“The Husbands” illustrates the madness of modern dating

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Haley Hill: Hi, I am Audible Editor Haley Hill, and today I'm so excited to speak with author Holly Gramazio about her debut novel, The Husbands. Its story begins when Lauren discovers her attic has suddenly become enchanted with the ability to swap out a seemingly never-ending supply of men, all of whom Lauren opted to marry in some alternate reality. What unfolds is a really fascinating and also really funny look at finding oneself under circumstances that are equally as absurd as they are mundane. Welcome, Holly. And thanks so much for being here today.

Holly Gramazio: Thanks so much for having me.

HH: It's a pleasure. So, the premise of your novel really does explore such a fun and wacky concept. I'm curious, where did the idea for The Husbands come from?

HG: I think it came from a few different places, and one is pretty obviously just online dating. My own online dating days are slightly before the apps, so I never got to swipe on my own behalf. But just sitting with friends while they try to write their profiles and scan through this seemingly endless carousel of potential people to chat with and the sense of exhaustion they start to feel about that. The way people have handed me their phone and said, "Oh, you pick a few for me," just because it's become so overwhelming. That's definitely played into it a little bit.

And another is, I think, my own difficulty with making decisions, which is something I've always been really, really bad at. My mum has this story of when I was little and she would take me to the ice cream shop and say, “Pick a type of ice cream,” and 10 minutes later she would take me from the ice cream shop sobbing because I had been absolutely incapable of choosing between lemon and raspberry and ended up with no ice cream at all, because I just could not make up my mind.

And the final one, which is a slightly odd one, is I think partly just that I'm an Australian, but I live in England and have done for 15 years. And in Australia we don't really have attics because partly everything's a bit more spread out, so there's not quite the same pressure to optimize every possible spot of space, and partly just because it would get really hot and full of spiders up there. So why would you put anything up there? And so then I moved to this country where everyone has an attic. This thing that I only really encountered in children's books where maybe something magical is going on. And then people would say things like, "Oh, I've not been up there in a year and a half. I'm not really sure what's up there anymore." And just the very, very oddest thing, this whole room in your house that you don't really think about and don't know what's going on there.

HH: I'm so glad you mentioned online dating, because I can attest I'm at the point in my life, too, where I have my friends just swiping for me because I don't think that I can be making those decisions for myself at all at this point, because it's just not going well. So, I really relate to that. And I think that's also what really made me fall in love with your novel, especially listening to Miranda Raison narrate, is it sounds like you're listening in on a friend the whole time and it just feels like sort of fun girl talk, but not in any diminutive type of way. But it's just very cathartic to hang out with your friends. I'm curious, what were you looking for in a performer to bring Lauren's inner dialogue to life?

HG: I think I was really keen on someone who can manage the sometimes quite unwieldy sentences when Lauren's thoughts run out a little bit, out of control. Sometimes everything can get a little bit lengthy and weird at times with the sentence structures, but still also keep in mind the comedy of it. Like, there's a lot of jokes. Sometimes it sort of goes past quite quickly, and someone who can judge how to have the joke present in the reading but not land on it so heavily that it distracts from the forward flow of the sentence, if that makes sense.

And also there's a lot of husbands in this book and they come from a lot of different places. So, there are a fair few accents that have to be at least sort of touched upon, including a quite major Australian character, which obviously as an Australian, I have a particular ear for that. And most people are not good at an Australian accent. That might be true for all accents and it's just that my ear isn't attuned to it, but almost every time I hear someone doing an Australian accent, even in a film or a highly professional polished television series, it's a little bit like, "Oh, that's ... Okay. Okay, well, let's just try and ignore that." And so having someone who could manage the different accents of the husbands in a way that felt smooth and within the flow of it was really important to me.

HH: That makes total sense to me. I'm from Boston, so I relate. Hearing Boston accents that aren't done well is excruciating.

HG: Yeah. It's those places where everyone thinks they can do the accent because there's two or three really obvious things about it, but there's also 400 nonobvious things about it that no one picks up on.

HH: Right. Just going back to the idea of how well the humor lands, I love the way that you're able to identify what's absurd about very mundane life. I think that's such a large part in dating as well, because it's just like you look at a guy and you think he should be normal, and you're like, "What's the catch? There's something off about it." But in general, I just wanted to say that I think your novel does a really great job of making a fresh spin on parallel universes and just sort of finding those realities that live right next to other realities. Prior to writing fiction, you have a strong background in game design, so I was curious if your background in game design influenced the world-building for the story at all?

