He thinks you’d have to be an “American Psycho” to live here.
Despite arguably making his literary bones in NYC, writer Bret Easton Ellis likely won’t be moving back anytime soon. During a recent Big Apple trip to promote his new book “The Shards,” the novelist wondered, “How in the f–k does anyone live here?” and pondered how someone could possibly call the now “unrecognizable” metropolis home.
“I arrived Wednesday night during this horrible storm, and then the usual problems of getting your luggage, an hour waiting at Delta carousel, and then the ride into New York,” the disillusioned 58-year-old satirist told Vanity Fair while describing his recent promo tour. “I thought, ‘How does anyone live here?’”
The NYC refugee, who currently resides in his birthplace of Los Angeles, has owned an apartment in Gotham City since 1987 but reportedly hasn’t slept there for a decade, according to Vanity Fair.
Ellis said he first became disillusioned with the city after a 2016 pilgrimage to his old stomping grounds in Astor Place to meet a prospective tenant.
“I had not been to New York in at least 10 years,” said the “Rules Of Attraction” author, whose East Village/Union Square digs, where he wrote “American Psycho,” recently hit the market for $1.5 million. “Around Fourth Avenue, 13th Street, I looked up from my phone and I suddenly panicked.”
He didn’t recognize his whereabouts.
“I told the driver, ‘You’re in the wrong area … We’re going to 13th Street between Third and Fourth.’ He said, ‘This is it.’ I couldn’t believe the change,” Ellis recalled.
While the screenwriter didn’t specify how exactly NYC had transformed, Ellis suggested it was a far cry from the ’90s, which he described as a “glorious time” to live in the metropolis.
“I talk to a lot of people who just simply agree — to be youngish and living in New York during that period, and to be involved in the magazine world, the glorious magazine world,” the author gushed.
It was during these supposed halcyon days that Ellis penned his opus “American Psycho,” the basis for the 2000 Christian Bale flick of the same name. The premise is that a psychopathic investment banker seemingly manages to get away with murder due to the superficial yuppie corporate culture of the 1980s.
It’s debatable whether the Big Apple’s glory days have gone the way of the dodo. However, mayhem appears to be on the rise in modern-day New Amsterdam with major crime soaring by 36% in 2022, according to NYPD figures from last August.
Other symptoms of this purported urban decay include rampant homelessness and the deluge of migrants, many of whom were, until recently, housed at The Watson Hotel in Midtown on the taxpayer’s dime.