Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Listeners, readers, welcome to the Foxed Page, where we dive
deep into the very best books. You'll come away with
a richer understanding of the text at hand, all while
learning to read everything a little better. I'm kimberly Ford,
one time adjunct professor at Berkeley, best selling author and
PhD in complet. Today the PhD in complet is getting
a bit of a rest. Today we are diving into
(00:25):
a New York Times bestseller by Holly Gramatzio called The Husbands.
This was a book that was absolutely delightful. Those of
you who've been listening recently know that I have in
the recent past tackled No Country for Old Men by
Kormick McCarthy, and I was drawn to that book for
all the right reasons. I wanted to read something that
was really, you know, challenging and harrowing and dark, and it.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Absolutely delivered on all of those fronts.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
And as a result, I think I was really looking
for something to you know, a bit of a palette cleanser,
something a little more uplifting and something a little brighter,
and The Husbands by Holly Gramatzio was absolutely that. We
always begin with this question of why I read this book.
Why am I talking to you about this book? This
was a recommendation from my younger sister. She's very wise,
very smart, very good reader. We actually have very different tastes,
(01:11):
which is fun because then a lot of times her
recommendations are things that I would not have come across. Anyway,
this came with kind of an interesting premise. This is
the premise that every time our main character would send
her husband up into the attic, a different husband would
come down. And I will say, at first it sounded
a little gimmicky to me. I think there are actually
a lot of pitfalls that this book might have fallen into,
(01:32):
but it ended up being an absolutely delightful look at
some really difficult philosophical questions about monogamy and about marriage,
and about how we make decisions, and about how each
of our decisions impact our lives, and certainly about how
our primary relationships shape who we are. I absolutely delighted
in all of those questions. But the thing that stood
(01:53):
out to me most was the humor in the book.
And if you are a longtime Fox Page listener, you
know that I really appreciate humor. But I have very
high standards and I am really convinced that it's a
very difficult thing to do. There's a lot of very
unfunny attempts at humor out there, and again and again,
Holly Grammacio set up these situations that were not only funny,
(02:14):
but that we're working really hard in terms of moving
the plotforward, developing characters, or doing really important work in
terms of the text. So what we're going to do
today is really focused on all of the ways that
humor is functioning really well in this book. For those
of you who like an agenda, we're going to do
a very quick bio about Holly Gramatzio. There are a
couple of interesting things about her that I want to
(02:34):
touch upon. We're then going to talk about humor, sort
of how humor functions, basically the general tenets of humor,
and then I'm going to talk a little bit about
how it is functioning here in the book. Will then
go on to look basically sort of chronologically at a
bunch of different examples of the excellent humor in the book,
and we'll talk about not only why these episodes of
(02:55):
humor work, but also what they are contributing to the
novel itself. It's really in many ways, like a primer
in how to sort of set.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Things up and make them funny, but.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Then also how to use humor to really enrich whatever
text it is that you are writing or reading. Frankly,
we're going to close by looking at all of the
things this book has to offer, things I really enjoyed,
but that we are not going to dig into, just
to give you kind of an overview of the richness
and I think the success of this text. But I'm
also going to throw in a couple of quibbles before
(03:25):
we dive into the bio. For those of you on
the YouTube, I am wearing one of my own creations here,
I am wearing what is called the shifty sweater, and
I mention that because I actually get a fair amount
of comments from fellow fiber artists out there. In fact,
some people would like to know the patterns of some
of the sweaters that I've knitted, which is such a compliment.
Although I will say the ultimate compliment is when sometimes
(03:55):
I have just made my own thing, like I've just
come up with my own recipe, my own pattern for something,
and someone will ask and I'll be like, oh my gosh, sorry,
I made that up myself.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
This one.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
However, if you go to ravelry you can find the
shifty sweater. It looks so difficult, and that is the
amazing thing about this sweater.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
It looks so hard to do, and it is not.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Only is it not difficult, but it is so fun
because you kind of never know how the next row
is going to look, and it's like this magic trick
before your very eyes. But back to the book, We're
going to dive in with a very quick, but I
think very important in some ways, biography of Holly Gramatcio.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
This is not our normal biography.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
We're not digging into all of her details, but there
is something that is very salient. And whoever wrote this
little quick bio paragraph about her at the start of
the book is really well done. I also really appreciate
the fact that they have this little bio, this little
paragraph at the beginning and not at the end, because
I think it does, in some very subtle ways.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Inform the way that we are reading the book.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
So we find out that she is born in Adelaide,
so she's Australian. The book is set in London. She
currently is based in London. I really loved the London parts.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Of the book.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
I found that part very enriching. But what was most
interesting to me here is that she's very involved with
video games. So apparently she founded the Experimental Games Festival
now play This, which I don't even really know what
that means, but founding a games festival sounds pretty impressive,
and frankly, it's super foreign it to me.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
But then it goes on.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
To say that she wrote the script for the award
winning indie video game Dicey Dungeons, which that actually just
kind of makes me laugh. It seems very funny and
very clever. I also didn't really know that anyone had
to write a script for these things. But it's so
interesting to think about the conceit of this book, the
premise of this book. I mean, it doesn't necessarily sound
(05:38):
right like a video game, but it's very interesting to
think about the different ways that the rules, you know,
sort of resetting and getting a new life and this
kind of thing. It does in some ways mimic the
way that people play video games, and I'm very interested
in the ways that that might cross over, especially because
it sounds like she's doing the verbal part of these
video games. It also says here she's particularly interested in rules, cities, gardens,
(06:02):
games that get people acting creatively, and arts that get
people interacting with their surroundings in new ways.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
I love that. I love this idea of.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Being interested in play and creativity and games, and I
think all of that gardens too.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
There's some good gardens in this book.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
I think all of that really, does, you know, give
us a little bit of a window into the creative
mindset that brought us to this book. This is also
her first novel, which I was like, Wow, this is
someone who is really kind of a polymath here. You know,
she can do all this video gaming stuff and then
also can apparently pop over and not only have a
great idea for a novel, but execute it in just
(06:37):
an amazing way. One quick thing fro from the editorial
world is that, and most of you probably know this,
but when you have a paragraph like this that's a biography,
you know, nine times out of ten it is written
in fact by the author. Not always, but you know,
a lot of the time. So when you read something
like she's particularly interested in rules, play cities, gardens, games
(06:57):
that people, you know, that kind of thing, those or
her priorities, So it's always very interesting to me, even
if it's written in the third person, to know that
that's something that she really wants the reader to know.
So if you are someone who reads fiction pretty widely,
you cannot not think of Gabrielle Zevin. So Gabrielle Zevin
wrote Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which is a book
that came out several years ago. I loved that book.
(07:20):
I was very resistant to that book. Someone suggested it
to me and I was like, wow, video games, no,
thank you. And then I read it and I was
just absolutely blown away. There are immediate parallels here. As
soon as you read this beginning part and you know
that she has to do with the structuring and the
writing of video games, you immediately think of Gabrielle Zevin.
And then sure enough you zip right across from this
(07:41):
little biography page here to the blurbs and who has
blurbed the book right across the way, but Gabrielle Zeven.
And here's what Gabrielle Zevian has to say, richly characterized,
philosophical and funny. I enjoyed all the husbands, even especially
the terrible ones, time bending gem about the way we
(08:02):
live now.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
I thought that was so good because the book is.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Philosophical and it is definitely richly characterized, and it is funny.
I also enjoy the idea of especially enjoying the terrible
husbands because honestly, they are some of the kind of
richest fodder in the book. And I was very happy
to see that Gabrielle z Evan you know, has put
her stamp of approval on this book, because gabrielle'z evn
is a world world class writer who wrote just a
(08:25):
hell of a novel, and in many ways, Tomorrow and
Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a much kind of heavier weight
and like a much more I think, in some ways
more significant novel.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
It's trying to do different things.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
I mean, it was definitely like trying to be a
more weighty novel where the Husband's is, you know, a
bit lighter and a bit frothier and a bit more fun.
But I really like the idea that Gabrielle zevin has
very positive things to say about this.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
I also wanted to read two other quick blurbs here.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
I usually don't read them ahead of time, partially because
I don't want people to sort of, like, you know,
creating some narrative about the book in my head, but I.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Really thought that these were very good.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
So another one by Claire Lombardo, The Husband's is a
wily and wonderful exploration of modern decision making, kaleidoscopic and
bright and very very funny.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
So I love this too.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
I love the fact that there is a lot of
emphasis here in this blurb on the humor in the book,
because as this whole lecture is going to try to prove,
I really think that is one of the major strengths
in the work. And then the last one we're going
to look at this is from Kirkus Reviews, which is
really still a very important kind of mainstay in terms
of the industry weighing in on the quality of a book.
(09:36):
The plot allows the author to explore current attitudes and
approaches to dating and mating from a fresh perspective, a
fun take on big questions, and.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
I love that too.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
And the reason I'm ending with that blurb is because
as we are reading through, we're going to look at
the humor, how it functions, and how it contributes to
the novel. But there are ways that this is asking
some really big questions and doing so in a way
that's not super weight, and that's not really ponderous.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
That is actually very fun.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
And I really love the fact that that person, in
a very succinct sentence from the Kirkus Reviews, was able
to articulate that in the vein of looking at these blurbs,
I want to do something slightly unusual which we usually
do not do here, which is to look at the
copy on the back cover. So we have a repetition
here of the Gabrielle Zevan blurb, which I think is
a very good idea. She's widely recognized and really should
(10:24):
be because of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and I
really appreciate what they have said here. And then underneath
the blurb those of you not on YouTube, I'm just
looking at the back of my yellow paperback copy. But
right underneath it, in kind of bright red type, it
says this do you take this?
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Man?
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Know what about this one? And I think that this
is such a clever way right at the beginning to
introduce the idea of the cleverness of the humor. And
this is also a good place for us to sort
of take a step back and describe a little bit.
This is very obvious about sort of how humor functions
in general. So the way that often humor works in
literature as well as in life and in comedy and
(11:05):
in terms of conversation and all sorts of different things
is that you know, our human minds are expecting certain things.
So you expect you know, A plus B is going
to equal C. Or if we have A and kind
of a long and drawn out A, we expect B.