HG: Oh, absolutely. In fact, I originally, maybe six or seven years ago, tried to make this as a little interactive fiction game. I had the idea sort of floating around in my head and thought this might be a fun thing, just spent maybe a day or a day and a half trying to do a little prototype of how it would work, and it didn't really feel good. And I set it aside and didn't really think about it again for ages and ages and ages. But even once I came to it as a straightforward narrative where you read all of the words in order—which as a games writer is very exciting for me, what order people are going to be coming to things in. Whereas in games, often you write these very different sections and people's play will piece them together in different orders, and you have to be constantly thinking, “Where will they be? What's going on?” So, it was just very refreshing to write something where I'm like, “Most readers will start at the beginning and then continue to read in a broadly linear fashion.”

"I originally, maybe six or seven years ago, tried to make this as a little interactive fiction game."

But even when I did come to writing in that mode, I think there was a lot of game design thinking in it. The thing I come back to about that is that in games, it feels really good when a game responds to you, when you try to do something in a game and the game acknowledges that. When you think, "Oh, what happens if I jump up on this wall? Or what happens if I carry that over there?" And something happens. The world is set up in a way where the thing that you've tried on an off-chance has a result. That feels great as a player. And when I'm designing games, I often think about that, how we can make the player seem felt or acknowledged.

And with structuring The Husbands, I thought a lot about what people would be wondering about at different times, what people would be thinking. "Oh, why doesn't she try this? Why doesn't she try that?" And trying to time things so that sometimes Lauren would be having those thoughts at about the same time. And you would think as a reader, "Oh, what if she tried this?" And then Lauren thinks, "Oh, I should try this," and then she does it. So sometimes Lauren's a little bit ahead of you, sometimes she's a little bit behind. But there's this sense of almost responsiveness to it and of Lauren embodying the exploration through the concept and the world that I was hoping readers would be doing in their heads as they read.

HH: I definitely was. I found it so fun to listen to and I love how she has to really figure out this algorithm, which I think is just not how most of us approach the everyday, is thinking of it in this gamified way. Or maybe I particularly don't, which is why I was so interested in your perspective. Maybe at this point I'm asking for a bit of dating advice, but not directly, but how would you compare dating to playing a game?

HG: Oh, interesting. I think it depends on the game, but I think one big difference is that with dating, you often feel a bit like it's a game or a set of chores that you're going through, sort of process that you have to do where you may or may not win in some way, but the stakes are genuinely there. You care about it because you probably want to find someone that you want to date. If you didn't, you wouldn't be going through this whole like swiping and messaging or chatting in bars or going to speed dating nights or whatever else it might be. The stakes are really there and there's this sort of thrum of the thing that you really want to get out of it, which both drives you to continue. It also makes it kind of awful because if it doesn't work out, you feel bad, right?

Whereas with games, you don't have that intrinsic sort of motivation there. That reason that you want to do it, you have to provide that within the world of the game, give people their rewards and their motivation, because they're not going to get a real thing in the world out of it if they're good at it. But also, it usually doesn't feel bad in the same way because the stakes are lower, because the things that you care about in the game don't spill out into your normal life.

HH: What I think is so interesting about Lauren is that, in a way, her stakes are already there, or she's already sort of received what most people are going on dates to find, because she's already married to all of these men. She knows that they would be compatible in some lifetime. She doesn't necessarily have to convince herself, or maybe she does go through sort of periods where she is convincing herself that there is a compatibility. But I think deep in her heart, she sort of knows, "In some lifetime this is a decision that I committed to and was happy with."

So that's where I really love where The Husbands also just completely disembarks from exploring the spark of romance, where Lauren is now trying to ponder every other shift in her life that these husbands bring, from changes in her class status to sometimes her physical body would change if she was married to a man who just happened to be into fitness and it rubbed off a little bit, which I found so interesting. Especially with that alternate reality idea of just waking up and feeling like you're in a slightly different body, but it's still always yours. Were you ever surprised to find your novel taking you in any unexpected directions as you did meditate on those aspects of the self that can change in relation to others?

HG: I don't think there was anything really unexpected about it, but that's partly because of the way I set about writing it, which I think is also probably something that's a little bit informed by my background in games. I didn't really set out with a plan and then write it all for the plan, but I also didn't really just start at the beginning and then see where it went, which is a sort of writing that you hear people talking about, things taking them by surprise. They didn't expect to go in this direction or that direction, but it did.

Instead, I just wrote a bunch of quite disconnected scenes and husbands and thoughts and possibilities. I ended up with about 50,000 more words than I needed. Just this huge massive of possibilities, which obviously suits the book topic as well, right? That it's about navigating massive possibilities. But it was very much paralleled in the writing process, where when I got to the end of this first draft, let's call it, it didn't have a real start, it didn't have an ending. It had about eight endings. It had a bunch of husbands that were just there because I'd found them fun to write, and I'd spent more time hanging out with them than I needed to. It had lists of 5,000 words, of paragraph-long husbands, and it was almost like I had made myself this huge lump of clay and then I had to dig into it and shape it and choose which bits to throw away and kind of use to shape the book out of rather than embarking on an adventure and finding out what happens.

