“Unfortunate Son” by Bret Easton Ellis first appeared in the April 1995 issue of Vogue. For more highlights from Vogue’s archives, sign up for our Nostalgia newsletter here.

The men in my family—my grandfather and his son, my father, both now gone—took pride in making money. My grandfather owned casinos in Nevada; my father made most of his fortune through risky real estate deals during the Reagan years. Money, and how much of it they made, was how these men defined themselves. They often believed that money excused almost any behavior, that the freedom it gave them allowed for a long list of abuses: alcoholism, cheating, domestic violence, arrogance, reckless carelessness, and an emotional coldness that, when I was young, seemed huge and impressive. But now, at 30, I see it as weak and more pathetic than grand.

As a result, I became skeptical and often horrified—not just by how money can shape a life, but also by how it can, depending on someone’s emotional stability, completely change a personality. My father couldn’t understand why anyone would see it that way, because to him money was a fact—something solid, real, a truth. But I found it so abstract that when he wanted me to go to business school at USC and I was determined to leave Los Angeles to attend an art school, of all things, a rift grew between us that was never really healed.

For me, during my last two years of high school, Los Angeles started to feel increasingly dark and threatening. I wanted to find a college as far from L.A. as possible—an art school, I kept insisting, one that didn’t offer any business courses. I couldn’t find one in Maine, so I chose Bennington, a liberal-arts college in Vermont. My father refused to pay the tuition. My grandfather—who was being sued by my father at the time over a money dispute so tangled and complicated that I still don’t know how or why it started—paid for it. I’m pretty sure (though it was never confirmed) that he paid the outrageously high tuition because it would upset my father, which it did. When I started at Bennington in the fall of 1982, my father and I basically stopped talking.

I vowed, rather naively even at 18, never to let money control my life or become an issue. I never believed for a moment that I could make serious money from writing or being a musician—the two things I was most interested in—so it was easy to keep that promise to myself. I would always have “just enough” to live on, nothing more, and that was “fine.” But in the winter and early spring of 1983, I wrote a novel for credit in a writing tutorial. Even though I had written three other novels before this one, the urge to write was (and still is) the same: it was enjoyable, such an instinctive drive that I can’t really explain where it comes from. I had no intention of publishing it or even starting a career as a writer.

I watched with a mix of fascination and worry (mixed with excitement) as my writing teacher submitted the novel to Simon and Schuster. They accepted the manuscript and published it in the late spring of 1985. It became a best-seller, was turned into a film, and was translated into 20 languages. Two things happened almost at once: I made a huge amount of money, and my father started talking to me again. His earlier attitude toward me slowly shifted into a glowing acceptance that only made me hate him even more.

People have deeply mixed feelings about money until they make a lot of it. And if you make a lot of it as an artist—which is usually an accident (luck, fate, current tastes, public mood)—you’re almost always viewed by others with suspicion, awe, jealousy, and you become the target of undeserved hatred or attraction. If you make a lot of money when you’re young and an artist, you’re never really forgiven. And if you are forgiven, it’s usually by the wrong people.People, for reasons that are completely suspicious.

If you make a lot of money when you’re fairly young—and during this time, absurdly enough, I was in my early twenties—and you make it as a writer, people assume you’ll always earn that much. So you spend without worrying about the future. There will always be big advances, film deals, bestsellers. When you’re 23, you can laugh when your newly hired accountant calls you at tax time, adds up a box of receipts for deductions, and nervously asks if Nell’s is a charity. At 23, taking ten, twelve, or fifteen people—friends, new friends, groupies, strangers—out to dinner in Manhattan doesn’t seem like a big deal. In fact, it seems like a “good idea.” I bought an apartment without fully understanding the property tax situation at the time (though even if I had, it wouldn’t have stopped me from closing the deal). I identified with Charlie Sheen in Wall Street. I threw catered parties in the new apartment for absolutely no reason. I developed a crippling fear of flying that made me take Amtrak across the country. The odds of a plane crash were tiny, but so were the odds of me having a bestseller at 21, so odds stopped meaning anything to me. I made a will. Friends said I changed, even though I hadn’t. I lied less.

