Book Club Meets: Soulmates, swiping culture, and difficult decisions, with Holly Gramazio

0:00What's wrong with you? The man says, keys clutched in his hand. Welcome to the Happy Place Book Club with me, Fern Cotton. He stole her spare keys. Today, The Husbands by Holly Gramazzo. Maybe he logged into her computer and changed her phone remotely and that's why his picture's on her lock screen. Is that possible? Fuck's sake, he says. Go and sit down, please. He turns off the light on the stairs and switches on the landing light instead. The big square landing with all the rooms leading off it. the big grey landing she passes through a dozen times a day, which is somehow blue. And it has a rug.

0:41It never had a rug before. Why is there a rug? She can't stop to look. The man's walking towards her. She backs across the rug, which feels thick and soft, even through her shoes, towards the door to the living room. It's right above Toby and Mariam's bedroom. If she screams, she thinks they'll hear. but even in the dark, the room doesn't seem right. She feels for the switch. Click. Light falls on more strange objects. The sofa is dark brown and surely when she left this morning it was green. The clock on the wall has Roman numerals instead of normal numbers and it turns out Roman numerals are difficult to read.

1:23Seven? Fifteen? Eleven? She has to squint to stop them from blurring. Her old vase on the shelf has tulips in it. Her wonky lino print of an owl is gone. The books are wrong or in the wrong place. The curtains have been replaced with shutters. Most of the pictures are wrong and one of them, one of them is very wrong. One of them is of a wedding featuring, and she steps up to it, nose almost to the glass. Her. And the man. The man who has entered the living room behind her. The husband.

2:04So you wait ages for the one. Then 203 come along at once. What the hell? It's Holly Gramazzo's novel The Husbands. Lauren finds a strange man in her flat who claims to be her husband. All the evidence, from photos to electricity bills, suggests he's right. Lauren slowly realises that her attic is creating an endless supply of husbands for her. There's the one who pretends to play music on her toes, the one who's way too hot, there must be a catch, and the one who can calm her unruly thoughts with a single touch. But when you can change husbands as easily as changing a lightbulb, how do you know which one is the right one?

2:47Oh man, it's such a fun concept. And Holly joined me live on stage at the Happy Place Festival in Tatton Park, just last weekend to chat about how the people around us influence our personalities, the constant swiping culture of dating apps, and how Holly's career in game design has influenced how she writes. The market's uncertain. Revenue's tied and hiring on hold. That's why results-driven companies are using Upwork to keep work moving. Go to Upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts. Just the right expert right when you need them.

3:29Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Post a job for free and get started today. Hi, this is Knox from the Popcast with Knox and Jamie. And maybe like us at the Popcast, you also know people who have been smokers or vapers. And Zen is the one product it seems like everyone is talking about. because there are many good reasons to make a change to Zen nicotine pouches. Reasons like Zen nicotine pouches are still America's number one choice for smoke-free, hands-free nicotine satisfaction. And you can choose between 10 varieties, each variety available in either 3 or 6 milligrams.

4:05Check out zen.com slash find to find Zen at a store near you. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. This episode is brought to you by Almond Joy. With its perfect blend of real creamy coconut, rich chocolatey taste, and a satisfying almond crunch, Almond Joy is the taste that simply takes you away. Blissful tropical flavors will have you feeling sunny vibes and ocean breezes in every bite. Almond Joy is the ticket to a sweet, indulgent, laid-back escape. One you'll want to return to again and again. Grab the creamy coconut and chocolatey crunch of Almond Joy today and taste paradise.

4:48OK, here we go. This is the show.

5:14Hey, Holly. Welcome, welcome. Take a seat. This is our lovely book club audience. This is so nice. Hello, everyone. So, Holly, we have so enjoyed reading The Husbands, which you can see right here for our book club pick of August. It's such a brilliant, unique idea. For anyone who hasn't read it, without giving too much away, what can you tell us about The Husbands? I think I can probably do the basic set-up without any spoilers. The Husbands is about a woman named Lauren, who's in her early 30s and she gets home quite late one night after her best friend's hen party sort of 3am she's not her best self necessarily and when she gets back she finds that her husband has been waiting up for her which is extremely confusing to her because when she left to go out she was definitely single but it is 3am she has been out all day essentially she just barricades herself in the living room, her phone's out of battery, decides she'll sleep it off and deal with it in the morning, like chair up against the door or everything else.