We just have these expectations, and when the expectations are
foiled in ways that are playful or unexpected, then you
(11:25):
result in humor. And this is a very good example
of it. So do you take this man? Is such
an enormous It's this huge and kind of ponderous thing.
It's very culturally important.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
For lots of people.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
It's this big kind of sacrisyanct question about marriage and
about monogamy and about making a lifelong commitment. So we
have this idea and it's still resonant.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
I mean, I think you know, even.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
If you're super not into monogamy, like you recognize that
as an important statement. Do you take this man? It's
kind of this big authoritative voice. And then what is
subverting the answer here? What is surprising? What is funny
is this simple and very no So you have this
funny ellision here. We don't have any comment by the
bride or anything here. I suppose we could also imagine
(12:07):
a groom if we're talking about a same sex marriage,
But you don't have any kind of, you know, cumbersome
response or anything. You simply have a know what about
this one. So it's this very clever, very economical way
of taking a very large, philosophical, weighty question and then
answering in a totally unexpected and playful and kind of
(12:28):
light way, which is really tipping us off to a
lot of the ways that humor is going to function
as we get into the novel. Okay, we're going to
dive into the book and just look more or less
chronologically at a bunch of times where I think humor
is working very well and happily. The first page is
offering up three different instances kind of bam bam bam,
all in a row of some very clever and I think,
(12:50):
very foundation laying humor. So the very first paragraph reads this,
The man is tall and has dark tousled hair, and
when she gets back quite late from Elena's Hendu, she
finds him waiting on the landing at the top.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Of the stairs.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
We're not going to parse all of this too carefully,
but it is worth noting this is a third person narrator.
But because we have this she that immediately becomes our protagonist,
the narrative stance, the third person narrator, all of that
is very very good.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
We also have this immediacy right.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Away, she's saying Elena's hendu. It's kind of flattering to
the reader because it assumes that we know, you know
essentially who Elena is, and we are kind of right
in the midst of this intimate friendship that they have.
We know what a hendu is, which is a bachelorette party.
We're also situating ourselves pretty firmly in either the UK.
I don't know in Australia if they have hendus maybe,
but we have this idea of being in somewhere in
(13:44):
the Commonwealth, somewhere in the British Commonwealth. We also have
this idea of the man, and beginning with the man,
which is this kind of generic male form, which is
very important because we're going to just substitute all sorts
of different forms in for that generic stand in male.
I also like the way, but you know, you think
about like the man as like this kind of patriarchal, authoritative,
(14:04):
like generic figure, and here.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
He is very much at the whims in.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Many ways, like existentially at the whims of our protagonist.
So we have him standing at the top of the landing.
She yelps and steps backwards what she starts, then tries again,
who are you? He sighs, fun night, which is so funny.
So the reason why this is functioning, I'm gonna break
(14:29):
it down for you here is that she is startled.
She doesn't know who the man is, and she yelps
and she's saying like who are you, like really, and
the reader is right there with her, because the reader's like, I.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Don't know who this guy is. And then he sighs,
And there is something so economical about that. It's like
it's a little bit like.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Louri Moore, which again we really need to look at
some Lauri Moore, where it's like there are lots of
things that he could have done in that instance. He
could have been like, oh, Lauren, or he could have,
you know, done all sorts of different things.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
But the sighing is it's so excellent. He's a little
bit like he knows her really well.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
It's a little world weary. He's like, oh my gosh, okay,
here we go again. It's not aggressive, it's not scary.
It's pointing to some lightness. And then again this very
economical fun night. So you know, there's a lot happening there,
which is that this guy is assuming that she's drunk
and that's why she does not recognize him. It's so
(15:23):
clever and it is so well done. And this is
all within like I mean, it's actually three paragraphs, but
it's very brief. We're kind of like, I don't know,
twelve lines into the book. It is so great. And
the thing that's happening there is we're expecting, you know,
this like intruder in her house and she's like, who
are you? And we're expecting him to be like what like, Lauren,
i'm your husband, or we expect him to be some
(15:43):
sort of actual intruder, and neither of those things happen.
He takes it in stride in this very kind of
casual and light way that ends up being very funny. Also,
the fun night thing is really pointing to a lot
of intimacy but also telling us a lot about this
main character, who is someone who often goes out and
has a fun night and apparently comes home having had
enough to drink that she's like not quite recognizing her husband.
(16:06):
There are some ways I will say in the book
that I felt like there was a little too much lightness.
Like you have to suspend disbelief obviously at the very beginning.
If you are in a novel where you know, you're
the male characters are going up into the attic and
you know, coming back down as a different person, obviously
you suspend the disbelief.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Right at the beginning.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
But there are times where where I think the lightness,
you know, it's avoiding a little bit of like the
heavier things that are happening in the novel, which is
totally appropriate. But there were a couple of times where
I was like, oh, this seems like a little bit
too light under the circumstances. But overall it ended up
feeling delightful to me. So just two paragraphs later, we
have more kind of in this vein. But what's interesting
(16:47):
about it is we're continuing with the humor, but we're
really learning more about this person, and we're also establishing
some very like nuts and bolts things about our situation.
But in this humor is vein that makes it much
more fun than a simple, straightforward, you know, omniscient narrator
telling us what's up. So we're a couple of paragraphs down, Lauren,
he says, come on, come up and I'll make you
(17:08):
some tea. He knows her name?
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Is he?
Speaker 1 (17:12):
No, it's been months since she had that guy around
and he was blonde, he had a beard. This isn't him,
which was also so funny. So we have this idea
here that she's piecing together what's happening. He's probably not
an intruder if he knows her name, and he's being
so calm and whatnot. And then we have this is
he and then an M dash? Actually, my bad, that's
(17:33):
an N dash, which I don't know. Seems to me
like that should be an M dash. We can chat
grammar later. Anybody's interested can comment below, and we can
get crazy about M dash versus en dash. I one
of my kids just sent me the most upsetting thing,
which is that apparently if something has a lot of
M dashes in it, that is a signal that it
was created by AI. And I, as someone who have
(17:54):
been like literally a lifelong devote of the m Dash.
I'm absolutely crushed by that. But back to the text,
So this question of like is he and you're like, wait, like,
as the reader, you're like, is he? What?
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Like, what is she going to say about him?
Speaker 1 (18:08):
And then she says, no, it's been months since she
had that guy round. And the thing about that, I mean,
it's also charmingly English because it's not around, it's round,
and those kinds of English subtleties Australian slash English subtleties
are very delightful for an American reader who's tuned into
that kind of thing. I did not listen to any
of this on the audible. It must be read by
(18:28):
an English speaking person. That would be fun. But it's
also telling us again that this is someone who has
guys round occasionally. And I think that's a very important
premise because a lot of this book is questioning all
of our kind of deep held thoughts on monogamy and
on sexual liberation, on the idea of women being able
to choose and being having a lot of agency and relationships,
(18:49):
whether they be casual sexual relationships or whether they are
monogamous marital relationships.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
So I really like the idea of.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Emphasizing here she's not someone who has any trouble bringing
guys around.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
She does this quite often.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
She's someone who's sexually liberated in a way that I
find very appealing.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
And what's excellent.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
About it here is we're not we're learning this in
this way that's very light and funny and very economical.
I also like from a grammatical perspective, she's got a
bunch of fragments there. He was blonde, he had a beard.
This isn't him. So that's all set off with commas,
not with periods, her syntax, her word choice, the prose,
and this is just excellent. And we're focusing on the
(19:29):
comedy today on her use of humor, which is excellent, excellent,
but the prose in general I found just kind of impeccable,
which is really impressive in a debut novel, and especially
with someone you know who's first and foremost a gamer,
a video game creator.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
It's all very impressive.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
And the last thing we're going to look at on
this first page is is kind of an important element
because it's one that I kept hearing throughout, and this
is one that I think other people might be hearing,
but definitely I did, and it is echoes of Fleabag.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Part of that is because it's all.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Happening in London, and so I know I have that
association kind of ready to go, and every single time
I heard these echoes of Fleabag, I was absolutely delighted.
If you are someone who has not yet seen Fleabag,
I am so jealous of you.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
You must absolutely.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Right away go and sit down and watch both seasons
of that incredibly, incredibly great television show. But what Holly
Grammazio is doing that I think is resonant. It's definitely
not too on the nose. But what's very resonant about
it is when Holly Grammatzio is doing these asides to
the reader. There are times when she's sort of saying
things they definitely fit in with what is happening in
(20:38):
the text. It's not like in parentheses or in italics
or anything. It's very seamless. But you have these assides
that are kind of directed to the reader that in
my mind feel a lot like when Fleabag is looking
directly at the camera. So these sorts of asides, whether
or not you know Fleabag is not really super irrelevant.
These assides to the reader when they are done well,
(20:59):
are so great. So there's an enormous amount of intimacy
that is established with the reader when you have this
kind of aside. So I'm going to give you an example.
This is down at the bottom of the very first page,
and she's obviously still you know, this is one of
her husbands, but she's still like feeling like he might
be a burglar or an intruder if you leave. She says,
I won't report this. She will absolutely report this. So
(21:23):
there it is, so you know, she's saying to them, okay,
I won't report it, and then as an aside to
the reader, without any fanfare, it's just the simple next sentence.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
It's not set off.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
It says she will absolutely report this, And I like
the absolutely there, because this is one of those kind
of conventions.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
It's like absolutely she will.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Like it's putting emphasis on the fact that like one
hundred percent she's going to do this, and she's totally
setting this guy up with essentially what is a lie?
Speaker 2 (21:46):
And that's this kind of magical.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Thing where it's directly, you know, telling the reader something
that she is not at all sharing with the other
people who are in the scene, the other fictional people
in the scene. She reaches behind to the door handle
and tries to turn it, which she takes a lot
of fiddling, but she isn't going to look away, especially
not now that oh God, he's coming down the stairs.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
So this is so good.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
This O God thing is set off here by m
dash's you know what, I take it back what I
said above about the en dash. I think these readers
are not powerful enough. Maybe that's what's happening here. Above
it looked like an en dash, but I think all
of these are proper m dashes. So aplus on the
grammatical punctuation here. But what's excellent here is not only
do we have this amazing aside when she says she
(22:33):
isn't going to look away, especially not now that oh God,
he's coming down.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
The stairs, this O God is set off.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
So it's as the reader, you're hearing it, and there's
this intimacy because she's not saying it out loud to him.
