When we put up our video of Bret Easton Ellis, we thought people would be interested but we didn’t expect the deluge of comments responding to the author’s talk.
First up was Gary Chau calling BEE “a douche” which inspired several of his fans to come to his defence. Emma wrote glowingly that Easton Ellis was “pretentious, opinionated, mildly subversive…and he was honest about his mood at the time” while Josie thought he “bridged the gap between generation x and y and baby-boomer” and was going to give his book to her 38-year-old son.
There was a lot of interest in the questions and the questioners. A character calling themselves Paul Bogan was against the whole idea: “As much as it’s democratic and breaks down the barrier between the artist and audience, the Q&A at the end was really embarassing, it’s no wonder Ellis was more interested in kvetching with his i-phone than anything else.”
Interviewer Alan Brough copped some flack from Mr Bogan, who compared his charisma to that of “hessian sack of unscrubbed potatoes”. We thought this was a little harsh and so did other commenters including Trev who outlined a golden rule “Don’t go the Brough”. Others agreed including Fran who “thought he [Brough] did an incredible job with someone who wasn’t that easy to interview” and Alex “walked away from the evening a little less a fan [of] Ellis but a new fan of Brough”.