And in the morning there was this deluge of replies to me. Things like ‘I have lost all respect for you as an author.’ There was one reply which was like ‘I’m very sorry that she has cancer, but I still think she’s a fucking sow.’ And I’m thinking, ‘What the hell is this?’ I did not know that you guys had such a complicated relationship with her, it’s very complicated! And then I played with it a little bit, and it’s gotten out of hand. I’m getting phone calls from Brian McFadden’s manager asking if I can get Delta a job in LA. And I’m like, ‘I don’t really know what she wants to do.’”
The point is this, the manager of an ex-Westlife member is now badgering the guy who wrote American Psycho to procure some kind of vauge stateside job for Delta Goodrem. There, I actually typed that sentence. That felt good and weird and I’m aware that infinity monkeys on infinity typewriters would eventually stumble onto that particular combination of characters – but honestly, if we live in a world where Delta Goodrem is the beneficiary of Bret Easton Ellis’ nepotism because he happened to write an offhand comment about her on a popular micro-blogging service, THEN THE COMMUNISTS HAVE WON.
Title Image by Ryan Pierse via Getty
