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There’s an anecdote I sometimes wheel out to strangers or dates to convey the sort of child I was, a morbid and sensitive one with a streak of prurient proxy-sadism In my hometown there is a huge bookshop with a cafe and I often went to read books for free for as long as I could get away with, books for adults, books about things I wasn’t yet allowed to know about When I was eleven years old I picked up a copy of American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis and spent eight consecutive Saturdays reading it in rapt horror When I came to a passage in which Patrick Bateman electrocutes a woman’s breasts and her fat splatters onto a window – an image which has remained lodged near the surface of my mind ever since – I burst into nervous laughter and then almost immediately began to cry    Ellis has remained an ambient presence in my life ever since Often, how I relate to him has to do with how readily I am able to engage with irony, a variance which determines everything from how I write to how I speak to how I make friends By the time I was 20, I’d read everything he wrote I was going through a strange phase, compulsively social and dependent on my friends for any sense of meaning in the world, and yet plagued by the certainty that the way we talked and joked together was preventing actual connection I felt profoundly isolated Once I asked my father if he had ever found that irony created a barrier between himself and his peers, and he responded ‘I don’t think we knew what irony was’ But I did I lived in it and it had poisoned me, made me bitter and lonely and inauthentic I was undergoing a spiritual crisis, and decided I hated Ellis I would put all my faith in total sincerity I would invest in earnestness I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), with its pleas for authenticity, honesty and disavowals of snide criticism, and