She's thinking it and we are in her mind, but
she's sort of addressing us. But we also have this
really economic way where she's telling us what is happening.
She's describing how he is coming down the stairs. But
it's not like and then the guy started coming down
the stairs. It's real time. We're experiencing it with her.
(23:01):
We're experiencing her sense of like, oh my god, no,
he's coming toward us. What is going to happen here?
But we are so firmly with our protagonist that you
have all of this identification between reader and protagonist that's
happening right at the very beginning. This is so strong.
We have this excellent aside, which is building intimacy. We
have this amazing economical and very sort of colorful way
(23:23):
of describing what is happening, all of which is making
this feel very rich.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
There's a lot of verisimilitude. We can sort of imagine things.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
There were a couple of times where I had a
hard time picturing what this apartment was looking like, but
honestly that was just because I was trying to find
something to be critical of hearing the very beginning of
the book. But this kind of a side that again
to me feels like flea bag is something that we
see over and over throughout the novel, and it's excellent.
It's the kind of thing that you like having as
a refrain, not just because it seems like an excellent
(23:52):
television show, but because it's actually a very effective way
to convey information, but also to have the reader, you know,
feel real intimacy and to have real understanding of what's
happening in the mind of the protagonist. Okay, we're going
to jump to page twelve. This is actually a handily.
This is another example of that kind of Fleabag kind
of moment. And in this case it's not an aside
(24:14):
a La Fleabag. It's more of the kind of humor
that we have that is crucial in Fleabag that shows
us the intimacy between the main character, Fleabag and her
best friend. Throughout this book, Holly Gramacio does such a
good job of establishing the very close ties between Elena
and Lauren, who is our protagonist. A lot of it
is done with shorthand, a lot of it is done
(24:35):
with the texts that they're sharing with each other. A
lot of it is very economical. It's kind of staccato,
like we don't have to have the whole picture of things.
We simply get reactions. But because it's so well done,
we understand the whole backstory without needing it explained to us.
One thing I will say, sometimes, Pete, this is even
harder to do than humor. Sometimes in this book, when
she is describing what her little nieces and nephews are
(24:58):
up to, she falls into what I think is kind
of a trap in that it's very difficult to describe
what kids are up to in like a quirky little
kid kind of way without it sounding so cliche. I
don't I have to think of someone who does this well,
I don't know. It's actually kind of tedious to me.
Maybe it's because I'm menapausal now to look at these,
(25:18):
like to really dig into books with lots of little
kids in them. I think that like trying to show
like the quirky way is that kids like ask funny
questions or whatever the thing is, it always feels predictable.
It always feels kind of like, okay, yeah, I mean
all kids are, say, quirky little things like that. Sometimes
I think that in this book that element of smaller kids.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Is not the strongest part.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
And the reason I'm bringing it up right now, I
think is because that is very much in counterpoint to
all of the interactions that she's having with her best
friend Elena. And it's also important to note here that
part of what's happening when she's checking these texts from
Elena is it's forwarding the plot. At this point, we're
still really very curious to know like who this guy is,
and the way that she's going to figure out who
(25:59):
the guy is.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
She's very smart.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
She's like, Oh, I'm going to go back and look
at my texts and maybe my texts will tell me
who this man is. There are lots of different ways
throughout the book, and this is I think like a
video gaming kind of mentality where you're like, wait, how
is this attic thing functioning? And then the fact that
her husbands are changing, how does that manifest in the
real world? And like how much is that impacting the
history before the man emerged from the attic? Or how
(26:24):
much is it impacting everything else in her life? Does
she still have nieces and nephews? All of these big
kind of philosophical questions about the choices we make and
reality and how they affect the past and the future.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
So on the bottom of twelve we have this.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
She checks her sent messages lots of hearts to Elena,
and then this is all in caps, I love you,
I know you're going to be so happy, and a
photo back from her of their chicken shop reflections, captioned,
it must be so difficult for everyone else that we're
so beautiful. That's the part that reminded me of Fleabag.
There is a lot in Fleabag of Fleabag. And then gosh,
(27:00):
oh my gosh, the name of her best friend just
went read out of my head.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
The blonde woman.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Who dies, who is dead throughout the whole entire series.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Anyway, I can't remember her name. It might come back
to me, probably won't, But this idea of it must
be so difficult for everyone that we are so beautiful.
To me, that sounded absolutely like the best friend on Fleabag.
And even if you're someone who loves that television show,
there's no way this feels heavy handed, because that is
both in Fleabag and here. What these women, Phoebe waller
(27:27):
Bridge and Holly Gramatzio are tapping into is a certain
kind of humor and a certain kind of shorthand, and
a certain amount of intimacy and unexpectedness. And this is
unexpected I mean, it's when you hear someone say it
must be so difficult for everyone, you don't think that,
then the next phrase is going to be that we
are so beautiful.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
And honestly we should have more of that.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
But that's just speaking, you know, to women's self doubt
and the ways that we are not supposed to express
how beautiful we.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Think we are.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
So it's unexpected, but it is also working really hard
to establish what's happen in the novel, A lot about
our character, a lot about her best friend. It's just excellent.
We're jumping all the way to page sixty five. But
it turns out this is our third example, and I
think it's the final example of again this kind of
fleabag kind of tone. So here we have her sister,
Lauren's sister, talking about Lauren's wedding to one of these husbands,
(28:19):
and for the sister, the wedding had been terrible and
she had broken up with her girlfriend, and it was
like this terrible experience for her. Twenty of your guests
heard us break up. I'm crying in the background of
half your wedding photos. The food was delicious, so funny,
so funny to me, I mean, you have this like
it's actually the end of a fairly long paragraph describing
(28:39):
why they broke up and whatnot. And you have this
kind of accretion toward the end of this paragraph, where
you know, things are getting more and more dire, and.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
She's like, it was awful and everybody saw us, and.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
So you're expecting more of that kind of tone. And
then you have this funny, declarative, simple sentence, the food
was delicious. And we actually do see a lot of
this in Fleabag. This lecture's turning into like a like
a tiny analysis of some of the humor and Fleabag.
And in many ways it makes sense to me that
the brand of humor is translating well on the page here.
But what's happening here kind of more broadly, is that
(29:10):
we are having some comic relief. So this is a
book that is very light even when very heavy things
are happening. There tends to be a lightning, a leavening
to it, which is really what we are expecting from
a book like this, and it is really the joy
of a book like this. And more importantly, what's happening
in the paragraph above is that the sister breaks up
with her fiance or her girlfriend, because they'd been engaged
(29:33):
for a long time and they weren't sure if they
wanted to be together, and they didn't have a lot
of conviction. And in this iteration of marriage, it turns
out that Lauren and her husband had only been to
together for a little while, but they had lots of conviction.
So you're talking about something that's pretty weighty here, which
is this idea of like when should you get married?
How much conviction do you need? Should you sort of
jump into these things? Should you deliberate for a long time?
(29:55):
So you have really large questions that are then levined
by humor, which is really I think the recipe for
serious success in this book. We're now going to jump
to page seventy three. One of the things that this
book does so well is it does this kind of
observation humor. And I'm not a big fan of observational humor.
So like observational humor, thinks Seinfeld when they're like talking
(30:17):
about like the big salad or like a close talker,
it's a very like Jerry Seinfeld. Larry David, I like
curb your enthusiasm better for a number of reasons. Although
that is still definitely a lot of observational humor. So
what that kind of humor is doing, you know, when
you have like a close talker, is it's you know,
you're picking out something that is that is a phenomenon
that people have yet to fully articulate, and then you're
(30:38):
articulating it in a way that's kind of funny, and
that's kind of the whole joke. So what I like
here better is that in the book we have a
lot of observational humor, but she's taking it a number
of steps further than just naming the thing, and a
lot of times it's like a skewering of certain populations
that I think is so funny. There's an American in
(30:59):
the book who's very and I loved all of the
parts where we were talking about where she was talking about,
you know, different characteristics of Americans. We're going to look
at a couple of them because I found them very funny.
But this on page seventy three is just an absolute
gem of a paragraph that is speaking to this idea
of preconceptions. This is also an interesting look at how
(31:20):
the book is functioning because every time she's in a marriage,
she's having.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
To figure out what the marriage is all.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
About, and who she is in the marriage and what
she gets up to in the marriage. So there's this
kind of self exploration that's really interesting, and of course
it brings up all sorts.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Of philosophical questions.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
So here on seventy three we have her trying to
figure out who she and her current husband are, you know,
kind of.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
In the world.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Oh, she thinks they're not cheating. They're swingers, though, Aren't
all swingers white and in their forties? She's sure, she
read that in an article somewhere. Their group doesn't quite
fit the demographic. Maybe they could be polyamorous instead. She's
vague on the difference. But they're in London's outermost suburbs,
and none of them, as far as she is aware,
(32:04):
work in tech, so this doesn't still fit. I honestly
can't keep reading the idea that all swingers are not
only white and in their forties, but that they all
work in tech.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
It's that is so funny to me.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
I mean, I am literally sitting here in Silicon Valley, which,
by the way, non sequitor, but we have terrible internet
and terrible telephone coverage here right in the heart of
Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
But to go back.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Again, what I love about this kind of observational humor
in her hands is that it's folded into this larger question.
She's discovering what's happening, which is funny to begin with.
And we have that first part about being forty and white,
and then she is waiting a couple of beats, and
then this idea of being in tech and also the
nuance between swinging and polyamory. She is loading so much
(32:50):
into this one paragraph, and the way that she's meeting out,
the way she's parsing all of this is so strong.
This next example of humor will surprise not one of
you who has listened to the Fox Page for a
long time. This has to do with just simple women's liberation.
And you have to go on a bit of a
journey with her. It's not you have to You get
to go on a bit of a journey here and
(33:10):
it is so this is like, I don't know anything
about stand up comedy, really.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
But to me, this is exactly like what you would
want a stand up comedian to do.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
There's a setup that is funny in itself, and then
it's making kind of a larger statement, and that larger
statement is actually really important and it's made in a
way that is light and entertaining, but it's really saying
something about our society. So on page eighty one we
have this paragraph. This is her, yet again, trying to
figure out how she and her husband relate who she
(33:40):
is in this new world, what kinds of habits she has,
that sort of thing she likes him too. But then
she goes to the bathroom and finds that A her
period has just started. Not ideal, and b the only
product she has in the cupboard is a menstrual cup.
