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I wasn’t aware that Gossip Girl authoress Cecily von Ziegesar was planning to do the elusive double-parody of her own novels (as inspired by Bret Easton Ellis) until I got an email from my mom. “Sue the bitch!!!! TRACE THE DATES!” wrote my mother, who apparently trolls the Gossip Girl boards way more frequently than I do.
She was referring to my own teen girl fan-fiction, Bret Easton Ellis Rewrites The Baby-Sitters Club, which I posted weekly for a while this summer. Cecily’s planning something similar, but Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer sounds way more like the parody that Bret did himself called All That Glitters for Funny Or Die:
While deliberating a theme for a Gossip Girl mashup, Eagan recalled reading Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho when it was first published in 1991. “I remember being addicted to the book—and also freaked out and repulsed by it at the same time,” she says. “It’s a satirization of the American dream that is totally twisted. Similarly, in Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer, these are beautiful, rich girls who supposedly have everything—but they go crazy, and, sardonically, killing becomes a competition between them. Cecily has taken a lot of the themes she explored in Gossip Girl and turned them on their side here, using her brilliant sense of humor.”
See, the difference between Baby-Sitters Club and Gossip Girl is that it’s very easy to imagine the kids on Gossip Girl killing off each other in a drug-fueled rage, while it is funny/satirical to imagine the sweet, repressed girls from Ann M. Martin‘s children’s series slowly losing it. Because don’t people take drugs and die all the time on Gossip Girl ? I’m pretty sure that is a consistent plot line . So Psycho Killer is not a “satire” of the Gossip Girl series, as much as a quick rewrite of characters who already resemble the teens who populate the world of Less Than Zero and Rules Of Attraction.
Satire is what Bret originally did to rich kids in his books. All Cecily is doing is using the popularity of her own characters on TV to sell more books under the guise of “Wouldn’t it be funny if Blair killed chuck with an ice-pick?” In essense, she is writing the ultimate fan fiction, but about her own work.
So no mom, I will not be suing Cecily von Ziegesar for “stealing” my idea, because my idea is still better. Also, then I’d have to sue Bret Easton Ellis for All That Glitters (which suffers from the same not-really-satire-if-it’s-exactly-what-you-write-about dilemma), and I don’t think I can win a case against the guy who wrote the source material for my fiction.
But hey, if they want to hire me to write a couple of these books, I’m open to the idea.