HH: I was particularly interested in the one husband who has his own magical wardrobe. I thought that he was a really cool example of how dating can be different for both men and women, whereas he's able to go to different realities but Lauren is sort of always stuck in her London flat. So, I wanted to know, how does your novel illuminate the differences in what's at stake in dating for both men and women?

HG: Yeah, he started off with the wardrobe. He's gone through a lot of different types of storage container, as it were, in the same way that Lauren's attic is disgorging husbands into her life. He's stepping out of a lot of different attics and wardrobes and cupboards and pantries and whatever it might be, into different versions of his life.

For me, I think it's less about what is necessarily true of men and women and more about the specific aspects of their personalities that they struggle with. And perhaps Lauren's are more common amongst women and perhaps Bohai's are more common amongst men. But essentially her big issue with decision-making is not being able to make that decision, feeling torn between a bunch of different possibilities. Not wanting to close off some options, not wanting to make that step of going, "This is the thing that I'm doing now," and finding that very difficult.

"I don't think that anything is meant to be. I think that for most people, under most circumstances, there are a bunch of different choices that you can make, and some of them will end up better and some of them will end up worse."

Whereas for him, his sort of fundamental issue with decisions is being extremely resistant to the influence of others, only really wanting decisions that he feels have come from within himself and that he feels fully empowered in making, if that makes sense. And these are both ways that I'm quite bad at making decisions. I both hate to commit to a thing—we have that ice cream story earlier—but also I kind of hate it when other people make a decision for me. I was going through my bookshelves earlier and I got to the end of it, I realized that almost every book that I'd taken out was a book that someone had given me. It didn't add to the sentimental value of it. I didn't think, "Oh, how lovely this person thought about me and chose this book and brought it to my birthday party. That's so nice." I was just like, "Oh, no, I didn't get to choose that. I don't want that taking up precious space on my shelves" [laughs].

These are both very, very silly traits, but sometimes it'd be really irritatingly difficult for me to make decisions or to do a thing that I need to do. And I think I wanted the characters to articulate those different ways of finding it hard.

HH: It's almost as if they have to protect their core self in this world where there's just all of this rapid change. Do you think there's such a thing as your core self, unchangeable by others and completely your own?

HG: I think there are things about all of us that are more or less likely to be the case in different circumstances, for sure. I think there are also things that are surprisingly malleable based on circumstances. I think not even about other versions of myself in different worlds, but even me at different ages. I remember that before 30 I found parties really stressful. I didn't really like going to pubs, I didn't like going to parties. I just found them deeply unpleasant. And now I love a pub or a party and I don't really remember what it felt like to hate them or why I did or what was going on there. I just remember that that felt like a really intrinsic thing to me, and that I would've been kind of aghast to know that in 10 years I would be different. So, I think our sense of what is core to ourself is not always justified.

I have ADHD, for example, and because I live in a world where I have a phone and a bunch of tabs open and a load of books on the shelves and so on, I spent a lot of time being distracted. If I lived in a world where I had none of those things and what I had was a vegetable garden to tend, then maybe that wouldn't manifest in the same way, but it would still be a true thing about how my brain worked. It would just be that the circumstances were different around it.

HH: I think having phones in front of us really does affect the way that we have to see the world through a set of algorithms. I love that you said that your story was somewhat inspired by the dating world nowadays. Again, just swiping yes and no on apps with this seemingly endless amount of choices and no real reason to settle, I feel like is an aspect of your book that will really resonate with a lot of folks. I know that currently there's sort of a trend in the dating sphere where people are so disillusioned with these algorithms that they're turning to speed dating because it gives you a slightly less amount of choices but more of a human connection, which something about the image of you in the vegetable garden just feels equally as human. Do you feel that Lauren would prefer speed dating to dating apps?

HG: Well, she does try speed dating when she is—slightly spoilers—during a time when she's single and doesn't really take to that very much either. Honestly, I think the magic attic suits her pretty well in some ways, but I think she would definitely struggle with the actual apps. I think they're a very strange and difficult way of thinking about people. The sense of infinity there is so overwhelming. And it's the same sense of infinity as when you go to the supermarket and there are 200 different types of jam and you're like, "I don't know what, maybe I, maybe I don't need jam. I don't know." But obviously with slightly higher stakes. But if you think about people living in little towns of 2,000 people, lots of people still found someone to date and marry and be reasonably happy with under that much more constrained set of choices. So, I do think in a way the sort of infinitude of it brings a different type of challenge.