So even that not ideal, that like Comma's set off
by Commas. That's almost the kind of a side where
(34:00):
she's saying to the reader like, okay, not ideal, just
started the period. And then it was so funny to
me that like it's these are things that are not ideal. A,
her period has started, and then B we're kind of like,
what is this other thing going to be? And it's
the fact that she uses a menstrul cup as this
iteration of her life. Okay, And then moving on, she
looks up a series of instructional diagrams on her phone,
(34:22):
folds it like this or like this or like that,
and she gives it a go, but the cup keeps
springing open when it's halfway inserted, blood spattering across the tiles,
and it gets slippier, slipperier wow.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
And it gets slippier. Wow.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
I actually had a hard time pronouncing that because she's
used this like excellent little version of this word that
is her own, which is slippier, not slipperier.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
It gets slippier each.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Time she reads the faq one last attempt, but all
she learns is that there are two sizes of menstrual cups,
and that, as a thirty one year old, she's recommended
to take the larger, and she simply declines to remain
in a world that comments immediately on the size of
her vagina.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Loved this. Loved this.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
I loved the graphic nature of her, like trying to
figure out how to do the thing, and then this
idea of looking things.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Up on your phone.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
You're reading the FAQs, you're trying to you know, it's
a very common experience of like trying to figure out
something that you don't want to necessarily like ask you
another person about You're trying to figure it out the
way you can, and then you know, we have this
kind of messy experience. But then the fact that the
kicker is about someone making you know, a comment about
like the man or like Big Pharma making a comment
(35:33):
about the size of her vagina is so funny to me.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
It's unexpected.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
It's growing very organically from the rest of this paragraph.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
I just found it masterful.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
On page one hundred, we have an example of the
kind of humor that's this very kind of sweet and
kind of basic thing. And again this has to do
with expectations. So this is with the American husband. His
name is Carter, and he is there at a wedding
and he is going around. Some have escaped in the chickens,
and so he's going around and he is like scooping
up the chickens. So this is something that seems kind
(36:06):
of awkward. It seems kind of you know, harried, doesn't
seem particularly like sexy or exciting. And we have this description.
He walks with it toward Lauren, so triumphant, his face delighted,
still got it. He says, you try and keep them
out of the barn. If the hawk comes down again,
I'll ferry them over to the coop, and that's what
he does. Over the course of the first dance and
(36:29):
the next song. He collects hens, first one at a time,
and then as his confidence grows and she's more and
more visibly impressed, two at a time, one in each arm.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
It's magnificent.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
What's excellent here is like the grandeur of that word
magnificent is just like not what you are expecting her
to say. We know she's getting more impressed, but he's
like walking around with chickens and he's scooping them up
and he's doing this kind of goofy thing. Also, magnificent
here is italicized, so we have this really i mean
almost on the like it kind of looks like cursive,
you know, italics function. But so the word magnificent and
(37:05):
then together with it being in italics is so it's
just like not what you're expecting from like a chicken situation,
but it is so economical and so strong because it
is showing us what is happening with her, Like she
is seeing this thing that he is doing, and for
her it's this very alluring thing and it seems magnificent.
You see the way that she's elevating him but what
(37:28):
is excellent about this is the thing that she's describing
so aptly, and the thing that we're seeing so vividly
is totally unexpected. I mean, we've talked a lot about
how if you want a reader to really step into
a world and be convinced of that world, you need
to show them details that they wouldn't be able to
imagine on their own. So like, if you have description
(37:49):
of like a country wedding in England, there are lots
of different things. As I am saying that, you're probably
picturing a bunch of different things, but you might not
be picturing like a picturesque little flock of hens.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Who is one around.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
And then you certainly might not be picturing like a
hawk that is arriving and causing all sorts of mayhem.
So this is the kind of choice detail that she's
adding in that feels original, it feels unique, it feels
really well planned because then it's offering up this opportunity
to show us so much about these characters, and then
she's adding things like it's magnificent as this kind of kicker,
(38:23):
it is so strong. On page one to eleven, we
have two different examples of humor one of them is
very quick. I'm going to read it to you here.
And this has to do with this idea of whether
or not she and her husband were cheating. The question
was whether or not they were swinging or cheating with
their neighbors who live down below, one of whom is
named Miriam, and she says this in a new iteration, Well,
(38:46):
at least if Mariam's pissed off at her and the husband,
she won't be trying to fuck them, which is so funny.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
So partially fuck is fuck is a word that I love.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
I think a lot of people know that, but it
is a word that is used very sparingly in this book,
which is excellent because then when it is used, it's
used to very good effect. And in this case, I
like the fact that it's just the verb, Like it's
not used as an explative. She's just using it as
the verb, which is one of my favorite ways. I mean,
it's just like it's so forceful and succinct and excellent.
(39:15):
What else is really amazing here is the fact that
it's coming at the end of the sentence. It has
a lot of force, But it's also that she's not
trying to fuck them So in the other iteration, Miriam was,
you know, I think there was some bisexuality. She was
interested in kissing both Lauren and Lauren's husband. So this
idea of like, at least if Mariam's mad, she's not
trying to fuck us both of us.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
So and partially that's just delightfully funny and unexpected.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Perhaps you know, in a very like heteronormative world that
like Mariam would only be trying to fuck the husband,
but it's unexpected.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
That it would be both of them.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
And there's also something about that kind of casual reference
that's really important. And this is what's great about a
lot of the humor is folded into the humor is
indication of how she feels about this deal to her
that Mariam is you know, somewhat bisexual or at least,
you know, by curious do we say that anymore? I
don't know if we say that anymore, But anyway, you know,
(40:08):
Mariam is someone who is interested in kissing both of
these people, potentially fucking both of these people, and that
is like not even of note, that is something that
is just going to get folded into this clever line
that is so strong. Then down at the bottom of
the page. This is another example of just the kind
of detail that Gramazio is using that I find so compelling,
(40:30):
and I think it's one of the reasons. I mean,
this book is kind of long. There are parts toward
the end that's like get flagged a little bit for me.
But there's a lot of detail and things are drawn
very specifically. Someone said earlier in the blurbs that it's
richly characterized.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Is that what they said? I think it's Gabrielle Evan,
meaning that the characters are very richly drawn. But it's
not just the characters.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
The whole entire world that she is creating is really
rich with details. So down at the bottom of one
eleven we have this description. She's driving with one of
her husbands. They drive southwest ten minutes in. Felix puts
a podcast on. It's about what economists can learn from trait,
inheritance and snakes, and it is very very boring, hosted
(41:11):
by three men with almost identical voices, two of whom
are called Matt So so far, and it is very
very boring. That extra very was so funny to me.
I mean, you expected her to say like it sucked
or it was boring or whatever, but it.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Is very, very boring.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
I don't know why that added very really put this
over the top for me and made me love it.
Then we go on and it's hosted by three men.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
Of course it is.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
It's also the topic is absurd, you know, the inherited
traits of snakes, and then what that has to do
with economics, which is of course lampooning the idea of
all podcasts, which you know, step away from the podcast here, people,
but this is very but every element of this is
pointing at different things and is very funny. Then we have,
of course the three men who are you know, it's
(41:56):
mostly men out there in the podcasting world who are
trying to tell us how to live our lives and
what we should take from economics and all the rest.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
Of these things. And then the fact that two of
them are called Matt. It's so good.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
This is the kind of detail that she's accruing as
we are moving through this that is kind of making
it funnier and funnier. And then she does this excellent
thing where we have the build up leads to something
that is unexpected. It reads this It is hosted by
three men with almost identical voices, two of whom are
called Matt. And it's calming to just sit there and
(42:27):
look out the window. So again this is the kind
of thing where she's saying, it's very very boring. There
are all these men, and it is so calming because
then she can listen to it and look out the window.
The predictable thing, of course, would be to be annoyed
at how annoying this whole thing is, and yet she
finds it calming, which is that kind of inversion that
she does. So well, Okay, we have three more examples
(42:47):
we're going to look at. On page two oh one,
we have a conversation between our protagonist and someone who
becomes kind of this friend and also kind of a
foil in some ways, who is not Elena, but is
a very close friend who is again and again and
who becomes a kind of a thread throughout the novel.
And he is talking in this case about his younger sister.
(43:07):
She's a good kid, he says.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
A lot younger.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
She was four or five when I moved out, So
we're not super close. I think you two would get on, though.
She does that thing you do sometimes of getting super
polite when someone says something you think is stupid. I
loved this. I thought it was so clever. I mean,
this is not like a haha, funny, but it's an
interesting and unique way to get across some information. I mean,
there are lots of different ways that he could talk
(43:30):
about Lauren together with his sister, but to point out
this thing that they both do. And I think there
is a cultural phenomenon where someone says, you know, somebody
says something really stupid, that maybe people get overly polite
to kind of like compensate and make them sort of
not realize or not feel so bad about having said
something stupid.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
It is so well articulated.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
When she says, right here, she does that thing you
do sometimes of getting super polite when someone says something
you think is stupid.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
So good, so good. That's observational humor. I can get
on to sixteen.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
We have another example of this kind of observational humor.