6:22But then in the morning when she goes to confront this quite nice man and say, what's going on here? He's like, oh, just a second, I just need to change a light bulb in the attic, climbs up. And then when he climbs down, he's a totally different man. And the flats change a little bit as well. With the first guy, just before her phone went out of battery, she saw that his face was the lock screen on her phone. There was a wedding photo up on the wall. And now that's gone. Now the walls are a different colour. She eventually figures out that essentially her attic is creating an infinite supply of husbands.

6:57And any time one husband goes up, a totally different man comes down. I mean, some of you are going, like the sound of that, into that idea quite a lot. can I swap him? Will he know? Will he find out? It's a really, really cracking idea. And, you know, before I'd even read the book, knowing the theme, I thought, what a cracking idea. What came first for you in terms of the themes for the book? Was it a desire to explore the notion of marriage? Or was it the unique idea that you could have husbands coming out of a loft? I think I've always been interested in the idea of exploring the range of relationships that a person might plausibly find themselves in without having to go through all of the narrative overhead of you meet a new person, you go on some dates, and just like plunging someone into the middle of a relationship and seeing how that goes.

7:58Obviously, I don't have a magic attic, but that is slightly based on my own dating history, which is just a series of long-term relationships. Whenever I'd break up with someone, I would cry for two weeks and then go, great, I'm going to be a glamorous single woman. I will concentrate on my career. I will go on holiday on my own. I will drink cocktails in a bar while I'm reading a book. It's going to be so incredible. And then it's like six weeks later, a little bell goes off. And whoever I'm standing next to, the universe goes, you two live together now. so with that history i definitely was interested in that narratively but it really started to hang together as a story when i thought of the attic when i was like oh i'm australian i've been here a long time so people mostly don't pick up on it but in australia we basically don't have attics what um yeah i i'm sure there are attics in australia somewhere where do you put all of The shed you don't need in your life.

8:59The shed. Oh, right. Cool. Yeah. As long as there's a place. No, no. We have sheds. We have so many sheds. Whenever an Australian retires, it comes upon us at some point the need to build a shed. Right. And sometimes several sheds. My mum has a shed inside a shed. Big shed for random nonsense. Little shed for crafting nonsense. Oh, cool. I like your mum. Yeah, she's great. Yeah. but sheds rather than attics because you know it gets very hot in the attic it's full of spiders yeah you don't even have a floor you can walk on or anything there's just this void that no one ever thinks of unless a possum dies in that and then i moved to england and suddenly a bunch of people have these attics that that for me are like magical things you get in kids books like maybe there's a a doorway to another world in them they're not real things that people put chairs up into yeah I mean do you know what now we're talking about attics they are so weird aren't they like I never ever think about ours but the stuff that is up there I could do a runner out of this tent now thinking about it it's been on my list for well the last 10 years since I moved in and put so much crap up there that I didn't need in my old house and I still haven't gone through it and I keep threatening to have a massive clear out I'm going to do a car boot sale I'm going to send all this stuff.

10:21And I've got a cot up there. My kids are 9, 11, 19 and 22. And I've got a cot. What am I doing? They are very strange places. What I'm so intrigued about, and I'm intrigued about this notion of ideas landing in someone's head, whether it's an author, a singer-songwriter. I've obviously had the great privilege of interviewing so many musicians over the years. It's like, where did that song come from? And I feel the same about books. When or where or how did that attic idea land in your head? Because it's a really strange idea. Possibly nobody else has ever had that idea, which is quite a rare thing to say because most ideas are now regurgitated, recycled.

