Halfway through my old friend Bret Easton Ellis’s first non-fiction book White, the author confesses what he and American Psycho’s starboy Patrick Bateman have in common: “an illusory and distant relationship with a world that appalled us, yet we both wanted to connect with it.” It’s obvious that today, at 55, Ellis still experiences a complicated relationship with the two worlds he has spent his life navigating: his own and that of Hollywood.

In White, a collection of personal essays, Ellis occupies the role of neutral observer of cultural chaos whose opinions cannot be defined by any one side or fit neatly into a binary. If he were to pick a stance, he would compromise the polarizing status that comes with maintaining freeform controversial views—which he seems to relish greatly. Although White teases the importance of individualism and cultural discourse, neither the book nor Ellis calls for aspirational activism or real change.

The book works as a fascinating look inside the brain of the puppeteer behind contemporary fiction’s most iconic characters. The primary lesson is that Ellis, like his fellow citizens, is just trying to understand the world around him. White functions too as a chronicle of the author’s remarkable life, documenting his private feelings on his blazing early literary successes and controversies, up through his complicated feelings on the age of social media. The essays, spanning across multiple decades, are provocative and often put the reader in the position of voyeur, as if you’re listening to tape-recorded journal entries or watching surveillance footage of celebrities gossiping in Beverly Hills bathrooms. This time warp through the eras he has experienced so vividly, makes the book a fascinating history of pop culture, from Generation X to Generation Z.

With the book on the verge of publication, Bret and I hopped on the phone to talk about some of our favorite topics — from Taylor Swift to Trent Reznor.