And what I would like you to note here as
we are reading through this is how skillfully she is
introducing this idea. There are lots of different ways you
could have this idea and this kind of criticism that
you could weave this into your novel, but the way
that she does it is so effective. It is also
(44:22):
yet another underscoring of how this world is functioning, and
that she's having to figure out each time who she is,
which of course is a very large statement on the
fact that who we choose to be our partners, the
choices that we make about matrimony and monogamy do affect
everything in our lives. So it's both funny, but it
is also developing this idea, this deeply philosophical question about
(44:46):
who we are as people. So on to sixteen, they
go to an Alberino tasting night at the wine shop
near Rob and Elena's and she worries that she's going
to have wine opinions, but Michael is happy to take
care of that. So it so funny that she worries
she's going to have wine opinions.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
So, I mean, there are.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Lots of ways you could say that, you know, she's
worried she was going to be a wine snob, or
she was worried that, you know, the evening was going
to be tedious, But this idea of she worries she's
going to have wine opinions, there's also something in that
that is kind of philosophical about this idea of like,
she doesn't have control of who she is and how
she is being shaped, and she has judgment. She does
not want to be someone who has a lot of
(45:25):
wine opinions, and yet there is a world where she
may have been shaped in that direction. And it speaks
to these kinds of preconceived notions that people have and
prejudices that we have that certainly we can get over
if we are exposed to different things. So not only
is this funny and just sort of tucked in very
neatly and very subtly into the middle of this sentence,
(45:46):
but it's also speaking to something larger. The last piece
of humor that we're going to sort of, you know,
look at in terms of analysis, here is on page
two fifty three. I loved this because this is having
to do with the American This is when she's at
a party Denver, actually, because she has gone to see
if she can find one of the past husbands, and
she's talking to these Americans she has just met for
(46:07):
the first time. I don't think I know anyone. In
a movie called Lauren, Ryan says slowly, is that a drawl?
Is he drawling they're not as handsome as Carter, but
they do have something of his expressions, his mode of being.
When she thought it was love, was it just being
from Denver, which I thought was so funny.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
So in being from.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
Denver is an italics and also up above, like is
he drawling? That's also in italics. Whenever people kind of
pick on a city like that, I always just wonder, like,
do they have to think about it? Are they like, like,
what city in the United States? Do I not know anyone?
So I can just like be a little bit critical
of the city. I mean, it's not like a skewering
of Denver, but it's not like it's not like an
elevation of Denver either. And I think what's especially charming
(46:52):
here as an American, I mean a lot of people
like a Southern accent, the drawing. Although it's funny because
I don't think of Colorado as people who are drawling,
which maybe she doesn't know her American geography super well.
Also maybe Ryan is from the South. Also, she's not
even sure if he is actually drawling. That word just
starting to sound very strange to me, drawling. But anyway,
you know, she doesn't actually know. Maybe he's just speaking
(47:13):
with a Colorado accent or a planolled American accent, not
super regional that she is interpreting. And as with all
of the different examples of humor in this book, there
is a larger question there. Why do we fall in
love with certain people? Why are we attracted to certain people?
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Does it matter? Do we have any control?
Speaker 1 (47:29):
All of these are very large questions that she is
posing in a way that is very funny. So we're
going to close bye. I'm just going to read through
a list. It's actually all of the notes that I've
made in the back of my book. Those of you
who are on the YouTube, I'll put it up there
so you can see. I Usually as I'm going through
a book, I will note different elements that I might
want to talk about, and then I'll have little page numbers.
(47:50):
I must admit, because this book is a bit lighter,
I didn't really dig into a lot of heavy duty
examples except where humor is concerned. My little page numbers
for humor go all the way across this page that
I was writing on. But some of the elements that
really struck me, aside from the humor, is just her
tone throughout the tone is so good. It's the perfect
amount of heaviness and sort of philosophical inquiry together with
(48:12):
just you know, frivolity, which is a very difficult thing
to attain and to maintain. She also does an amazing
job I've mentioned this a couple of times of really
filling out these worlds and asking important questions about how
marriage affects us. The pros We've spoken about it a
bit excellent in so many different ways. There are a
(48:32):
lot of questions about what it means to be a wife,
which is obviously an extension of marriage, but it's a
very interesting question that is different than what it's like
to be in a marriage. It's like, you know, there's
some feminist issues there, just just the question of what
wifedom looks like. She does a really good job with
chapter breaks. That was something I really enjoyed throughout their
unexpected and oftentimes it'll be kind of right in the
(48:54):
middle of something, but it really because it seems kind
of unexpected and somewhat arbitrary.
Speaker 2 (48:59):
It really makes you look at how the chapter breaks
are functioning, which is always cool.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
I mean, there's some certain conventions that we take for
granted in any novel, and when someone pushes up against
them a little bit and does something unusual, it's really
interesting to step back and be like, oh, why do
chapters function the way they do, and why are people
ending them in certain ways and then beginning in others.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
Hers are very interesting.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
There's a whole kind of meta fiction, kind of sci
fi thing that's happening here that to me feels a
little bit like the video game portion of the book,
but it's.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
Really well done.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
She does a very good job of describing kind of
how this phenomenon is working. I have a lot of
notes about how the attic is functioning and the different
rules about what it affects and what it doesn't, and
it seems like it would be very basic, and it
is on some level, but then she creates this whole
cascade of things that comes from this premise, and in
a lesser writer's hands, it could be kind of clunky
(49:53):
or illogical or kind of contradictory, but it is not.
Speaker 2 (49:56):
It's very well done.
Speaker 1 (49:57):
She has really good use of figurative language, which is excellent.
You guys know, I'm very picky about that meaning, you know,
metaphor and simile and foreshadowing all of that kind of
stuff symbolism. To be honest, it's mostly metaphor and simile,
and honestly, as someone who doesn't really read for plot
very much.
Speaker 2 (50:13):
I really enjoyed the plot.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
There were parts toward you know, like three quarters three,
where I was like, Okay, I think we could move
this along a bit more quickly. I might have edited
a little bit more aggressively, but I really was interested
in how things were going to be tied up, like
how are we going to finish this? How were we
going to you know, cut this cycle, and what kinds
of decisions was she going to make and what kind
of a statement would Grimazio be making with however she
(50:37):
ended the book, So the plot was extremely strong. I'm
looking here, and actually, in terms of quibbles, I only
have two tiny things.
Speaker 2 (50:44):
One is that well three.
Speaker 1 (50:46):
The first thing being what I just mentioned, which is
I do think it's a bit long in places. The
other is like the kid antics. I noted that earlier.
It's such a hard thing to do. I just think,
I don't know. My advice to any writers out there
is is like, don't have your kids and your books
be doing like things that are like wacky cute things.
I don't know what else they're going to be doing,
but you know, I would tread easy on the like endearing, awkward,
(51:09):
goofy kid stuff. She also at one point used the
word impossibly, and anyone who's listened to the Fox Page
knows that it's just it absolutely makes me want to die.
So for like the last fifteen years or so, every
time I'm reading something that purports to be literary fiction,
not everything, but like honestly ninety nine percent, I will
come across the use of the word impossibly somewhere. They'll
(51:31):
be like, you know, he was impossibly tall, or it
was impossibly hot, or whatever the thing is, and I'm
just like, never, never is it good? Never does it
add he is not impossibly tall. You know, there are
many many different ways to describe that, but impossibly first
of all adverbs not great, not great, and certainly that one.
Speaker 2 (51:49):
I just I want to die.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
It does the signal, you know, like a certain kind
of echelon, like a certain level of literary fiction. And
I do think this definitely qualifies as literary fiction. It's
also kind of light. It's is it a rom com?
Speaker 2 (52:01):
Not quite? I don't know.
Speaker 1 (52:02):
We used to call it chick lit. Now I think
we call it book club lit. This is definitely like
book club lit.
Speaker 2 (52:07):
It's light, it's fun, it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
So maybe the inclusion of impossibly, you know, really situates
it firmly in like the literary fiction kind of world.
But I was not super happy when I came across
that tiny, tiny quibble, obviously. So we're going to end
just by looking at the acknowledgments and looking at the
first line of the acknowledgments, because even in the acknowledgments,
she's funny. So at the very back of the book,
(52:31):
this is what she says at the beginning of the acknowledgments.
Every time I get to the end of the book,
I read the acknowledgments and I think, I don't know,
there's no way it takes so many people to make
a book, though, right, which is so funny and so cute.
And I will tell you that this really speaks to
her to the way that she is constructing her humor
and a certain tone. There is a way that you
(52:52):
could have said this and it would not have been
very funny, And it has everything to do with her
syntax here. So I'm going to describe this every time
I get to the end of a book, I read
the acknowledgments, and I think, then she has a colon,
which is very good, and the rest of it is
in italics, which is setting off the fact that this
is different. She is, you know, she is speaking this question,
(53:13):
and the question says, I don't know, which is d
U n n O. Which it's crucial that we have
that kind of casual thing. And it sounds very much
like what you might say to a girlfriend. And there's
also like a way that it's softening.
Speaker 2 (53:25):
It's not like this.
Speaker 1 (53:25):
There's no way this is you know that all these
people need to be thanked. So she says, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (53:30):
There's no way.
Speaker 1 (53:31):
It takes that many people to make a book. Though
right it feels very colloquial, though coming late in the
sentence is very is very individual to the syntax and
to the voice that we are hearing here. It's so
well done. It's casual, it's not like too aggressive. I
just thought it was very well done, and I loved
the fact that we have her beginning even the acknowledgments,
(53:52):
with something that I found very funny. So I'm going
to go ahead and leave it there. I hope that
this little dive into how humor is functioning in the
book has been interesting. Holly Gramontio is so good at this.
I hope that she, frankly, I hope that she turns
her back on the video game world and that she
keeps writing novels because she's very, very good at this,
and I would love to read something else by her.
Speaker 2 (54:13):
So thank you so much for tuning in. Happy reading,
Listeners, readers, welcome to the Foxed Page, where we dive
deep into the very best books. You'll come away with
a richer understanding of the text at hand, all while
learning to read everything a little better. I'm kimberly Ford,
one time adjunct professor at Berkeley, best selling author and
PhD in complet. Today the PhD in complet is getting
a bit of a rest. Today we are diving into
(00:25):
a New York Times bestseller by Holly Gramatzio called The Husbands.
This was a book that was absolutely delightful. Those of
you who've been listening recently know that I have in
the recent past tackled No Country for Old Men by
Kormick McCarthy, and I was drawn to that book for
all the right reasons. I wanted to read something that
was really, you know, challenging and harrowing and dark, and it.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Absolutely delivered on all of those fronts.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
And as a result, I think I was really looking
for something to you know, a bit of a palette cleanser,
something a little more uplifting and something a little brighter,
and The Husbands by Holly Gramatzio was absolutely that. We
always begin with this question of why I read this book.
