The Shards: A Novel
The Shards: A Novel
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
Bret Easton Ellis on The Shards: A Novel
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
The year that kept coming backThe novel had been circling since 1981, and Ellis had attempted it at 26, at 30, and at several points after that. Each attempt stalled. What finally broke the stalemate was the spring of 2020: the internet had erased almost every trace of his senior year, and the erasure made the loss feel urgent. He put on YouTube videos of music from 1981 that night, and the book arrived.
I had a profound wave of nostalgia for that time. I started writing the book that night, and the next day I had 14 pages. It happened very quickly.
Speed on the page did not mean the emotional territory was easy. For Ellis, returning to 1981 meant returning to something that had never resolved. He was 58 when he finally looked at it directly.
I just wanted to write about some of my classmates and my somewhat sentimental feelings of nostalgia about a period in my life that was also extremely painful; to finally, at 58, look back at that boy in 1981, a year that changed everything for me, and to write about it, and people I love, without embarrassment.
One thing he had protected across every previous book was his own sexuality. His earlier fiction, even when narrated by gay or bisexual men, had sidestepped the specifics of those relationships. The Shards, written in what he called a state of not caring about protection, went where the earlier work had not.
For a ‘gay’ writer, I don’t think I’ve explored gay relationships at all in my work until a little bit in The Shards — doesn’t really interest me, I guess.
How he wrote it
A 57-year-old opens the doorEvery previous attempt to write the novel had been narrated from inside the skin of the teenager living it. That was the wall. The breakthrough was not a new plot idea or a new character but a shift in the narrative address: who is doing the remembering, and from where.
It was not a novel that’s going to be narrated by an 18-year-old. It’s a novel that’s going to be narrated by a 57-year-old man. And when I realized that, the door opened and it all came flowing out. [paraphrased from audio]
The autobiographical voice he chose was not simply a stylistic preference. Across four decades and multiple abandoned drafts, the material had resisted the kind of invented distance he applied in his other novels. When he found the right voice, the change was immediate and measurable.
It gave the project an immediacy I hadn’t been able to locate for 40 years.
Rather than finishing the manuscript and waiting for a publisher, Ellis serialized the novel on his Patreon podcast as he wrote it, releasing episodes through 2020 and 2021 with no editor or agent involved. He had spent his career inside the traditional publishing cycle and had reached a conclusion about what it costs.
The patience required to write a novel, wait for it to be published, and then to get readers, is just an antiquated system of getting information out to people. I think we live in a time where it just doesn’t seem to make much sense.
The Patreon version opened with something more provocative than the published book would later signal: Ellis presented the early episodes not as fiction but as memoir, as the literal truth of what happened at the Buckley School in 1981. Listeners who searched newspaper archives for evidence found nothing, and the fiction became apparent slowly. He described the premise he set for himself at the McNally Jackson event.
I was going to present it as memoir and as the truth. This thing really happened to me. Bret Ellis is narrating this. These are all my friends. [paraphrased from audio]
One real classmate eventually found her name in the published novel. She sent him a Facebook message: “Of all the names you could have chosen, the name I hate the most is Debbie.” He wrote back to tell her he hoped she had enjoyed his fictional imagining of their senior year.
The personal thread
The fabulist at 17The novel’s narrator, a version of Ellis at 17, is a writer whose imagination distorts what he sees. Ellis has said that this was not purely invented as a character trait. At the McNally Jackson event he placed himself inside the same dynamic, describing his own senior year at Buckley.
I caused a lot of problems my senior year, and some people didn’t talk to me, and I made up stuff, and I was a fabulist. [paraphrased from audio]
What the novel then does with this quality, the ability of a young writer to bend what he sees into what he wants to see, is treat it as something with genuine stakes. At the Forbidden Planet event, Ellis named this as the book’s central concern.
Part of the problem, and what The Shards is really about, is how you control this kind of superpower you have as a young man. [paraphrased from audio]
At this age in his writing, Ellis had kept a layer of ironic distance between himself and his narrators. The Shards strips that layer away. The result, as he told i-D, is that the novel functions as a kind of preface to everything he has published: readers who want to understand the fiction that followed should start here.
It’s the first one, it’s the origin story. If you’re going to read my books, and you want to read them in order, you start with The Shards.
What he wants us to sit with
A warning addressed to no oneThe dedication of The Shards reads “To no one.” This is not an affectation. At the Louisiana Channel interview, Ellis explained the logic behind it in terms of what writing actually does for him, as opposed to what it does for a reader.
I write a book for myself. I’m sorry if that sounds selfish, I just don’t write it for the reader. I write it to work out something that’s going on within myself. And I need to figure it out, I need to relieve myself of it. [paraphrased from audio]
What the book worked out for him was the loss of a specific place and year. Sherman Oaks in 1981, the Galleria, the clubs, the coffee shops, the people: almost none of it is documented. The novel is partly a race against the disappearance of his own memory of it. At Forbidden Planet he put the feeling in plain terms.
an overwhelming sense of loss and nostalgia about that crucial year of being 17 and of the LA I grew up in that is now gone, doesn’t exist anymore. [paraphrased from audio]
But the book does more than preserve. The narrator’s fabulist imagination, his tendency to rewrite what he sees into what he wants, carries consequences in the plot. At the McNally Jackson event, Ellis stated what he wanted the novel to do at the level of argument.
The Shards is a warning about that. It’s the moment where you realize, ‘I have to see the world for how it is and not for how I want it to be.’ [paraphrased from audio]