The Shards: A Novel

Narrator and protagonist Bret Ellis has much in common with author Bret Easton Ellis, and the book blends elements of memoir and autofiction—a genre that uses the author’s real life as a foundation for fiction. Bret grows up in the same elite Los Angeles world as the author, in the same time period, and his obsessive references to popular music and movies not only ground the novel in its historical period, but also echo the pop cultural obsessions that have marked Bret Easton Ellis’s entire literary and media career. The book never draws a clear line between reality and fiction, or between Bret the character and Ellis the author, ultimately suggesting that memory is always at least partly fictional: To construct the story of a life, to try to make meaning out of the chaos of experience, inevitably means altering some details and inventing others as emotional truth conflicts with a factual truth that is never fully accessible.

This distinction between emotional and factual truth manifests in Robert and Bret’s conflict. From the beginning, Bret’s suspicions of Robert have more to do with emotion and intuition than fact.