Why am I talking to you about this book? This
was a recommendation from my younger sister. She's very wise,
very smart, very good reader. We actually have very different tastes,
(01:11):
which is fun because then a lot of times her
recommendations are things that I would not have come across. Anyway,
this came with kind of an interesting premise. This is
the premise that every time our main character would send
her husband up into the attic, a different husband would
come down. And I will say, at first it sounded
a little gimmicky to me. I think there are actually
a lot of pitfalls that this book might have fallen into,
(01:32):
but it ended up being an absolutely delightful look at
some really difficult philosophical questions about monogamy and about marriage,
and about how we make decisions, and about how each
of our decisions impact our lives, and certainly about how
our primary relationships shape who we are. I absolutely delighted
in all of those questions. But the thing that stood
(01:53):
out to me most was the humor in the book.
And if you are a longtime Fox Page listener, you
know that I really appreciate humor. But I have very
high standards and I am really convinced that it's a
very difficult thing to do. There's a lot of very
unfunny attempts at humor out there, and again and again,
Holly Grammacio set up these situations that were not only funny,
(02:14):
but that we're working really hard in terms of moving
the plotforward, developing characters, or doing really important work in
terms of the text. So what we're going to do
today is really focused on all of the ways that
humor is functioning really well in this book. For those
of you who like an agenda, we're going to do
a very quick bio about Holly Gramatzio. There are a
couple of interesting things about her that I want to
(02:34):
touch upon. We're then going to talk about humor, sort
of how humor functions, basically the general tenets of humor,
and then I'm going to talk a little bit about
how it is functioning here in the book. Will then
go on to look basically sort of chronologically at a
bunch of different examples of the excellent humor in the book,
and we'll talk about not only why these episodes of
(02:55):
humor work, but also what they are contributing to the
novel itself. It's really in many ways, like a primer
in how to sort of set.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Things up and make them funny, but.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Then also how to use humor to really enrich whatever
text it is that you are writing or reading. Frankly,
we're going to close by looking at all of the
things this book has to offer, things I really enjoyed,
but that we are not going to dig into, just
to give you kind of an overview of the richness
and I think the success of this text. But I'm
also going to throw in a couple of quibbles before
(03:25):
we dive into the bio. For those of you on
the YouTube, I am wearing one of my own creations here,
I am wearing what is called the shifty sweater, and
I mention that because I actually get a fair amount
of comments from fellow fiber artists out there. In fact,
some people would like to know the patterns of some
of the sweaters that I've knitted, which is such a compliment.
Although I will say the ultimate compliment is when sometimes
(03:55):
I have just made my own thing, like I've just
come up with my own recipe, my own pattern for something,
and someone will ask and I'll be like, oh my gosh, sorry,
I made that up myself.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
This one.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
However, if you go to ravelry you can find the
shifty sweater. It looks so difficult, and that is the
amazing thing about this sweater.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
It looks so hard to do, and it is not.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Only is it not difficult, but it is so fun
because you kind of never know how the next row
is going to look, and it's like this magic trick
before your very eyes. But back to the book, We're
going to dive in with a very quick, but I
think very important in some ways, biography of Holly Gramatcio.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
This is not our normal biography.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
We're not digging into all of her details, but there
is something that is very salient. And whoever wrote this
little quick bio paragraph about her at the start of
the book is really well done. I also really appreciate
the fact that they have this little bio, this little
paragraph at the beginning and not at the end, because
I think it does, in some very subtle ways.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Inform the way that we are reading the book.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
So we find out that she is born in Adelaide,
so she's Australian. The book is set in London. She
currently is based in London. I really loved the London parts.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Of the book.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
I found that part very enriching. But what was most
interesting to me here is that she's very involved with
video games. So apparently she founded the Experimental Games Festival
now play This, which I don't even really know what
that means, but founding a games festival sounds pretty impressive,
and frankly, it's super foreign it to me.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
But then it goes on.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
To say that she wrote the script for the award
winning indie video game Dicey Dungeons, which that actually just
kind of makes me laugh. It seems very funny and
very clever. I also didn't really know that anyone had
to write a script for these things. But it's so
interesting to think about the conceit of this book, the
premise of this book. I mean, it doesn't necessarily sound
(05:38):
right like a video game, but it's very interesting to
think about the different ways that the rules, you know,
sort of resetting and getting a new life and this
kind of thing. It does in some ways mimic the
way that people play video games, and I'm very interested
in the ways that that might cross over, especially because
it sounds like she's doing the verbal part of these
video games. It also says here she's particularly interested in rules, cities, gardens,
(06:02):
games that get people acting creatively, and arts that get
people interacting with their surroundings in new ways.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
I love that. I love this idea of.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Being interested in play and creativity and games, and I
think all of that gardens too.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
There's some good gardens in this book.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
I think all of that really, does, you know, give
us a little bit of a window into the creative
mindset that brought us to this book. This is also
her first novel, which I was like, Wow, this is
someone who is really kind of a polymath here. You know,
she can do all this video gaming stuff and then
also can apparently pop over and not only have a
great idea for a novel, but execute it in just
(06:37):
an amazing way. One quick thing fro from the editorial
world is that, and most of you probably know this,
but when you have a paragraph like this that's a biography,
you know, nine times out of ten it is written
in fact by the author. Not always, but you know,
a lot of the time. So when you read something
like she's particularly interested in rules, play cities, gardens, games
(06:57):
that people, you know, that kind of thing, those or
her priorities, So it's always very interesting to me, even
if it's written in the third person, to know that
that's something that she really wants the reader to know.
So if you are someone who reads fiction pretty widely,
you cannot not think of Gabrielle Zevin. So Gabrielle Zevin
wrote Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which is a book
that came out several years ago. I loved that book.
(07:20):
I was very resistant to that book. Someone suggested it
to me and I was like, wow, video games, no,
thank you. And then I read it and I was
just absolutely blown away. There are immediate parallels here. As
soon as you read this beginning part and you know
that she has to do with the structuring and the
writing of video games, you immediately think of Gabrielle Zevin.
And then sure enough you zip right across from this
(07:41):
little biography page here to the blurbs and who has
blurbed the book right across the way, but Gabrielle Zeven.
And here's what Gabrielle Zevian has to say, richly characterized,
philosophical and funny. I enjoyed all the husbands, even especially
the terrible ones, time bending gem about the way we
(08:02):
live now.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
I thought that was so good because the book is.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Philosophical and it is definitely richly characterized, and it is funny.
I also enjoy the idea of especially enjoying the terrible
husbands because honestly, they are some of the kind of
richest fodder in the book. And I was very happy
to see that Gabrielle z Evan you know, has put
her stamp of approval on this book, because gabrielle'z evn
is a world world class writer who wrote just a
(08:25):
hell of a novel, and in many ways, Tomorrow and
Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a much kind of heavier weight
and like a much more I think, in some ways
more significant novel.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
It's trying to do different things.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
I mean, it was definitely like trying to be a
more weighty novel where the Husband's is, you know, a
bit lighter and a bit frothier and a bit more fun.
But I really like the idea that Gabrielle zevin has
very positive things to say about this.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
I also wanted to read two other quick blurbs here.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
I usually don't read them ahead of time, partially because
I don't want people to sort of, like, you know,
creating some narrative about the book in my head, but I.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Really thought that these were very good.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
So another one by Claire Lombardo, The Husband's is a
wily and wonderful exploration of modern decision making, kaleidoscopic and
bright and very very funny.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
So I love this too.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
I love the fact that there is a lot of
emphasis here in this blurb on the humor in the book,
because as this whole lecture is going to try to prove,
I really think that is one of the major strengths
in the work. And then the last one we're going
to look at this is from Kirkus Reviews, which is
really still a very important kind of mainstay in terms
of the industry weighing in on the quality of a book.
(09:36):
The plot allows the author to explore current attitudes and
approaches to dating and mating from a fresh perspective, a
fun take on big questions, and.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
I love that too.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
And the reason I'm ending with that blurb is because
as we are reading through, we're going to look at
the humor, how it functions, and how it contributes to
the novel. But there are ways that this is asking
some really big questions and doing so in a way
that's not super weight, and that's not really ponderous.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
That is actually very fun.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
And I really love the fact that that person, in
a very succinct sentence from the Kirkus Reviews, was able
to articulate that in the vein of looking at these blurbs,
I want to do something slightly unusual which we usually
do not do here, which is to look at the
copy on the back cover. So we have a repetition
here of the Gabrielle Zevan blurb, which I think is
a very good idea. She's widely recognized and really should
(10:24):
be because of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and I
really appreciate what they have said here. And then underneath
the blurb those of you not on YouTube, I'm just
looking at the back of my yellow paperback copy. But
right underneath it, in kind of bright red type, it
says this do you take this?
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Man?
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Know what about this one? And I think that this
is such a clever way right at the beginning to
introduce the idea of the cleverness of the humor. And
this is also a good place for us to sort
of take a step back and describe a little bit.
This is very obvious about sort of how humor functions
in general. So the way that often humor works in
literature as well as in life and in comedy and
(11:05):
in terms of conversation and all sorts of different things
is that you know, our human minds are expecting certain things.
So you expect you know, A plus B is going
to equal C. Or if we have A and kind
of a long and drawn out A, we expect B.
We just have these expectations, and when the expectations are
foiled in ways that are playful or unexpected, then you
(11:25):
result in humor. And this is a very good example
of it. So do you take this man? Is such
an enormous It's this huge and kind of ponderous thing.
It's very culturally important.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
For lots of people.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
It's this big kind of sacrisyanct question about marriage and
about monogamy and about making a lifelong commitment. So we
have this idea and it's still resonant.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
I mean, I think you know, even.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
If you're super not into monogamy, like you recognize that
as an important statement. Do you take this man? It's
kind of this big authoritative voice. And then what is
subverting the answer here? What is surprising? What is funny
is this simple and very no So you have this
funny ellision here. We don't have any comment by the
bride or anything here. I suppose we could also imagine
(12:07):
a groom if we're talking about a same sex marriage,
But you don't have any kind of, you know, cumbersome
response or anything. You simply have a know what about
this one. So it's this very clever, very economical way
of taking a very large, philosophical, weighty question and then
answering in a totally unexpected and playful and kind of
(12:28):
light way, which is really tipping us off to a
lot of the ways that humor is going to function
as we get into the novel. Okay, we're going to
dive into the book and just look more or less
chronologically at a bunch of times where I think humor
is working very well and happily. The first page is
offering up three different instances kind of bam bam bam,
all in a row of some very clever and I think,
(12:50):
very foundation laying humor. So the very first paragraph reads this,
The man is tall and has dark tousled hair, and
when she gets back quite late from Elena's Hendu, she
finds him waiting on the landing at the top.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Of the stairs.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
We're not going to parse all of this too carefully,
but it is worth noting this is a third person narrator.
