Things That Make You Different From Morrissey

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Things That Make You Different From Morrissey

As gleaned from my unsuccessful attempt to slog through the new book, Autobiography, by the lead singer of the Smiths, Steven Patrick Morrissey.

Favorite childhood television programs!

You: remember them fondly.

Morrissey: devotes five straight pages to listing them, alongside inscrutable commentary that is especially confusing for American readers who have never heard of any of these shows.

When it’s hard to find an after school job as a teenager,

You: bitch to your friends, eat Cheetos, take a job you hate because it’s better than nothing.

Morrissey: spends several “war-torn months” “kowtowing to the rigors of gabbling clerical ciphers in a fate worse than life.”

When you want to describe your cool arty friend,

You: describe her as “cool and arty.”

Morrissey: calls her “an alcohol-free mangle of Jean Genet, Yoko Ono, Norma Winstone and Margaret Atwood. Pens, pencils, pens, pencils.”

When it comes to words you may be guilty of overusing,

You: say “great,” or maybe “awesome.”

Morrissey: says “sea-creature.”

When describing a past complicated romantic relationship,

You: giggle, say “it was complicated.”

Morrissey: says, “There will be no secrets of flesh or fantasy, and we managed to parrot on non-stop for two years in a jocular fourth-form stew of genius and silliness.”

When it comes to paragraph breaks, section breaks, and chapters,

You: recognize that readers sometimes need a little visual break, a signal to catch their breath before plunging ahead in the book.

Morrissey: finds them vastly overrated. What’s wrong with a 454 page Chapter One, anyway? Pencils, pens, pencils, pens.

You’re a vegetarian faced with cold cuts at the breakfast buffet.

You: head for the oatmeal.

Morrissey: guilts David Bowie into setting down the bacon in favor of some fruit salad then says to himself, “And another soul is saved from the burning fires of self-imposed eternal damnation.” On a related note, many scenes in his book conclude with him getting up and leaving restaurant tables in protest over meat being served. (Alas, Morrissey doesn’t see that as a good enough reason to sprinkle in a paragraph break.)

Someone’s done you wrong (legitimately, or maybe not.) But decades have passed.

You: move on. Sure, it pains you once in awhile, but water under the bridge, life’s too short, all that.

Morrissey: call an editor and say, “I have an idea for a book.”

On the other hand, if we’re talking about the catchiest, funniest, most mordant and memorable songs ever to play on the airwaves,

Morrissey: wrote and performed them.

You: probably didn’t.

(If you’d like a Smiths tome with a tad more objectivity, check out A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smithsby Tony Fletcher. Or, as my friend Barry suggested, you can always waste some time on This Charming Charlie – Smiths lyrics mashed up with Peanuts cartoons to great effect.)