Carole Morin

Carole Morin is a Glasgow-born novelist who lives in Soho, London.

Quotes

I think about toilets a lot, and how awful it must be to be a toilet.
- "Thin White Girls" (1984)

Lies are easy to believe in but the truth sounds false.
- Lampshades (1991)

Irene the Slut sits on top of the television, the atmosphere of Russian vodka about her skin.
- Dead Glamorous (1996)

I fell in love with money before I had any and it’s a myth that the best romances end in heartbreak.
- Penniless in Park Lane

A sinning nun, her face in a plate of cakes, caught my eye as I descended on the moving stair.
- Penniless in Park Lane

Writing is hard work. Even when you start with the raw ingredients – a mad family, a sense of humour, talent…it’s hard work. But you do get to sit around in silk pyjamas all day.

I read Wuthering Heights when I was seven. I stole a copy from the library. We weren’t allowed books in the house because they’re ‘dirty and dusty’. My mum had a shelf of fake leather books which my dad used to hide whisky behind. I used to die of embarrassment every time a visitor tried to pick up a book and realized it was fake.
The library was forbidden so it became exotic and sexy in my imagination. I was dying to get in there and read a book!

I wouldn’t want to be labelled a Woman Writer even though I’m definitely not a man. And I think Scottish Writer has some unfortunate associations.
Last century when I was commissioned to write my first novel, Scottish writers were being bullied by a purple nosed publisher to write in dialect. Well my voice is authentically Scottish. I’m an educated Scottish person who escaped. My voice is as valid as a whiny cunt who lives in a council flat and doesn’t quite speak English. That doesn’t mean I have to sound like Evelyn Waugh either.
I’d like to be called a Good Writer. To quote a review on Amazon, "Carole Morin is a Fucking Genius. Fact." Fucking Genius will do.

It’s all real. It came out of my head. Everything in there is real. Even the things invented and imagined.

Writing things down is dangerous. Ink can’t be erased without leaving a mess behind.

I wanted to wake up with a new name, a new hair colour, and almost the same heart.

Characters in novels are all fiction like the world they live in. Of course Vivien Lash has things in common with me but if she actually was me I wouldn’t have been able to invent her. And I’m not plotting to murder my husband!
The closest connection between me and my characters is that we live in a city that’s recognisable as London, but it’s a version of London that came out of my head.

Murder and sex are both Dionysian.
Creative work is first anarchic; and then it’s structured. It’s right brain then left brain. Anarchic then controlled. To be a really good writer, you have to be able to do both. It’s hard work and it takes longer than murder or sex.

I like being described as "Sylvia Plath with a sense of humour." But I wouldn’t marry Ted Hughes. He’s dead for one thing.

Books were banned from my house, my mum thought they were ‘germ traps’, so I was always sneaking into the library, hiding under a big plant; reading. I was escaping into another world as well as finding out stuff that was news to me.

There’s a theory that if you have an interesting childhood then you have enough material to last a lifetime. But that implies that art is always autobiographical when reinvention and imagination are the most important elements. But it doesn’t hurt to have a mad family! Of course I didn’t notice until I’d escaped – when I left home as a teenager on a diplomatic scholarship – how odd my family were.

Life-affirming people are a bit creepy and self-consciously life-affirming art is usually awful.
My books tend to have happy endings, or at least that’s one way of reading them. My characters are exuberant and funny as well as dark. Duality is the essence of my voice so it’s appropriate for me to have an evil twin to blame things on.

Carole Morin has enough autobiography to last her a lifetime. 90 per cent of it comprises Dead Glamorous — or at least the 90 per cent she claims to be true. The rest is obfuscation and exaggeration, designed to give her already improbable tale the sheen of some glorious myth.
- Allan Brown, in "Carole Morin's second book is an unlikely family saga" in Sunday Times (29 September 1996)

With her ‘grotesque gallery’ of relatives I wonder why she even bothers to make things up.
- Jackie McGlone The Scotsman (2nd March 2013)

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Carole Morin