A hilarious dive into online shopping for partners – Holly Gramazio nails the grim reality with surreal delivery and punch
- CWIP
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
For readers who haven’t (yet!) read The Husbands, can you tell us about it in one sentence?It's a comedy about a woman whose attic starts to generate an infinite supply of husbands.
Would you describe yourself as the Tinder Generation and what are the best bits about that and the worst?I had a go at early-days online dating but I just missed out on Tinder - I'd met my now-husband by the time it started getting popular. So my experience of the apps has all been second-hand. A lot of my friends have had accounts, and because for some of them it started to feel like such a chore I've taken plenty of shifts doing their swiping for them, picking out people I think they might get on with. I do think it's good for it to be so normal to have a context where people who are looking to meet possible partners can do that, but I think the actual moment-to-moment experience can be pretty grim in a lot of different ways.
We love how you communicate so wittily about learning to live with and appreciate the blessing it is to have the ups and downs of life with people you care about. Do you get angry in real life when things go wrong, or do you consider imperfection a source of humour?I tend to get sulky or grumpy rather than angry, I think! Obviously I try my best to keep in good humour about it when things go wrong but I'm not particularly good at it.
Which witty novel inspired you the most growing up?As a kid, I really loved Diana Wynne Jones: Archer's Goon was maybe my very favourite of her books, but Howl's Moving Castle, The Ogre Downstairs, Charmed Life, all these strange intense fantasies of invention and ridiculous situations.
Where do you write? Do you need silence, crave music or manage with people drilling outside your window/other? Any writing habits gratefully received
I love having other stuff going on around me while I write. Music, or hubbub, or people going about their business, or birds shrieking around outside the window: anything that isn't just tranquility, ugh. When I'm really struggling to get something done I put the television on, which I guess is probably a legacy of the distant past, doing all my homework in the living room while my little brothers were watching TV.
The best advice I've ever read for getting writing done is to always stop for the day while you're still enjoying it, ideally in the middle of a sentence. It can be so hard to force yourself to do sometimes, when you just want to keep going, and I don't always stick to it, but it's incredible for keeping momentum up over the days and weeks.
Finally, can you tell us why you think CWIP is important?
It's brilliant to have something that's so determinedly about funny books. Most of the time we don't really talk about comedy as a category in books in the same way we do for film or TV or theatre. And funny books by women in particular are, I think, even more likely to be talked about through some other lens, with the comedy relegated to an afterthought.
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