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Hello and welcome to Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator.

And this week, I'm very pleased to be joined by Brett Easton Ellis, who will be best known to many of you as the novelist behind less than zero, American Psycho, Glamorama and Luna Park.

But here makes his non-fiction debut with White, which is a collection of essays that sort of part memoir, part film criticism, part state of the nation stuff.

And it's the latter part that's called a lot of attention and generated a lot of flack.

People seem to cross the road, Brett, baseball bat this book in print.

Was that what you were expecting?

No, not at all. I was expecting

that people were going to be much more interested in my childhood and my adolescence and the

writing of American Psycho, which I go into in this book. And I didn't really think that me

writing about how the media was covering the last election in 2016, without going into policy,

without straying onto either side of the aisle, was going to be as controversial as it was.

I actually took this section that causes a lot of consternation among the press and the mainstream media.

It's a long section about how I was living in Los Angeles and working in Hollywood post-election

and how everyone was having meltdowns.

Absolute hysterical meltdowns.

And they were kind of creating this dystopian handmaid's tale present we were all living in

under trump and i thought it was absurd i thought it was pure hysteria and my partner also had a

meltdown also got re-addicted to drugs because of Trump.

And I thought the whole thing was just completely nuts.

And so I did a podcast on how the entitled people that I knew were having meltdowns over Trump,

...