Bateman, in his mid-20s when the story begins, narrates his everyday activities, from his recreational life among the Wall Street elite of New York to his forays into murder by night. Set in Manhattan during the Wall Street boom of the late 1980s, American Psycho follows the life of wealthy young investment banker Patrick Bateman. I was so on the defensive because of the reaction to that book that I wasn't able to talk about it on that level. It came from a much more personal place, and that's something that I've only been admitting in the last year or so. It wasn't that I was going to make up this serial killer on Wall Street.
That is where the tension of American Psycho came from. I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself. It initiated because of my own isolation and alienation at a point in my life. He did not come out of me sitting down and wanting to write a grand sweeping indictment of yuppie culture.