To say that making the kind of money I was making at such a young age—though in late-eighties New York, everyone seemed to be making money; the city reeked of well-dressed young men and women earning small fortunes—harmed me in any way would be the kind of self-pitying admission writers love to make. And I’m tempted. But the only real damage, besides having to show false modesty in front of friends who were struggling artists and hadn’t “made it” yet, is that it can make you lazy. Instead of writing, you end up walking around that new apartment in a daze, muttering quotes from Flaubert to reassure yourself: that you must live like a bourgeois to write like a revolutionary, and so on. But in the end, I never really felt that rule applied to me anyway—it was too late, I had always been bourgeois—so I shrugged it off and took more people out to dinner.

Even though I had spent most of the money from the first book, people assumed I was still rich, even though I wasn’t. Taxes took about half of what I had made; an agent took another 10 percent. I lived in New York City, even though my nervous accountant begged me to move back to California, Nevada, Connecticut—anywhere but Manhattan. And he had reason to worry, because even though I kept supporting myself and making a living as a writer, I soon found I could no longer take ten, twelve, or fifteen people out to dinner, or pick up the tab for 30 at Nell’s, or throw catered parties on a whim—”Because it’s Thursday!”—in the new apartment. There simply wasn’t enough money anymore. I had spent it.

And unlike my father, I was relieved when I realized I couldn’t live that way anymore. The pressure was off. A month before he died, my mother told me—and this wasn’t unusual for him—that my father had called her from New York after I had attended dinner at Petrossian with eight others. He drunkenly insisted on picking up the check, which was $5,000. He cried to my mother about it from his bed in his suite at the Carlyle. They had been separated for six years. Like everyone else, I became more careful with money, but also much less conflicted.

My father was also less conflicted about money, but he was always staggeringly casual. In his will, he left me nothing except two watches. What was left of his estate went to the IRS, mostly for back taxes he thought tax shelters would cover but didn’t. There was nothing left, even though in the last ten years he had made somewhere in the low eight figures. My father’s carelessness didn’t exactly make me love him more.He never treated me badly, but somehow I understood him better, even though it bothered me to realize we shared this one trait. I took it as a lesson about money—an unintended one, but those are the ones that teach you the most.

Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about the essay From the Archives A Bret Easton Ellis Essay from the April 1995 issue of Vogue

BeginnerLevel Questions

Q What is this essay about
A Its a personal essay by author Bret Easton Ellis published in Vogue in 1995 He reflects on fame youth and the dark side of Los Angeles culture in the 1990s

Q Why is it called From the Archives
A Thats the name of the series Vogue uses when they republish old notable articles from their past issues

Q Who is Bret Easton Ellis
A Hes a famous American author best known for his controversial novels Less Than Zero and American Psycho

Q Is this essay about American Psycho
A Not directly It was written five years after that novel so it focuses more on his life and observations in LA in the mid90s

Q Is the essay easy to read
A Yes Ellis writes in a clear conversational style though it touches on some dark themes like emptiness and celebrity obsession

Advanced Deeper Questions

Q How does this essay connect to Elliss novel Less Than Zero
A It reads like a nonfiction sequel Both explore disaffected wealthy young people in LA but the essay adds a layer of Elliss own aging and disillusionment

Q What specific cultural moments does Ellis critique
A He criticizes the rise of tabloid culture the shallowness of Hollywood parties and the way fame distorts personal relationships

Q Why was this essay important when it was published in 1995
A It captured a specific mood of millennial anxiety and celebrity fatigue before the internet exploded Its a snapshot of how people felt about fame right before reality TV took over

Q Does Ellis offer any solutions or just complain
A He doesnt offer easy solutions The essay is more of a melancholic observationhes describing a problem without pretending to fix it