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Interview with Ewan Morrison
Arena, July 2005
Where do the characters come from?
There are a lot of different voices in there, male, female, straight, gay, young, middle-aged. When you put yourself in the vacuum of writing a book, all of these different characters, which are really just different sides of yourself, come out. I think we all tend to censor most of those conflicting voices so we can have some sense of coherence. And there is a kind of terror in realizing that you are not coherent – that, at times, you are barely a character at all. A lot of the stories are about identities breaking down and people realizing that they are not who they think they are.
How do you feel about them as their creator?
I worry about them sometimes. They’re all pretty fucked up, flawed and needy – all wandering about like Courtney Love with a big hole in themselves. But also I’m quite glad that they’re out there in the world being fucked up on my behalf so that I can lead a fairly quiet life.
Silly question, why sex?
Consumerism is obsessed with sex. We see sex as a way of finding fulfilment in a culture that engenders lack and replaces long-term goals with short-term fixes. But, then again, that’s too simplistic. In the absence of any greater goals, sex is as good a reason as any to get out of bed in the morning and, I guess, an even better reason to get back there at night.
Sex is so many contradictory things: life affirming and lethal; wholesome and addictive; the most intimate connection and, at the same time, utterly anonymous. I could spend my whole life writing about all the contradictions that occur when (at least) two people have sex.
The stories are very conversation driven, why?
I’ve done a lot of scriptwriting and so dialogue and conversation come easily to me. I like the way in which, when a character is speaking, you can see both sides of them – who they think they are and who they might really be. It’s like that old expression ‘I work in a bar, but really I’m an actor’. When people say that, you immediately get a sense of thwarted ambition, need and even hope. Conversation is a good way of revealing splits and conflicts in a character. Also I was motivated by a line in Sexus by Henry Miller, ‘Write like you speak’. I guess my tone as an author is pretty conversational.
How long did they take to come together?
The stories were written over an intense period of six months, listening to Mogwai on loop and getting myself into this almost hypnotic state. At a certain point, I was working up maybe three of four stories at the same time, which was good because it helped me resist the temptation to put everything into one story – to remain true to a specific character’s voice and to work within the parameters of the situation they find themselves in. It all happened very quickly because all the stories were feeding off each other.
Did you envisage them as a complete package of work?
It was when I was about half way through the collection and had outlines for the remaining stories that I started to see how they were all connected. There are about four stories which all involve the same dating site (the title of the collection, The Last Book You Read, comes from the typical online dating question). Some stories are like answers or replies to the others – you have a guide for the would-be adulterer followed by another about the traumatic aftermath of an affair. When I was writing I was aware that certain stories would throw up questions and so new stories would be born. When I finished the last one and showed it to the publisher, she said, ‘That’s it, that’s the book’. There was not a sense that every question had been answered but that they’d been viewed from all possible sides.
What is the main thing you’re trying to get across and the main emotion you’re trying to engender in the reader?
It’s strange but I set out to put as much cynicism and negativity into the whole lot as I could, to get it all out of my system. Then I’d read them to people who would quite often cry and say words like ‘compassionate’ and ‘humane’. So it’s ironic, you try as hard as hell to be an evil bastard and it comes out like that. I think, if I was consciously trying to engender compassion in a reader, that would be coercive and deeply cynical. These things only come about by accident. I don’t like to use the word subconscious but I guess I might just have one.
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