11:09But you've had this unique idea and I'm so intrigued as to when that landed in your head and how, if it had been maybe percolating for some time. well like i say i do find attics extremely strange and and interesting and i think the first time i ever went into a proper attic i was 30 and i was visiting uh a work colleague's dad uh we had some work to do in the midlands and so we'd driven up the night before and he was like oh we can stay at my parents house great and then at about midnight he's like would you like to see the attic what a strange question what a chat up line do you want to see my attic i was like i i guess that's not an invitation i've ever had before so yeah why not and it turned out that he had an attic absolutely filled with model trains oh i know the guy yeah yeah yeah and also he'd left the radio on and i was climbing up at like i say midnight on the dot so i climbed up this ladder emerged into the middle of a huge loop of model trains as the national anthem started playing on the radio as it does at midnight every night just going like oh interesting this is what attics are like so that definitely sort of fed into the sense of attics as a magical place yeah and then when I was um beginning to write it and sort of mess around with the idea of where did the husband's come from I'd I'd decide to set it in in my friend's flat essentially and was just thinking about my character being in this flat and then kind of just looked up and saw the attic hatch and thought oh yeah yeah that's where they come from I love it I love it I must go into my attic when I get home and just see what's up there any men who knows um I'm I really loved reading about how Lauren found herself in completely different scenarios each time.

13:09So as you have touched on, her apartment or house would look completely different depending on who the husband was. Sometimes she was in sort of affluent mansions in the countryside, at other times flats that were a bit haphazard. Also her style sort of changed, the clothing she was wearing, the hobbies that she found herself doing with her husband, whether it was going out cycling or whatever she might be doing. And I kept thinking about that so much as I was reading it and thinking about people that I've dated in the past and how I could be such a different version of myself today. And I don't think I'd ever really given that enough thought, like how much my husband, who I've been with for the last nearly 14 years, how much has our partnership influenced who I am, how I dress, what our home looks like.

13:55And actually, it's probably much more than I would care to believe. So I think I always like to think, I know what I like, I'm very single-minded, but actually looking over the years and how much I've changed as a person and even, I guess, my personality and my likes and dislikes, they are absolutely connected to our partnership and who he is as a person. That's such an interesting thing to look into. Yeah, I think it's absolutely not that, you know, we would all be radically different people if we had different friends or a different partner or whatever it might be. But of course, the people that we spend most of our time with influence the things that we notice about the world, the hobbies we try out, the books we read and then have knock on effects from that.

14:38I think, yeah, relatively small nudges can end up in radically different versions of your life. It's also really interesting because you've got Lauren landing in the middle of a marriage. So you sort of miss out that lovely, amazing marriage can be lovely forever, obviously. but um the first bit where it's all so exciting and you're meeting someone it's all lovely and actually a lot of the time lauren finds herself in relationships where she's going oh ick i don't like that about him or that's a bit odd and actually you that that's where all of us can end up in a place where the things that you loved about someone come really great on you really piss you off and obviously vice versa you're probably doing the same for my husband in many ways many of my endearing qualities at the start really great on him now um but I found that so interesting as well that you then sort of start to forget about why you were compatible in the first place and I I really liked the idea of exploring that and and how people do end up sort of staying in marriages and relationships when they've actually lost sight of why they're in it did that feel quite an important thing to look at I think so I think so I think um um I think for me there's a couple of things going on there and one of them is that if you just suddenly found yourself in in the middle of a relationship without all of the the early stuff maybe you wouldn't be able to see what had brought you there and and that could be quite confusing or confronting or make you think about what in you caused you to decide or maybe just bit by bit that this is where you wanted to to end up but it also sort of gives you um this kind of external perspective to go like huh this is this is a type of person I could be and a type of life I could have and a type of partner I could be with what do I think about that yeah at least at the start I would say she doesn't have an uncomplicatedly great time of that I think there's definitely points where she's not really able to have the distance to look at the people she ends up with that is just so exhausted by this carousel of faces.

16:46Yeah, I mean, some she's really keen to get rid of quite instantly. Get in that loft. Yeah, often for very, very silly reasons. But, you know, if there's an infinite attic, why not? Yeah, absolutely. Just send the, let's see who's next. Come on, keep them going. Let's have a look. Yeah, that aspect of it is slightly inspired by sitting with friends while they do online dating and helping them out with that and having them, you know, I don't know if anyone has had, has thrusted a friend their phone and said can you swipe for me just because of this feeling that you ought to be going through this endless carousel of faces and going like yes yes no but also it's this chore that you don't want to actually do I have swiped for about five separate friends yeah fun it is fun but it's clearly exhausting too I get it I mean I I missed all that dating up stuff So I'm completely intrigued by it.

