Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park, pp. 13–14:
I would sit in the Porsche I’d leased for the summer in a Bridgehampton parking lot waiting for the liquor store to open, usually sharing a cigarette with Peter Maas, who was awaiting there too. I had just broken up with a model over a bizarre argument while we were barbecuing mackerel – she complained about the drinking, the spacing out, the exhibitionism, the gay thing, my weight gain, the paranoia. But it was the summer of Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous homosexual/cannibal/serial killer from Wisconsin, and I became positive that he had been under the influence of American Psycho, since his crimes were just as gruesome and horrific as Patrick Bateman’s. And since there had been a serial killer in of all fucking places Toronto, for Christ’s sake, who had read the book and based to of his murders on scenes from it, I made a number of frantic, drunken phone calls to my agent at ICM as well as to my publicists at Knopf to make sure this wasn’t the case (it wasn’t).
And yes, it was true, I had gained 40 pounds – I was so sunburned and fat that if you had drawn a face on a giant pink marshmallow and plopped it in front of a laptop, you could not have told the difference between the two of us. And of course, being this out of shape, I was prone to skinny-dipping in the Atlantic just 50 yards from my $20,000-a-month cottage, and yeah, I had also developed a minor crush on a teenage guy who worked at Loaves and Fishes. So Trisha’s leaving me was semiunderstandable. Calling me a “fucking lunatic” and speeding away in that leased Porsche was not.