What I didn’t—and couldn’t—tell anyone was that writing the book had been an extremely disturbing experience. That even though I had planned to base Patrick Bateman on my father, someone—something—else took over and caused this new character to be my only reference point during the three years it took to complete the novel. What I didn’t tell anyone was that the book was written mostly at night when the spirit of this madman would visit, sometimes waking me from a deep, Xanax-induced sleep. When I realized, to my horror, what this character wanted from me, I kept resisting, but the novel forced itself to be written. I would often black out for hours at a time only to realize that another ten pages had been scrawled out. My point—and I’m not quite sure how else to put this—is that the book wanted to be written by someone else. It wrote itself, and didn’t care how I felt about it. I would fearfully watch my hand as the pen swept across the yellow legal pads I did the first draft on. I was repulsed by this creation and wanted to take no credit for it—Patrick Bateman wanted the credit. And once the book was published, it almost seemed as if he was relieved and, more disgustingly, satisfied. He stopped appearing after midnight gleefully haunting my dreams, and I could finally relax and quit bracing myself for his nocturnal arrivals. But even years later I couldn’t look at the book, let alone touch it or reread it—there was something, well, evil about it. My father never said anything to me about American Psycho. Though oddly enough, after reading half of it that spring, he sent my mother a copy of Newsweek with the cover that asked, over the angelic face of a baby, “Is Your Child Gay?” unaccompanied by any kind of note or explanation.

The death of my father occurred in August of 1992. At the time I was doing the Hamptons in a $20,000-a-month cottage on the beach in Wainscott, where I was trying to work through my writer’s block while preparing for weekend guests (Ron Galotti, Campion Platt, Susan Minot, my Italian publisher, and McInerney), ordering the forty-dollar plum tart from the specialty bakery in East Hampton and picking up the two cases of Domaines Ott. I was trying to stay sober but I’d started opening bottles of chardonnay at ten in the morning, and if I’d drunk everything the night before, 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 waiting 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 g*y 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 f**king places Toronto, for Christ’s sake, who had read the book and based two 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 forty 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 fifty 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.

And then the summer was interrupted by a phone call in the middle of the night. He was found naked by the twenty-two-year-old girlfriend on the bathroom floor of his empty house in Newport Beach. That was all we knew.

I had no idea what to do, who to call, how to cope. I collapsed into shock. Someone had to remove me from that cottage and get me back to California. There was eventually only one person who could do all this for me—or, more pointedly, would. So Jayne left the set of a movie in Pennsylvania she was costarring in with Keanu Reeves and made plane reservations on MGM Grand and dragged my shivering hulk out of the Hamptons and flew to L.A. with me—all within twenty hours of hearing about my father’s death. And that night, at the house in Sherman Oaks that I grew up in, drunk and terrified, I brutally made love to her in my childhood room while we both wept. Jayne returned the next day to the set in Pennsylvania. Keanu sent me flowers.

My father had made me trustee of his estate, which was worthless, and he also owed millions in back taxes, so there was a protracted legal battle with the IRS (they could not understand how someone who had made $20 million in the last six years of his life had spent it all—but this was before we found out about the rented Learjet and all the bad art) that kept me in Los Angeles for several months, locked in an office in Century City with three lawyers and half a dozen accountants until all the financial matters were cleared up. In the end I was left with two Patek Philippe watches and a boxful of oversized Armani suits, as well as a monumental relief that he was gone. (My mother and sisters—nothing.) The autopsy revealed that he had suffered a massive stroke at 2:40 a.m., though the coroner was mystified by certain irregularities. No one wanted to pursue these irregularities and he was cremated immediately. His ashes were put into a bag—even though his (invalid) will stated that he wanted his children to spread them at sea off the coast of Cabo San Lucas, where he vacationed frequently—and we stored the ashes in a safe-deposit box in a Bank of America on Ventura Boulevard next to a dilapidated McDonald’s. When I brought some of the Armani suits to a tailor to be altered (I had dropped all the weight I had gained that summer in a matter of weeks) I was revolted to discover that most of the inseams in the crotch of the trousers were stained with blood, which we later found out was the result of a botched penile implant he underwent in Minneapolis. My father, in his last years, due to the toxic mix of diabetes and alcoholism, had become impotent. I left the suits with the tailor and drove back to Sherman Oaks in tears, screaming while punching the roof of the Mercedes as I swerved recklessly through the canyons.