17:39And one of my friends, there's seven of us who all grew up together. We're all in relationships. But our friend who lives in New York, I think New York's quite an unforgiving place to meet someone. The dating sort of whole landscape is completely different. And online dating is huge, but it's got a whole different set of rules. So when she comes back to the UK, we force her to go on apps. And wherever we are, we'll meet in different places. We're like, let's see who's in the local area. And all of us married lot are like, this is so fun. just swiping away I find it it's it's so intriguing I'm wondering what your personal beliefs are as to whether you think there are infinite options for all of us out there in terms of partners or do you believe in the one the soulmate I don't think necessarily infinite options but I do think but we kind of shift a little bit to get into the the life that we've chosen or ended up with right so so I don't think me now could necessarily be parachuted happily into 200 different versions of my life but I do think that there's more than one potential match for everyone there's more than one potential way to to be happy and to to be yourself and it's not even just partners but things like what university course will you enroll in what job will you apply for what flat will you live in all of these things and their knock-on effects it's not that there's there's one specific one that you have to to hone in on and in fact i think that sense that there is a one best decision can be quite overwhelming and stifling it makes it very difficult to try things out because you feel like you have to keep going until you find the uncomplicatedly single best decision.

19:36And that's part of why the apps are so exhausting as well, right? You feel like there should be someone perfect on there where there aren't any things that are not exactly what you want. You want something so convincing that you see it and immediately go, yes, that is correct. And I think there are a lot of different ways of things being approximately correct. I agree and I think it's really liberating to land on that and also I think it gives us all the freedom and I'm not just talking about relationships here I think it's really important to sort of look at it in the context like you say of looking at what you're going to study or what job you might apply for or where you live in the country or the world and all these decisions that you know that there is room for change there is potential for us to to make decisions that that we're not even expecting saying that I do still find that ripple effect thought like terrifying and overwhelming that every decision we make has this ripple effect so almost everything in my current life can be tracked back this is horrifying this is horrifying to me when I think about it can be tracked back to a misfiled book in a second-hand bookshop in like 1999.

20:48I went to a second-hand bookshop. I was looking for a translation of the Latin poet Catullus because that is the exact sort of obnoxious teenager I was. I found in the foreign poetry section, a foreign language poetry section, I found Miss Fylde a collection of essays on games and science, basically. And I was like, oh, that looks like fun. I'll get that. Read that. it talked about a game that sounded fun and then I found a place online to play that game with some people who became my friends who then introduced me to the friends that I lived with when I moved to London and the people that I did my first before I wrote a book I was a game designer the people that I did my first games work with and then most of my friends and my husband all just traced back to this book that was on the wrong shelf I think most people there's something like that in their lives but maybe it's not quite so uh blatantly like narrative right it's not as horrifyingly present as someone put this book on the wrong shelf and now I'm on this stage talking about this book I wrote I mean it makes my brain is exploding no I like I'm just as you were saying that I was spoiling back in time like what what was it what was the moment and actually one thing that just sprang to mind is my late granddad Phil who was a brilliant character he was like everyone on Northwood Hills High Street knew Phil because he's so bloody loud and always out chatting to everyone on the street he ran a florist and my mum when I was 12 because this is what happened back in the early 90s said you need to go and get a job oh all right so I had to go and work for my granddad Phil on a Saturday in the florist like clean and I thought okay I'll get to make some nice bouquets I was 12 I was cleaning awful pots that stank of egg in the back room and I hated it so much I mean I love my granddad but I was like this is so boring and my mum said well if you're not going to do that you need to do something on a Saturday and then there was like an advert in the local paper to start going to this dance and drama school and I thought well anything to get me out of working with my granddad Phil and cleaning out eggy pots so I started and that was I guess the it's the sort of nucleus of everything else that's happened for me in my career and how I started going to auditions.

23:04And it's all thanks to the eggy pots. There's always a route back. The market's uncertain. Revenue's tied and hiring on hold. That's why results-driven companies are using Upwork to keep work moving. Go to Upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts. Just the right expert right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Post a job for free and get started today. Hi, this is Knox from the Popcast with Knox and Jamie. And maybe like us at the Popcast, you also know people who have been smokers or vapers.

