"The collective outrage over 'American Psycho' provides a context for the essays in 'White,' whose topics range from [Bret Easton] Ellis’s unsupervised 1970s childhood..."

"... in upper-middle-class Sherman Oaks, Calif., to his critiques of movies and movie stars, to President Trump and the digital echo chamber. His points are not always agreeable, but that’s never stopped him. In one essay, 'Liking,' Ellis indicts the 'horrible blooming of "relatability" — the inclusion of everybody into the same mind-set … the ideology that proposes everybody should be on the same page, the better page.'... He’s complained about liberals who think he’s a Trump apologist.... 'Lately what’s bothered me is the tweeting world, and how, since there’s no context, no nuance, and since everyone’s so hysterical, you are tagged things that you are not,' Ellis said. 'The language police is a hard thing to deal with if you are creative.' He really wishes everyone would just calm down...
[He prefers] to treat the news cycle as fleeting entertainment rather than the end of the world ('Really, Jared Kushner looks great in a bathing suit')... Ellis finds himself now in his longest relationship to date, with a 32-year-old musician named Todd Schultz.... He described their post-2016 household as 'a bad sitcom of a crusty old Gen X-er, who’s kind of a lapsed liberal centrist, and my communist gay boyfriend.'... Todd’s a 'political monster' who 'sits in front of MSNBC having meltdown after meltdown … yet his bounce-back time is pretty good.' If Schultz stands for the melodramatic, media-obsessed millennial, then Ellis identifies as 'the old man on the porch,' whining over the cultural profundity of decades past."

From "Bret Easton Ellis Has Calmed Down. He Thinks You Should, Too. In the 1980s and ’90s, the novelist was seen as a literary bad boy and the voice of his generation. Now 55, he’s about to publish his first book in nine years" (NYT).

Here's that book of essays: "White."

Why's it called "White"? Is it racial? The article says that the original title was "White Privileged Male" and that it means to acknowledge the great old book of essays by Joan Didion, "The White Album."

ADDED: The opposition to the idea that "everybody should be on the same page" caught my eye because, just recently, somebody took me to task simply for using the phrase "on the same page" — "We need to be on the same page." He hated that, I was told.