- As a great fan of Ellis's novels, particularly American Psycho which was an exquisite and damning critique of late 20th century decadence, I looked forward to reading this despite its widespread condemnation by critics.
- Unfortunately, it's rather tedious, self-indulgent and dated. There are good parts, but overwhelmingly it's bad.
- He revisits phases of his life and career as a novelist, film/TV critic, podcaster, screenwriter, tweeter. His views are often astute, always intelligent, revealing, and frequently savage. He holds nothing back. It's the sort of memoir that will undoubtedly lose him a lot of friends. He quotes James Joyce: ‘I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people’.
- His movie reviews are often a little banal, eg The Imitation Game, about Alan Turing, but at other times subtle and insightful. He loathed, for example, Barry Jenkins’ Oscar winner Moonlight. His critique of this absurdly lauded film is spot on: a product of ‘liberal Hollywood’s fake-woke corporate culture’.
- But dominating the book are his generally weak and immature political reflections. Certainly many of us would share his frustrations about ‘the threatening groupthink of ‘progressive ideology’, which proposes universal inclusivity except for those who dare to ask any questions..’. ‘Victimhood’ is Ellis’s principal obsession. He doesn't think much of Millennials, who he calls 'Generation Wuss', because they 'can’t abide criticism'.
- He sees everywhere ‘a new kind of liberalism', censoring, punishing, obstructing, blocking. ‘Everyone seemed vulnerable to micro-aggressions... survivor-victims afflicted by traumas that happened years ago...It’s actually an illness...a new kind of mania, a psychosis that the culture has been coddling’. (Interestingly there is no mention whatsoever of the #MeToo movement).
- Incredibly, he’s very politically naive, showing little awareness of the rise of right wing extremist populism around the world. He's oblivious to the ugliness of Republicans and their far right trajectory over the decades since Ronald Reagan, Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich. Being ‘strenuously independent’ is his identity, whatever that means. He retreats into the lukewarm sanctuary of being an ‘artist’. He didn’t even vote in the 2016 election, for god's sake.
- With Trump in power ‘it seemed to many of us...that the Left was morphing into...a morally superior, intolerant and authoritarian party... a rage machine...’ ‘In the summer of 2018 they had turned into haters, helped by an inordinate amount of encouragement from the mainstream media, and now came across as anti-common-sense, anti-rational and anti-American’. Absurdly, he's talking about the Democrats and their supporters, and the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other respected media outlets. He's swallowed hook, line and sinker the 'fake news' mantra of Donald Trump.
- And then he has the gall to admit that he ‘just wasn’t that interested in politics’! He thinks he has ‘the gift of neutrality’. So lame.
- He ends his book with an inane genuflection to the bombastic narcissist and ‘artist’ Kanye West and his aggressively pro-Trump views.
- Don't waste your time reading this book. I've done it for you. Read or re-read American Psycho instead, or see the movie (which Ellis liked).
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