“Unfortunate Son,” by Bret Easton Ellis, was originally published in the April 1995 issue of Vogue.
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The men in my family (my grandfather and his son, my father, both deceased) prided themselves on making money. My grandfather owned casinos in Nevada; my father made the bulk of his money in highly speculative real estate deals during the Reagan years. Money and the amount of it made was how these men defined themselves. And they often felt that money excused almost any kind of behavior, that the freedom money brought them entitled them to carry out a litany of abuse: alcoholism, infidelity, spousal battery, megalomania, random carelessness, and an emotional indifference on a scale that as a young man I thought was massive and impressive, but now, at 30, I see as weak, more pathetic than gigantic.
As a result I became skeptical and often horrified by not only how money can shape a life but also how it can, depending on one’s emotional stability, alter an entire personality. My father could not comprehend how anyone would see things this way because money was a fact, something hard and tangible, a truth, but one that I found so abstract that when my father wanted me to attend business school at U.S.C. and I was intent on leaving Los Angeles to attend, of all things, an art school, a rift grew between us that was ultimately never resolved.
Los Angeles for me, during my last two years of high school, began to represent something increasingly ominous and sinister. I wanted to find a college that was as geographically distant from L.A. as possible, an art school, I kept stressing, one that didn’t offer any business courses. I found none in Maine so I chose Bennington, a liberal-arts college in Vermont. My father refused to pay the tuition. My grandfather—who was being sued by my father at the time over a money matter so circuitous and complicated that I’m still not sure how or why it began—paid. I’m fairly certain (this was never verified) the reason he paid the outrageously expensive tuition had to do with the fact that it would upset my father greatly, which it did. When I started attending Bennington in the fall of 1982, my father and I basically stopped speaking.
I vowed, rather naively even at eighteen, never to let money inform or become an issue in my life. I never for a single moment believed I could make any serious money from either writing or being a musician (the two vocations I was most interested in), so it was easy to keep this promise to myself. I would always have “just enough” to live on, nothing more, that was “fine.” But I wrote a novel for credit for a writing tutorial in the winter and early spring of 1983. Even though I had written three other novels before this one, the impetus to write was (and is) still the same: It was pleasurable, so intuitive an instinct that I can’t begin to explain where it comes from. I had no intention of publishing it or even embarking on a career as a writer.
I watched with a mixture of fascination and worry (laced with excitement) as the novel was submitted by my writing teacher to Simon and Schuster, which accepted the manuscript, then published it in the late spring of 1985. It became a best-seller, was turned into a film, and was translated into 20 languages. Two things happened almost simultaneously: I made an enormous amount of money and my father began speaking to me again. His previous attitude about me had slowly metamorphosed into a glowing acceptance that intensified my loathing for him even more.
