Kay: I didn’t either. Down: They’re so wildly different from us, I felt like I’ve never really thought about them being reflections of where we are in our lives. I dunno, they kind of want different things than me and Konrad. [laughs] There are obvious reference points for a character like Whitney. There’s Bret Easton Ellis and Patrick Bateman. There’s Patricia Highsmith and Tom Ripley. But what was Whitney’s origin point for you guys? And how do you construct a character whose entire identity is self-constructed? Kay: Well, him being our peer is actually quite important in framing this question, when we think about it, because he’s obviously a sort of composite of all the things you just mentioned—and of the stuff he would’ve been reading. In a way, he’s a metatextual character, because his reference points for constructing himself would’ve been identical to what me and Mickey were drawing on in writing him. So you could look at him as a sort of a cipher or an avatar—but to us it was interesting to …