23:48And Zen is the one product it seems like everyone is talking about. Because there are many good reasons to make a change to Zen nicotine pouches. Reasons like Zen nicotine pouches are still America's number one choice for smoke-free, hands-free nicotine satisfaction. And you can choose between 10 varieties, each variety available in either 3 or 6 milligrams. Check out zen.com slash find to find Zen at a store near you. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

24:18I'm really intrigued about your career in game design. because I'm sure that it has influenced how you write to a degree or maybe it's informed how you write entirely I know that rules are quite an important thing to you obviously they have to be in game design that's the whole point that there's rules and there's a process to work through how much of that did you apply to writing oh I definitely think there's some of that in here I think with any book where you have sort of a big magical thing and you've got this was scripted as well of course you're this thing at the heart of it you do kind of have to be quite clear about what the rules are right you don't necessarily need to explain them to readers you don't necessarily need to to have a reason for them but you need to to have that that sense of consistency deep within yourself so that people can can accept the the core fiction of it the core silly idea and buy into that and go on the story with you so i think that was that was super important for me and and the other thing that I think was important from games is um so in games design there's a thing called play testing which is when you give people the game in a fairly early stage often and you watch them play it and just moment to moment you get this this sense of what's working and what isn't you can you can sit nearby or even you can get them to screen record it and then you watch the screen back later so you're not there looming over their shoulder and because a game is something that you have to enact in order to to play it right you can see when people are confused when they make a mistake when they go off in the wrong direction when you can when they get pleased by a thing you can tell what it is that they're doing and you don't have that with books if you give people a draft of your book and they read it and they laugh and you go what bit was that what was that tell me which sentence he liked it turns out that's really not yeah you know helpful to the reading experience quite creepy just to sit there watching someone reading a book too turns out what's going on enjoying it yeah tell me so I thought about how to get some of that playtesting sort of experience because I'm so dependent on it as a designer I didn't want to lose it as a writer and realized that my husband is totally incapable of lying oh no he his face just constantly broadcasts what he's thinking at any point in incredible detail.

26:50If I'm cooking something and I put an ingredient in that he's not sure about, I can see him think, oh, I'm not sure about that. But also Holly's better at cooking than me. Probably it's fine. Also, it's too late. I won't say anything. He did. He just did it with your face. so I read it all aloud to him a chapter a night and get that really really clear reading um immediately back of what's working what isn't when something's going on too long when a joke lands like he cannot uh dissimulate about that that's handy it is so if you know um for book two I recommend finding a friend who cannot lie at all oh maybe okay he sounds like the perfect guy.

27:38Let's talk about other books because obviously you've had this amazing success with the husbands. You've had a crazy busy summer promoting it, talking about it, getting exceptional feedback. What is next? Oh, I'm in the very early stages of book two and it's still kind of vague and I can't say too much about it, but it does involve zookeepers. So I'm getting to do a lot of reading about about animals and about the history of zoos and going to the zoo and hanging out there and and making notes on what's going on around me and that's a great way to to spend a day going to the zoo like listening in on conversations making little notes and going I'm working yeah I love it is there a fantastical element to the book it doesn't have a sort of magical thing of the husbands but it is a bit weird like the husbands I love that and what's your process because I'm sure you know I've been walking around the festival all weekend and likewise in Chiswick and we've been doing this festival now for the last five years I meet so many people who say I've got a book in me I want to start I want to do it which I always heartily encourage I think even if you just do it for yourself as a hobby and it becomes something that you know for me writing is pure escapism it's so worth doing it and giving it a go and and working through that it's a long laborious process but a really beautiful one what is your process how do you like to write where do you like to write oh gosh okay so for the first draft of the husbands I I basically did an hour um in the mornings first thing that would go to the cafe around the corner and sit there for an hour.

29:20I didn't have the Wi-Fi code there, so that was helpful. And just do maybe 800 words, 1 ,000 words. And I wouldn't necessarily write in order. Sometimes I would write a scene that I just had an idea for or I'd go back to something I'd been doing a week earlier or I would just spend a day thinking of a bunch of possible husbands. And so at the end of that, I had this huge, way too long, not at all in order just bundle of of pages and sentences and scenes and and then the the bigger work of of shaping that into something and figuring out what order things should happen in and rewriting it and redrafting it and smoothing it out that was a more concentrated piece of work so basically for me it seems like writing new stuff I can only really do for an hour or two a day um I wish I was one of those people who would just like go into like an attic or sit in the corner of the kitchen or whatever it is and get absorbed completely by something and then two months later they sort of emerge blinking into the world going here it is but sadly that's not me so I don't know if many people can do that I mean I feel I'm probably pretty similar in how I wrote scripted, certainly.

