Drinks with Victor Morrison

champagne with cranberry juice & Cointreau

(Photo Credit: Devyn Andersen, the artist formerly known as Digyphus)

I met last week with Victor Morrison who told me his feelings on satire, literary fiction, and what it means to take a wrong turn. When we met he was wearing a rustic checkered red, black shirt and drinking a glass of champagne with cranberry juice and orange liquor.

I’m very excited to be with you today as part of Wrong Turn. So Victor, what is the last great book you read? Tell me why you enjoyed it so much!

The last great book I read was actually a collection of essays by Meghan Daum called My Misspent Youth and I really liked it, because having just moved to New York myself, it’s really about being in New York in your twenties. All the things you hope it will be, all the things it is, and then reality comes crashing down on you about money, work, having to bust your ass to get through. Then there are the humorous things you find out about yourself, the tastes you acquire, the things you can’t stand, while you’re living in New York City. It was a really amazing read. It was actually published originally around the year 2000 and it went out of print, but they brought it back in 2015. So I recommend it if you’re in the city or at a younger age.

What styles or genres of stories do you enjoy the most?

Probably literary fiction, I have been getting into essays and memoir and all that, but I love fictional books strongly grounded in a time or a place. I like not just necessarily stories that I can relate to, but when I can see it happening. It’s grounded in reality, in a way that speaks to a moment in the past. You feel like you’re there.

The exception to everything I’ve been saying is satire. I recently read Self Care by Leigh Stein which is about the wellness industry and social media and all that stuff is now and even has political references, but it is very satirical. It wasn’t as if the writer was taking herself too seriously. That’s often the case with a lot of these books about now. They’re so serious. You can’t make a joke about anything. Satire is different, everything’s a joke. So if you can take the current moment or a moment from the recent past, or even a historical moment and make it funny, I’ll probably enjoy it.

What do you envision for the future of literature, what kind of stories do you think we need more of in today’s world?

I would love for us to get past messages and morals and just return to the quality of the story above anything else. I don’t think the identity of the author should have as much of a role as it has today. I prefer to read a book without knowing anything about the author. If I could get a book without the author’s name on it – I mean I’d like to eventually know who wrote it, it’s nice to go to book talks in a bookstore, I like doing all that. But I prefer to read without thinking about the author. Unless it’s a collection of essays like I just talked about. I do know who that author is and it was interesting to read more about her life, but if it’s a work of fiction, the author really should not matter.

That's interesting, there is an essay called “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes. It’s a similar premise to what you’re describing. Some people don’t want to know anything about the author. Others say you can’t divorce the writer from the story, they are that story. I know this is a hotly contested topic, others believe you absolutely must know the author, so I’m curious about your feelings on that.

It’s fine for people to be interested in an author. You read a book, you really like it, you want to learn more about who wrote it, that’s perfectly natural. It’s just that if you read a book and you love it, but then you don’t like the author as a person, that doesn’t lessen the book in any way. People are looking at the author first. It should be the writing first, the story first, it should really be able to stand alone.

You were talking earlier about going to the bookstore and always seeing the same thing that’s already been written, so it seems to me that you’re interested in innovative writers with innovative stories. I’m wondering if you can expand on this theme of innovation. What kind of writing do you find especially innovative in today’s world?

That’s a tough question. Well, obviously I judge a book by its cover all the time. Book designers sometimes do a great job of drawing me in. But if it’s something I’ve never thought before, if it’s something I’ve never seen before, that pulls me in. But if I’ve seen that book cover in a million and one places, if I’ve seen it everywhere online, and it’s getting glowing reviews and everyone’s on the same page, then I know that it’s probably all bullshit. Most of the books that I have loved you don’t see every day. I’m not interested in things that just have tons of money thrown at them.

So it’s like, okay, I haven’t seen this new book yet, I haven’t seen this online… I know that in terms of innovation that’s not something crazy but then I think – this hasn’t been thrown at me? This hasn’t been in my face? Why not? And I look at it, and I’m like “Oh, because it’s different.” Somehow they think different means not as worthy, they don’t think it’s going to make as much money. Well, I’m interested in different – so they have my vote. I’m going to give them the chance, because the best books are the ones that defy categories and the ones that challenge readers.

What does Wrong Turn mean to you??

Wrong Turn for me is not something negative as “wrong” might imply, but it’s more something unexpected. A path taken by the author or the story that feels risky, or risque, or both. Going back to innovation, if I see there’s something different, it’s not like this person thinks that they have to follow the right path or write about things in a certain way – this person does not care. They’ve gone on their own path, they’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere, as most in the literary community would say. And we’re using Wrong Turn kind of satirically, we don’t mean something scary or something bad, we mean something different. Something risky. Something uncharted.

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