"Being gay was not my trauma story at all. I dealt with it quite easily," he says. "We had a lot of fun doing things that now kids look at as being horrific and we were all somehow traumatized ... And no, we don't... None of us did." The novel is set in 1981 but the author has since moved on to other projects.
Los Angeles, 1981. A group of beautiful, rich, high school students are playing adult in their absentee parents' empty mansions, fueled by lust and prescription drugs, and filled with fear and disaffection. This is the world of The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis’ first novel in 13 years, part auto-fiction, part horror. The provocative and polarising author joins Alex Preston, award-winning author and journalist, to speak about the emptiness of adolescence, the lawlessness of the 80s, and how it feels to look back at it all aged 56 in 2023.
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