HH: Yeah. I love how you were speaking, too, before about your own sort of personal growth. Looking back on "I used to not love parties and now I do," and I'm sort of curious—and I have a feeling this might be a question that for someone who struggles with decisions might be difficult to answer—but I'm sort of curious if you believe that anything is ever meant to be, and if your answer to that question specifically changed as a result of writing the novel?

HG: I don't think that anything is meant to be. I think that for most people, under most circumstances, there are a bunch of different choices that you can make, and some of them will end up better and some of them will end up worse. But I don't think there's one choice that is the absolute correct choice. If you can just figure out what it is, then everything would fall into place that you just need to know what the correct thing is. I don't think that's true.

HH: Well, I find that very comforting to remember. I found this novel to be particularly cathartic and just exactly sort of the listen that I needed to hear right now. My long-term relationship ended recently. And then just ever since then, my life has been like a series of rapid change where it almost felt absurd. So, I think I've grappled a lot with the idea of all of this has to have happened for some reason, and I have to find some way to make sense of it, even though I think at a point it's just a nonsensical coincidence of events.

But really, The Husbands was the novel that helped me come to terms with just rapid change and the ability that I can adjust to these changing circumstances and even make some light of it. Which again, I think your novel is great with the humor because I think there's no way to go through difficult situations without laughing at it. But at the same time, I really connected to this piece, but it has so many interesting fantasy elements of time travel and swoon-worthy romantic moments, and just a really, really rich dissection of Lauren's character itself. So, I really feel like this novel has something for everyone and I've been recommending it to everyone who I know because I just feel like everyone needs to listen to it.

HG: Oh, thank you. I appreciate it.

HH: You're very welcome. But I'm curious, who do you think should listen to your novel?

HG: Yes, good question. Ooh. I think for me, the process of writing it was partly a process of trying to convince myself to be better at making decisions, at freeing myself from that idea that there is one perfect decision to make and that I should always put in the amount of time to make that and do a color-coded spreadsheet with 90 different tabs that will help me to figure out what is the best of all of the options. Where should I go for lunch through to who should I marry, right? So, I think anyone else who struggles with that sense of wanting to find the optimum decision, I hope would enjoy The Husbands, would enjoy the light it makes of that edge and the way it talks about the impossibility of that.

HH: Speaking of decision-making and planning, do you have any ideas in store for your second novel now that you've published your debut, which congratulations.

HG: Thank you. Thank you. I do, but I talked earlier about how with The Husbands, I ended up writing a huge amount of unnecessary words and having this huge big lump and then trying to shape the book out of it. I was really hoping that for my second book that wouldn't be how it worked, that I would choose what it was about, have a vague sense of where it goes, maybe even choose the ending in advance. Because honestly, I spent a lot of time stomping irritably around the house trying to figure out what the end of The Husbands was. And I had this very excited vision of what I might be like with book two, where I would know that from the start, know where I was heading.

"I think anyone else who struggles with that sense of wanting to find the optimum decision, I hope would enjoy The Husbands, would enjoy the light it makes of that edge and the way it talks about the impossibility of that."

I don't think I would ever be an intense planner who knows every scene, because for me, discovering and spending time with the characters is part of the joy of writing, so there'd always be some mysteries. But now that I started on book two, it turns out, nope, I am exactly the person that I was with book one. I am writing a bunch of largely disconnected scenes, extremely out of order. Whenever I think of a funny thing that could happen, I go off into a corner and I write that scene and don’t know how it might or might not connect to everything else.

So, it's very difficult to talk about. It's very difficult to figure out the sentence-long “this is a story of what happens” or even “this is what it's about” because it's just this strange lump of accumulating jokes and characters and incidents. But I will say it's a little bit about humans’ relationship with animals and pets and how we feel at seeing animals in the world. And it's a little bit about embodiment and pleasure.

HH: That sounds very up my alley. I'm really looking forward to that one. And one more question as well that I just have to ask. I think I heard you mention in a separate interview recently that you yourself are married.

HG: I am, yes.

HH: I'm picturing you stomping around the house thinking about this story that is so much about just trading in husbands for other ones. And I have to ask, has your husband himself had the chance of reading any of this or listen to it?

HG: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, once I got to the stage where I was trying to sort of pull it all together into coherent chapters, which happened quite fast because I'd written everything, it was just a matter of figuring out how it fit together. Every night or every second night, I would read him out a chapter of where I'd got to and what was going on, starting at the beginning and through to the end. So, he was the first person to hear the whole thing.

HH: That's lovely. He never took it too personally, I hope, that you might try to send him up to change a light bulb or anything?

HG: No, thankfully we don't have an attic, so it was all right.

HH: Right, okay, then that saves the day. That's perfect [laughs]. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat about The Husbands today, Holly.

HG: Thank you so much for having me. I've really enjoyed the chat.

HH: As did I. And listeners, you can get The Husbands by Holly Gramazio on Audible now.