30:39But even with, I think maybe it was slightly different with my nonfiction because it can just be like a big word vomit of like thoughts and feelings. But I think with a story, you do want to keep it feeling fresh and sparky. And I think you've only got so much energy to put that, to get that out of you. And then you do need to go off. And actually what I've learned, certainly with the one fiction that I've written and I've started another one, is that the time that I'm not writing is equally important, if not more important. And it doesn't even have to be consciously related to what I'm writing.

31:15I'll probably pick up things today that will seep in and might sort of create an idea for later down the line or trying out new things, putting myself in different circumstances. Or sometimes just like when we were on holiday a couple of weeks ago, I had a day where, well, actually I never take my phone out if I don't need to so I'd left it in the rental that we had and I was just sat in a cafe my husband had taken both kids off to a shop so I had about 20 minutes on my own which was some sort of miracle and I didn't have a phone so I just sat and sort of people watched and it was so like when do we do that these days we never do it we think it looks weird for a start whereas we all used to do it just sit and ponder life and look around now we feel like we have to be on our phone so like no one talks to us and no one looks at us or we'll try and look busy and like rummage in our handbag but I just sort of sat back and and was looking and I got maybe two three tiny little ideas or nuggets that could be something do you I mean with this zoo book obviously you're purposefully putting yourself in the environment that's needed but with the husbands what what did that time look like where were you getting your inspiration for characters for for the narrative so um a little bit from from things that have happened to me in the past um a little bit from things that have happened to friends in the past a little bit just um you know if you ever have those impulses that you don't act on of course you do everyone does and and just sort of think through what if i was the sort of person who would act on that impulse and put some of that sort of sense of the different versions of yourself that there could be into into one of the characters yeah a lot of a lot of just like fragments like you say like a little thought here a little a little and i said almost nobody in in the book is based on a real person um but obviously you get characters from being in the world and being around real people and piecing little things together and like excavating things from inside yourself and like mulching them all up and like plus the same person going here it is it's so cathartic yeah actually I think I've found writing fiction more cathartic than non-fiction because you can almost sort of secretly explore things that are deep within you that no one will really understand or know what you're talking about but you know that you're working through it did you find it a cathartic book to write I'm not really a catharsis kind of person oh I am I've got a lot of shit to catharsisize yeah I don't know I don't know i think i guess i think of catharsis as sort of a big wump and and i tend to deal with things in a more like put them in little little rows and arrangements like here are these bad emotions that i will put out in rows and examine that kind of thing but maybe it's just a different different way of doing the same thing that sounds like a gaming thing maybe maybe i'm gonna put these things over here press save put these bits over here i like it if there was someone sat in this audience now and I'm you know I think everyone sat here now is a big book lover otherwise you probably wouldn't have bothered to turn up but if someone sat here now would really love to write fiction or non-fiction but get started with a book often the hardest thing is starting I'm so grateful that I've got really good friend Claire and she was the first person I told my idea to for scripted and I was quite nervous telling her because I was like this could sound absolutely ludicrous and she's going to end our friendship but let me see what she thinks about me writing a novel and she went just open your laptop and start tomorrow and I was like well it can't be that easy you can't just start and she's like yeah you just start writing it I think that's the hardest boundary to get over almost I think yeah I had kind of always assumed that I would eventually try to write a novel and I guess I also assumed that it would come upon me at some point it would be visited upon me the sense that I was ready to start trying to write a novel and yeah it it turns out that doesn't particularly happen you just have to sort of try it anyway and and see how it goes that you don't become a special sort of person that can write novels and get a little note going it's your turn now which which I was kind of emotionally waiting for yeah and yeah start and see how it goes and actually the the best advice that I ever got um I guess equivalent to your just just start is is about um not totally exhausting yourself and and using up your your stock of things that you want to say it's stop each day when you you aren't totally you haven't quite run out of stuff that you want to put down don't write to exhaustion of everything that you've got in your head don't like tip every drop of water out of that cup leave leave a little bit left so that you're excited to get back to it the next day and always leave a little bit so that so that there's something to draw you back and keep you going because it does take a long time it does take a long time did you find motivation hard or were you so excited by it that it just flowed um well I did a lot of the writing in um 2020 so there wasn't that much else on so that helped of the very first draft.

