Life in the age of anxiety & browser tabs with alt lit writer Guillaume Morissette

12 years ago

Alt Lit authors Guillaume Morissette and Ashley Opheim are good friends. They both live in Montreal, where they co-curate the reading series This Is Happening Whether You Like It Or Not. Guillaume’s first novel, New Tab, was published in April by Vehicule Press. It’s a book that’s deeply funny, smart, and relatable. Set in Montreal, it centers around a 26-year-old videogame designer who decides to reset his life, in the process self-destructing at work and in other aspects of his life. In the past, Guillaume’s work has been featured in publications like Dazed & Confused, Little Brother Magazine, Vice, Pop Serial and many more. While they were both in New York to perform at a reading, we invited them to do a photo shoot with us, then asked Ashley to interview Guillaume about New Tab, Montreal, etc.

I felt pretty inspired watching you dump those Japanese cookies all over your head during our photo session. What was the last thing that inspired you?

I don’t know, I find it hard to point to a single thing. After I finished New Tab, I felt insanely uninspired for a while, like I couldn’t write or even come up with something good to tweet. And I was unemployed, so it was like, “Shit, how do normal people spend their days if they’re not writing all the time? Should I go outside? Is that where they are? Outside?” I couldn’t remember. Then I gave up. I stopped, like, trying to create stuff and reloaded on life experiences and did unproductive things like watching fifty episodes of an anime about baseball. Doing “nothing” for a while really helped me feel inspired again. Also, all of sudden, I felt like I wanted a rival, like the main character in the anime about baseball.

I feel like that’s a common thing for writers to experience. Like post-traumatic stress disorder, but post-traumatic first novel disorder.

That sounds medically accurate to me.

How would you describe New Tab to someone who’s never heard of it?

New Tab is semi-autobiographical, so it takes place in Montreal in 2010. The main character has a full-time job in videogames, but he’s lost interest in it and he’s preparing himself mentally to quit and move on to something else. At the same time, he moves into this new apartment that’s well-located and has access to a giant backyard that they’re using to run a DIY backyard cinema and throw parties semi-illegally. There’s stuff in the book about self-reinvention, ambiguous relationships, Facebook, videogames, etc.

Do you consider yourself part of a distracted generation? I remember one of the earliest reviews of New Tab used generalisations about our generation to describe the book. I remember you being opposed to that…

Most of the reviews for New Tab have been really positive so far, but some of them contain, like, blanket generational statements, like “these characters are trapped by their lifestyles” or something, which I don’t think is true.

Do you feel trapped by your lifestyle?

I don’t know. I honestly feel that book people and authors are way more trapped by their lifestyles than twenty-somethings who use Facebook and party a lot.

Is there something about New Tab that hasn’t been brought up in press or other interviews that you want to talk about?

I feel like I want to talk about the backyard cinema with you.

What was the name of the backyard cinema in real life again?

Cinequanon. You can still find articles about it online or, like, photos of us setting the screen on fire at the last screening. In the book, I changed the name of the cinema to Cinedrome, because everyone else was getting a pseudonym anyway. The only name I didn’t change was our landlord’s. I tried to come up with a better name than Pierre for him, but Pierre just seemed so perfect. I couldn’t resist.

I remember seeing Facebook events for your screenings pop up every week and always meaning to come but never actually coming. You guys were selling beer but the movies themselves were free, which is of course something that drew people.

You came to a few parties that we threw, at least. Do you remember when we first met, how we ended up hanging out during a party in Ronaldo’s empty room?

I vividly remember hanging out in Ronaldo’s room, although I think I thought it was your room at the time. There was like nothing in there but a bed, it seemed. We sat on the floor and I feel like we instantly became good friends. I remember at first having a really hard time following your long trains of thought, and it took me awhile to become accustomed to you speaking.

I am laughing at the train of thought thing.

At first when reading the book I thought it was going to be about our friendship. I remember tearing through it in like two days trying to figure out who the characters were and if I was in there anywhere. I wish I could read the book objectively somehow. Can you talk a bit about the male-female friendship present in New Tab?