But because we have this she that immediately becomes our protagonist,
the narrative stance, the third person narrator, all of that
is very very good.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
We also have this immediacy right.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Away, she's saying Elena's hendu. It's kind of flattering to
the reader because it assumes that we know, you know
essentially who Elena is, and we are kind of right
in the midst of this intimate friendship that they have.
We know what a hendu is, which is a bachelorette party.
We're also situating ourselves pretty firmly in either the UK.
I don't know in Australia if they have hendus maybe,
but we have this idea of being in somewhere in
(13:44):
the Commonwealth, somewhere in the British Commonwealth. We also have
this idea of the man, and beginning with the man,
which is this kind of generic male form, which is
very important because we're going to just substitute all sorts
of different forms in for that generic stand in male.
I also like the way, but you know, you think
about like the man as like this kind of patriarchal, authoritative,
(14:04):
like generic figure, and here.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
He is very much at the whims in.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Many ways, like existentially at the whims of our protagonist.
So we have him standing at the top of the landing.
She yelps and steps backwards what she starts, then tries again,
who are you? He sighs, fun night, which is so funny.
So the reason why this is functioning, I'm gonna break
(14:29):
it down for you here is that she is startled.
She doesn't know who the man is, and she yelps
and she's saying like who are you, like really, and
the reader is right there with her, because the reader's like, I.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Don't know who this guy is. And then he sighs,
And there is something so economical about that. It's like
it's a little bit like.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Louri Moore, which again we really need to look at
some Lauri Moore, where it's like there are lots of
things that he could have done in that instance. He
could have been like, oh, Lauren, or he could have,
you know, done all sorts of different things.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
But the sighing is it's so excellent. He's a little
bit like he knows her really well.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
It's a little world weary. He's like, oh my gosh, okay,
here we go again. It's not aggressive, it's not scary.
It's pointing to some lightness. And then again this very
economical fun night. So you know, there's a lot happening there,
which is that this guy is assuming that she's drunk
and that's why she does not recognize him. It's so
(15:23):
clever and it is so well done. And this is
all within like I mean, it's actually three paragraphs, but
it's very brief. We're kind of like, I don't know,
twelve lines into the book. It is so great. And
the thing that's happening there is we're expecting, you know,
this like intruder in her house and she's like, who
are you? And we're expecting him to be like what like, Lauren,
i'm your husband, or we expect him to be some
(15:43):
sort of actual intruder, and neither of those things happen.
He takes it in stride in this very kind of
casual and light way that ends up being very funny. Also,
the fun night thing is really pointing to a lot
of intimacy but also telling us a lot about this
main character, who is someone who often goes out and
has a fun night and apparently comes home having had
enough to drink that she's like not quite recognizing her husband.
(16:06):
There are some ways I will say in the book
that I felt like there was a little too much lightness.
Like you have to suspend disbelief obviously at the very beginning.
If you are in a novel where you know, you're
the male characters are going up into the attic and
you know, coming back down as a different person, obviously
you suspend the disbelief.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Right at the beginning.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
But there are times where where I think the lightness,
you know, it's avoiding a little bit of like the
heavier things that are happening in the novel, which is
totally appropriate. But there were a couple of times where
I was like, oh, this seems like a little bit
too light under the circumstances. But overall it ended up
feeling delightful to me. So just two paragraphs later, we
have more kind of in this vein. But what's interesting
(16:47):
about it is we're continuing with the humor, but we're
really learning more about this person, and we're also establishing
some very like nuts and bolts things about our situation.
But in this humor is vein that makes it much
more fun than a simple, straightforward, you know, omniscient narrator
telling us what's up. So we're a couple of paragraphs down, Lauren,
he says, come on, come up and I'll make you
(17:08):
some tea. He knows her name?
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Is he?
Speaker 1 (17:12):
No, it's been months since she had that guy around
and he was blonde, he had a beard. This isn't him,
which was also so funny. So we have this idea
here that she's piecing together what's happening. He's probably not
an intruder if he knows her name, and he's being
so calm and whatnot. And then we have this is
he and then an M dash? Actually, my bad, that's
(17:33):
an N dash, which I don't know. Seems to me
like that should be an M dash. We can chat
grammar later. Anybody's interested can comment below, and we can
get crazy about M dash versus en dash. I one
of my kids just sent me the most upsetting thing,
which is that apparently if something has a lot of
M dashes in it, that is a signal that it
was created by AI. And I, as someone who have
(17:54):
been like literally a lifelong devote of the m Dash.
I'm absolutely crushed by that. But back to the text,
So this question of like is he and you're like, wait, like,
as the reader, you're like, is he? What?
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Like, what is she going to say about him?
Speaker 1 (18:08):
And then she says, no, it's been months since she
had that guy round. And the thing about that, I mean,
it's also charmingly English because it's not around, it's round,
and those kinds of English subtleties Australian slash English subtleties
are very delightful for an American reader who's tuned into
that kind of thing. I did not listen to any
of this on the audible. It must be read by
(18:28):
an English speaking person. That would be fun. But it's
also telling us again that this is someone who has
guys round occasionally. And I think that's a very important
premise because a lot of this book is questioning all
of our kind of deep held thoughts on monogamy and
on sexual liberation, on the idea of women being able
to choose and being having a lot of agency and relationships,
(18:49):
whether they be casual sexual relationships or whether they are
monogamous marital relationships.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
So I really like the idea of.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Emphasizing here she's not someone who has any trouble bringing
guys around.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
She does this quite often.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
She's someone who's sexually liberated in a way that I
find very appealing.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
And what's excellent.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
About it here is we're not we're learning this in
this way that's very light and funny and very economical.
I also like from a grammatical perspective, she's got a
bunch of fragments there. He was blonde, he had a beard.
This isn't him. So that's all set off with commas,
not with periods, her syntax, her word choice, the prose,
and this is just excellent. And we're focusing on the
(19:29):
comedy today on her use of humor, which is excellent, excellent,
but the prose in general I found just kind of impeccable,
which is really impressive in a debut novel, and especially
with someone you know who's first and foremost a gamer,
a video game creator.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
It's all very impressive.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
And the last thing we're going to look at on
this first page is is kind of an important element
because it's one that I kept hearing throughout, and this
is one that I think other people might be hearing,
but definitely I did, and it is echoes of Fleabag.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Part of that is because it's all.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Happening in London, and so I know I have that
association kind of ready to go, and every single time
I heard these echoes of Fleabag, I was absolutely delighted.
If you are someone who has not yet seen Fleabag,
I am so jealous of you.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
You must absolutely.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Right away go and sit down and watch both seasons
of that incredibly, incredibly great television show. But what Holly
Grammazio is doing that I think is resonant. It's definitely
not too on the nose. But what's very resonant about
it is when Holly Grammatzio is doing these asides to
the reader. There are times when she's sort of saying
things they definitely fit in with what is happening in
(20:38):
the text. It's not like in parentheses or in italics
or anything. It's very seamless. But you have these assides
that are kind of directed to the reader that in
my mind feel a lot like when Fleabag is looking
directly at the camera. So these sorts of asides, whether
or not you know Fleabag is not really super irrelevant.
These assides to the reader when they are done well,
(20:59):
are so great. So there's an enormous amount of intimacy
that is established with the reader when you have this
kind of aside. So I'm going to give you an example.
This is down at the bottom of the very first page,
and she's obviously still you know, this is one of
her husbands, but she's still like feeling like he might
be a burglar or an intruder if you leave. She says,
I won't report this. She will absolutely report this. So
(21:23):
there it is, so you know, she's saying to them, okay,
I won't report it, and then as an aside to
the reader, without any fanfare, it's just the simple next sentence.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
It's not set off.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
It says she will absolutely report this, And I like
the absolutely there, because this is one of those kind
of conventions.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
It's like absolutely she will.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Like it's putting emphasis on the fact that like one
hundred percent she's going to do this, and she's totally
setting this guy up with essentially what is a lie?
Speaker 2 (21:46):
And that's this kind of magical.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Thing where it's directly, you know, telling the reader something
that she is not at all sharing with the other
people who are in the scene, the other fictional people
in the scene. She reaches behind to the door handle
and tries to turn it, which she takes a lot
of fiddling, but she isn't going to look away, especially
not now that oh God, he's coming down the stairs.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
So this is so good.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
This O God thing is set off here by m
dash's you know what, I take it back what I
said above about the en dash. I think these readers
are not powerful enough. Maybe that's what's happening here. Above
it looked like an en dash, but I think all
of these are proper m dashes. So aplus on the
grammatical punctuation here. But what's excellent here is not only
do we have this amazing aside when she says she
(22:33):
isn't going to look away, especially not now that oh God,
he's coming down.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
The stairs, this O God is set off.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
So it's as the reader, you're hearing it, and there's
this intimacy because she's not saying it out loud to him.
She's thinking it and we are in her mind, but
she's sort of addressing us. But we also have this
really economic way where she's telling us what is happening.
She's describing how he is coming down the stairs. But
it's not like and then the guy started coming down
the stairs. It's real time. We're experiencing it with her.
(23:01):
We're experiencing her sense of like, oh my god, no,
he's coming toward us. What is going to happen here?
But we are so firmly with our protagonist that you
have all of this identification between reader and protagonist that's
happening right at the very beginning. This is so strong.
We have this excellent aside, which is building intimacy. We
have this amazing economical and very sort of colorful way
(23:23):
of describing what is happening, all of which is making
this feel very rich.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
There's a lot of verisimilitude. We can sort of imagine things.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
There were a couple of times where I had a
hard time picturing what this apartment was looking like, but
honestly that was just because I was trying to find
something to be critical of hearing the very beginning of
the book. But this kind of a side that again
to me feels like flea bag is something that we
see over and over throughout the novel, and it's excellent.
