The Shards: A Novel

By creating a fictionalized version of himself, Ellis builds on the contentious literary persona he’s cultivated since the debut of his first novel Less Than Zero. In The Shards, characters accuse Bret of causing drama and behaving like a “drama queen.” While Ellis’s novels prompt debate due to their unsentimental depictions of young people, sex, drugs, and violence, Ellis himself frequently creates conflict by directly criticizing what he believes to be a culture of excessive political correctness. On social media, with the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, and in his nonfiction critique of contemporary society, White (2019), Ellis makes fun of what he feels is a humorless, victimized atmosphere. In The Shards, Bret refuses to consider himself a victim after his sexual assault by Terry. Bret says, “[N]o one had hurt me, I hadn’t been assaulted, I let it happen” (686). Despite this denial, Bret’s status as a minor at the time means that their sexual encounter was definitionally an assault.

Early in his career, Ellis belonged to a coterie of writers dubbed the “literary brat pack,”—a reference to the original 1980s “brat pack” comprised of young actors Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, and others.