Bret Ellis’s emotional numbness

Bret Ellis’s emotional numbness is both a way of moving through his senior year at Buckley and a response whose costs become clear only in retrospect. At seventeen, he can recognize events and perform the expected reactions without feeling their weight; the result is a widening separation from school, public life, and other people. What first seems like an exhilarating refuge from feeling eventually becomes, in his adult account, a coldness shaped by trauma and difficult to leave behind.

The Making of Detachment

In the first week of September, Bret describes himself as living inside a private narrative. He tells himself that the desecration of the Buckley Griffin was merely a prank that had taken an unintended turn, that the person seen with a flashlight regretted what had happened, and that Robert Mallory was no less stable than anyone else in the senior class. These assurances preserve a picture of safety: the students are innocent, protected by wealth and status, and held together by their parents’ ambitions. But the story he constructs sits uneasily beside his growing sense that he no longer belongs to the life around him. He calls himself numb because, increasingly, nothing seems to affect him.

That distance shows in his response to public events. Ronald Reagan’s election means little to him, and even the attempted assassination of Reagan produces only empty excitement: Bret knows the details but cannot attach feeling or meaning to them. John Lennon’s murder likewise fails to shock him as it does older classmates. He later admits that he performed grief, playing Double Fantasy more than he wanted to because that was the reaction people expected. The contrast between knowing what happened and feeling its significance is central to his detachment: outward awareness remains intact while emotional participation falls away.

What Still Reaches Him

Bret’s numbness is not an absence of all feeling so much as a narrowing of what can reach him. During a trip to New Orleans for the Super Bowl, he remembers little about the game or its public occasion. The clearest memory is a private glimpse of Thom Wright in their hotel suite. Even the ceremony marking the end of the Iran hostage crisis and the yellow ribbon around the Superdome make less impression than this intimate image. Bret recalls that he was numb to almost everything except a moment of desire. His attention contracts around what he wants but cannot have.

The same division shapes the summer. Bret takes little interest in the royal wedding, though Susan Reynolds and Debbie Schaffer follow it closely. He watches Raiders of the Lost Ark repeatedly, but barely shares dinner with his separated parents twice. Sex, novels, music, and movies, he says, make life bearable; family, school, friendships, and social life do not. The ordinary markers of shared experience seem to belong to a world that was not made for his needs or desires. His detachment is therefore not simply passivity: it redirects his attention toward private fantasies and cultural experiences that can be revisited on his own terms.

School, Desire, and the Performance of Normality

At Buckley, numbness also becomes a way of interpreting relationships. Bret remembers Thom as easygoing and largely unaware of his own effect on others, and recognizes that his attraction to Thom cannot realistically be returned. He and Ryan Vaughn, meanwhile, share a concealed attraction and a wish to leave Los Angeles and begin again elsewhere. Ryan describes their relationship as requiring subterfuge. Their plans for a future beyond school offer the possibility of a life not governed by Buckley’s social expectations, but they do not remove the need to hide in the present.

After a traumatic afternoon, Bret tries to turn detachment into a deliberate program. Having slept through the night, he decides to act as if everything is normal and to impose a schedule on himself. He resolves to reduce his drinking and drug use, exercise before school, arrive early, and ignore news about the Trawler. He also chooses visible gestures of ordinary life: apologizing to Debbie Schaffer, kissing her in public, and withholding the feelings he does not want to confront. His new routine briefly makes the day easier. At school, however, he notices Susan turning away from Thom after their kiss and recognizes Thom’s fleeting disappointment. The moment registers precisely because Bret sees what the performance of normality is meant to conceal. He calls numbness not only a feeling but a motivation, even an ecstasy: an adopted counter-narrative that promises relief by making other people’s pain and his own desires seem irrelevant.

Trauma, Memory, and the Adult Reckoning

In retrospect, Bret identifies the weekend he spends with Ryan at the empty house on Mulholland in September 1981 as the last one untainted by what follows. He remembers its apparent calm and its intimacy as a brief interval of innocence. This boundary gives the earlier numbness an altered meaning: it had once seemed to protect him, but after the events of that year it could no longer keep fear and loss at a distance. Bret says that the numbness of adolescence hardened into a remote coldness, and that he was never really the same after 1981; there was no recovery period.

The afterlife of that separation appears decades later in Bret’s attempts to write about the past. In 2006, while living in Los Angeles, he tries to make notes about the autumn of 1981 and suffers a severe anxiety attack that sends him to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The experience contradicts his belief that he had become strong enough to revisit what happened. Years later, during a week in the desert, he sleeps only a few hours a night despite taking medication, while anxiety and dreams continue to intrude. He also recalls seeing Susan outside the Palihouse Hotel and hearing “Vienna,” a song associated with parties and mixtapes from the fall of 1981. The song brings the old fear forward rather than settling it; Bret recognizes that the fiction he had published over the years had not, by itself, worked through the trauma.

The book’s eventual return to the past is thus not a simple triumph over numbness. While writing, Bret argues with his partner, Todd, about the truth of particular events; Todd sometimes leaves their home for days, and Bret turns to alcohol, medication, and music from the period. The process makes the old material present again without guaranteeing that it can be neatly resolved. Bret’s account distinguishes the teenager who used detachment to survive his immediate world from the adult who discovers that a long-practiced emotional distance did not erase what happened. Numbness offered temporary control, but the effort to tell the story reveals its limits.