36:36I was in Australia at the time, which is why there were still cafes open to go to around the corner. But yeah, I think once I started and as long as I didn't totally wring myself dry, I was excited to get back to it and have fun with it and play out these scenarios and use little nuggets of ideas that I'd had. The editing was a little bit harder to motivate myself for especially with a with a first novel when you have to do all of this work without knowing if anyone will ever read it it takes so long and it's so speculative and if you're like me you read all of these blog posts that people have written going like most people who start a novel never finish them most novels that get written never find an agent most novels that find an agent never get get published and it's very easy to talk yourself into a oh I'm I'm wasting so much time on something that will never get get anywhere but also you're so not because it's so enjoyable I think if you love it like I when I was writing scripted I had no idea if it's going to be a pile of old rubbish or if anyone would ever want to publish it if anyone would ever read it but I kept going back to this makes me feel so happy when I open my laptop every morning I was the same as you I'd write in the morning for maybe an hour or two before I start work and I loved every minute of it it was just so fun so I keep going back to it even now because obviously you don't know how it's going to be received yeah whether people will like it whether it will do well or not whether it's going to have a long-lasting life so I keep having to go back to that no one can take away that sense of joy and I think we should probably approach most things like it whether it's a hobby or anything else in your life that if you enjoyed it the outside opinion should be as irrelevant as possible but it's a hard one to land on it is it is and then editing is honestly less fun probably like it's i i really love like like fiddling with sentences and smoothing things over and making sure that stuff lands well but you go through it so often and it's not uh exhilarating for me anyway it's not exhilarating in the same way i think for most people but by the time you get to editing and all of those tasks you've probably got a better you know you've finished it at least um if you if you do a rough draft and then go back to it you know that you've got this this whole thing and then you feel some responsibility to it i think you've you've made it and to your past self you've put all of this time into making this thing you kind of owe it to yourself to to try to make it as good as it can so you can kind of trick yourself into it you have the fun roller coaster of writing and then you're like okay i've got this burden that I've taken on and that I'm now obliged to follow through on and that can push you the rest of the way maybe.

39:26Yeah I agree because I think whenever you set out to edit it is like you're at the foot of a mountain and you're like this is going to be really long and really tough and it's sometimes laborious but you've got to do it otherwise what's the point but I think if anyone has got a book in them just do it for fun do it for you and don't think about what people are going to say about it, just do it and go for it because it's an absolute joy. Holly, I wish you all the luck with your next book. I'm already excited to read it and hear what all the animals in the zoo get up to. And it's just been wonderful talking to you today.

40:03And thank you for writing this excellent book, which is our Happy Place Book Club pick for August. Holly Gramazio, thank you so much.

40:13Oh, blimmin' heck, I loved that chat so much. Holly was so fascinating to talk to. And who knew that Australia didn't have attics? I literally had no idea. The Husbands was our Happy Place recommended read for August. And if you follow at Happy Place Book Club on Instagram, you'll find loads of extra content and discussions about the book. That is the place where you can have your say on all the books that we read together, including our September book, Want by Gillian Anderson. And massive news, guys. Gillian is going to be on the podcast on Monday. Do you know how long I've been waiting for this to happen?

40:57Gillian has been on my hit list. That sounds like I'm trying to kill her. But she's been on my want list, there we go, for so long. So I've been buzzing about this one and I know you're going to love it. It's only a few days away. It's going to be sexy, it's going to be spicy and I cannot wait. All right, for now, a huge thank you again to Holly, to the producer Anushka Tate at Happy Play Studios and to you because you are the best bookworms out there.

41:41so

41:52hi this is nox from the popcast with nox and jamie and maybe like us at the podcast you also know people who have been smokers or vapors. And Zen is the one product it seems like everyone is talking about because there are many good reasons to make a change to Zen nicotine pouches. Reasons like Zen nicotine pouches are still America's number one choice for smoke-free, hands-free nicotine satisfaction. And you can choose between 10 varieties, each variety available in either three or six milligrams. Check out zen.com slash find to find Zen at a store near you. Warning, this product contains nicotine.

42:23Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Have a great day now.