Sure. The main friendship in the book is between Thomas, the protagonist, and Shannon, who’s more extroverted than him and parties a lot. They both use self-destruction as a form of self-discovery, but in different ways, I think. New Tab is set in 2010, so we didn’t know each other that well then, but several people have asked me if Shannon was based on you.

Shannon is too catty to be me.

I would write you way differently. A character based on you would be stoked about, like, planets and holograms and sequoia trees or something.

Overall, I still feel like Thomas and Shannon’s relationship is one of the most successful aspects of New Tab.

I grew up around women, and for whatever reason it seems proportionately easier for me as an adult to have female rather than male friends. I do have guy friends, but it feels like they’ve endeared themselves to me more than I really tried to befriend them. Male friendships are often competition-driven, which I don’t really like, probably because I spent my childhood losing all the time at videogames and board games to my two older sisters. I feel like my brain still thinks that competition equals failure, so it doesn’t even see the point of trying. The other thing from New Tab is that I feel like the male-female friendship between Thomas and Shannon comes across as so much more satisfying and reliable than the ambiguous relationship between Thomas and Romy. I like that scene near the end where Thomas and Shannon are talking about sex dreams and how they can’t be attracted to one another and it just seems, like, a perfectly normal conversation for them. Do you remember that scene?

“I am less worried about us. We’re not romantically interested in each other. That makes us invincible.” That part?

Yeah, exactly. That part.

I really loved how you decided to include the electricity bill as a sub-plot. It kind of feels like everyone I know in Montreal has at one time or another had an outstanding electricity bill, if not currently. At one time my apartment owed like $3,000 to Hydro. It was really depressing. People move around so much here, so it was the same thing with what happened to your place.

What ever happened to your $3,000 bill? I forget.

I lived with like 10 different roommates during the span of our outstanding bill, so it was really confusing and stressful. I ended up hunting down old roommates and getting them to pay me what they owed by harassing them non-stop via Facebook and Gmail. My ex-boyfriend and I payed the majority of the bill. One asshole named François still owes me like $400. He ignored all my attempts to contact him, but most of the others were good about it.

Yeah, I was horrible at being “the person in charge,” so we ended up in situations like that. Part of the problem was that I have weird issues with asking things from people, like I basically don’t like asking anything from anyone, and my roommates were often broke, so it was always a mental, like, wrestling match to ask them for stuff when they’re my friends and I don’t want them to be struggling with money.

Speaking of struggling with money, I feel like you were just living off of green tea, rice and cereal while you were writing this book.

Protein bars, too. After I quit my full-time job, I didn’t really have any steady source of income for about two years. I “freelanced” for a while, but then that was really just another way of saying “70% unemployed.” During that period, I finished my degree and wrote this book and re-taught myself how to never buy anything. I have a source of income now for the first time in a while, and buying anything feels really amazing. A few weeks ago, I bought a bottle of Kombucha for 4$ and I just felt like an out-of-control millionaire or something.

Tell me a secret.

I lost my virginity in a funeral home.

Really?

Yeah.

What was the last dream you had that you remember?

Something about hanging out with my cat alone in a desert area, and her being the prey of rattlesnakes and stuff. When I woke up, I just felt the need to check up on her and make sure she was okay. She was sleeping in the living room and I started petting her really hard and she just looked at me, like, “What the hell are you doing?” In my head, I was, like, nursing her dream injuries or something.

Last question: Can you channel your inner gypsy and tell me what’s going to happen to you in the next year?

I think the next year is going to be a year of high-level confusion and inner turmoil for me. Overall, I feel like I need to be less rational and maybe 10% weirder at all times. I am hoping I can travel a little, like I’ll be doing festivals in the fall and stuff, and that travelling can help me find clarity. Long term, I have no idea what I’ll be doing professionally, and I am hoping I can find some non-hopeless form of employment that’s in sync with my writer identity, as opposed to some job that I get in spite of it. I started writing another book, but I am not satisfied with the general direction of it right now, and it needs to be stronger/longer than New Tab, because I don’t want to publish another book just for the sake of doing another book. I feel a lot of pressure to challenge myself to do “better,” without having any idea of what I actually mean by “better.” I’d also love to run a DIY space again, use my skills to collaborate with other people and do a project in another medium, like a videogame or something.