It's the kind of thing that you like having as
a refrain, not just because it seems like an excellent
(23:52):
television show, but because it's actually a very effective way
to convey information, but also to have the reader, you know,
feel real intimacy and to have real understanding of what's
happening in the mind of the protagonist. Okay, we're going
to jump to page twelve. This is actually a handily.
This is another example of that kind of Fleabag kind
of moment. And in this case it's not an aside
(24:14):
a La Fleabag. It's more of the kind of humor
that we have that is crucial in Fleabag that shows
us the intimacy between the main character, Fleabag and her
best friend. Throughout this book, Holly Gramacio does such a
good job of establishing the very close ties between Elena
and Lauren, who is our protagonist. A lot of it
is done with shorthand, a lot of it is done
(24:35):
with the texts that they're sharing with each other. A
lot of it is very economical. It's kind of staccato,
like we don't have to have the whole picture of things.
We simply get reactions. But because it's so well done,
we understand the whole backstory without needing it explained to us.
One thing I will say, sometimes, Pete, this is even
harder to do than humor. Sometimes in this book, when
she is describing what her little nieces and nephews are
(24:58):
up to, she falls into what I think is kind
of a trap in that it's very difficult to describe
what kids are up to in like a quirky little
kid kind of way without it sounding so cliche. I
don't I have to think of someone who does this well,
I don't know. It's actually kind of tedious to me.
Maybe it's because I'm menapausal now to look at these,
(25:18):
like to really dig into books with lots of little
kids in them. I think that like trying to show
like the quirky way is that kids like ask funny
questions or whatever the thing is, it always feels predictable.
It always feels kind of like, okay, yeah, I mean
all kids are, say, quirky little things like that. Sometimes
I think that in this book that element of smaller kids.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Is not the strongest part.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
And the reason I'm bringing it up right now, I
think is because that is very much in counterpoint to
all of the interactions that she's having with her best
friend Elena. And it's also important to note here that
part of what's happening when she's checking these texts from
Elena is it's forwarding the plot. At this point, we're
still really very curious to know like who this guy is,
and the way that she's going to figure out who
(25:59):
the guy is.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
She's very smart.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
She's like, Oh, I'm going to go back and look
at my texts and maybe my texts will tell me
who this man is. There are lots of different ways
throughout the book, and this is I think like a
video gaming kind of mentality where you're like, wait, how
is this attic thing functioning? And then the fact that
her husbands are changing, how does that manifest in the
real world? And like how much is that impacting the
history before the man emerged from the attic? Or how
(26:24):
much is it impacting everything else in her life? Does
she still have nieces and nephews? All of these big
kind of philosophical questions about the choices we make and
reality and how they affect the past and the future.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
So on the bottom of twelve we have this.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
She checks her sent messages lots of hearts to Elena,
and then this is all in caps, I love you,
I know you're going to be so happy, and a
photo back from her of their chicken shop reflections, captioned,
it must be so difficult for everyone else that we're
so beautiful. That's the part that reminded me of Fleabag.
There is a lot in Fleabag of Fleabag. And then gosh,
(27:00):
oh my gosh, the name of her best friend just
went read out of my head.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
The blonde woman.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Who dies, who is dead throughout the whole entire series.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Anyway, I can't remember her name. It might come back
to me, probably won't, But this idea of it must
be so difficult for everyone that we are so beautiful.
To me, that sounded absolutely like the best friend on Fleabag.
And even if you're someone who loves that television show,
there's no way this feels heavy handed, because that is
both in Fleabag and here. What these women, Phoebe waller
(27:27):
Bridge and Holly Gramatzio are tapping into is a certain
kind of humor and a certain kind of shorthand, and
a certain amount of intimacy and unexpectedness. And this is
unexpected I mean, it's when you hear someone say it
must be so difficult for everyone, you don't think that,
then the next phrase is going to be that we
are so beautiful.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
And honestly we should have more of that.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
But that's just speaking, you know, to women's self doubt
and the ways that we are not supposed to express
how beautiful we.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Think we are.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
So it's unexpected, but it is also working really hard
to establish what's happen in the novel, A lot about
our character, a lot about her best friend. It's just excellent.
We're jumping all the way to page sixty five. But
it turns out this is our third example, and I
think it's the final example of again this kind of
fleabag kind of tone. So here we have her sister,
Lauren's sister, talking about Lauren's wedding to one of these husbands,
(28:19):
and for the sister, the wedding had been terrible and
she had broken up with her girlfriend, and it was
like this terrible experience for her. Twenty of your guests
heard us break up. I'm crying in the background of
half your wedding photos. The food was delicious, so funny,
so funny to me, I mean, you have this like
it's actually the end of a fairly long paragraph describing
(28:39):
why they broke up and whatnot. And you have this
kind of accretion toward the end of this paragraph, where
you know, things are getting more and more dire, and.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
She's like, it was awful and everybody saw us, and.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
So you're expecting more of that kind of tone. And
then you have this funny, declarative, simple sentence, the food
was delicious. And we actually do see a lot of
this in Fleabag. This lecture's turning into like a like
a tiny analysis of some of the humor and Fleabag.
And in many ways it makes sense to me that
the brand of humor is translating well on the page here.
But what's happening here kind of more broadly, is that
(29:10):
we are having some comic relief. So this is a
book that is very light even when very heavy things
are happening. There tends to be a lightning, a leavening
to it, which is really what we are expecting from
a book like this, and it is really the joy
of a book like this. And more importantly, what's happening
in the paragraph above is that the sister breaks up
with her fiance or her girlfriend, because they'd been engaged
(29:33):
for a long time and they weren't sure if they
wanted to be together, and they didn't have a lot
of conviction. And in this iteration of marriage, it turns
out that Lauren and her husband had only been to
together for a little while, but they had lots of conviction.
So you're talking about something that's pretty weighty here, which
is this idea of like when should you get married?
How much conviction do you need? Should you sort of
jump into these things? Should you deliberate for a long time?
(29:55):
So you have really large questions that are then levined
by humor, which is really I think the recipe for
serious success in this book. We're now going to jump
to page seventy three. One of the things that this
book does so well is it does this kind of
observation humor. And I'm not a big fan of observational humor.
So like observational humor, thinks Seinfeld when they're like talking
(30:17):
about like the big salad or like a close talker,
it's a very like Jerry Seinfeld. Larry David, I like
curb your enthusiasm better for a number of reasons. Although
that is still definitely a lot of observational humor. So
what that kind of humor is doing, you know, when
you have like a close talker, is it's you know,
you're picking out something that is that is a phenomenon
that people have yet to fully articulate, and then you're
(30:38):
articulating it in a way that's kind of funny, and
that's kind of the whole joke. So what I like
here better is that in the book we have a
lot of observational humor, but she's taking it a number
of steps further than just naming the thing, and a
lot of times it's like a skewering of certain populations
that I think is so funny. There's an American in
(30:59):
the book who's very and I loved all of the
parts where we were talking about where she was talking about,
you know, different characteristics of Americans. We're going to look
at a couple of them because I found them very funny.
But this on page seventy three is just an absolute
gem of a paragraph that is speaking to this idea
of preconceptions. This is also an interesting look at how
(31:20):
the book is functioning because every time she's in a marriage,
she's having.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
To figure out what the marriage is all.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
About, and who she is in the marriage and what
she gets up to in the marriage. So there's this
kind of self exploration that's really interesting, and of course
it brings up all sorts.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Of philosophical questions.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
So here on seventy three we have her trying to
figure out who she and her current husband are, you know,
kind of.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
In the world.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Oh, she thinks they're not cheating. They're swingers, though, Aren't
all swingers white and in their forties? She's sure, she
read that in an article somewhere. Their group doesn't quite
fit the demographic. Maybe they could be polyamorous instead. She's
vague on the difference. But they're in London's outermost suburbs,
and none of them, as far as she is aware,
(32:04):
work in tech, so this doesn't still fit. I honestly
can't keep reading the idea that all swingers are not
only white and in their forties, but that they all
work in tech.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
It's that is so funny to me.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
I mean, I am literally sitting here in Silicon Valley, which,
by the way, non sequitor, but we have terrible internet
and terrible telephone coverage here right in the heart of
Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
But to go back.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Again, what I love about this kind of observational humor
in her hands is that it's folded into this larger question.
She's discovering what's happening, which is funny to begin with.
And we have that first part about being forty and white,
and then she is waiting a couple of beats, and
then this idea of being in tech and also the
nuance between swinging and polyamory. She is loading so much
(32:50):
into this one paragraph, and the way that she's meeting out,
the way she's parsing all of this is so strong.
This next example of humor will surprise not one of
you who has listened to the Fox Page for a
long time. This has to do with just simple women's liberation.
And you have to go on a bit of a
journey with her. It's not you have to You get
to go on a bit of a journey here and
(33:10):
it is so this is like, I don't know anything
about stand up comedy, really.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
But to me, this is exactly like what you would
want a stand up comedian to do.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
There's a setup that is funny in itself, and then
it's making kind of a larger statement, and that larger
statement is actually really important and it's made in a
way that is light and entertaining, but it's really saying
something about our society. So on page eighty one we
have this paragraph. This is her, yet again, trying to
figure out how she and her husband relate who she
(33:40):
is in this new world, what kinds of habits she has,
that sort of thing she likes him too. But then
she goes to the bathroom and finds that A her
period has just started. Not ideal, and b the only
product she has in the cupboard is a menstrual cup.
So even that not ideal, that like Comma's set off
by Commas. That's almost the kind of a side where
(34:00):
she's saying to the reader like, okay, not ideal, just
started the period. And then it was so funny to
me that like it's these are things that are not ideal. A,
her period has started, and then B we're kind of like,
what is this other thing going to be? And it's
the fact that she uses a menstrul cup as this
iteration of her life. Okay, And then moving on, she
looks up a series of instructional diagrams on her phone,
(34:22):
folds it like this or like this or like that,
and she gives it a go, but the cup keeps
springing open when it's halfway inserted, blood spattering across the tiles,
and it gets slippier, slipperier wow.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
And it gets slippier. Wow.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
I actually had a hard time pronouncing that because she's
used this like excellent little version of this word that
is her own, which is slippier, not slipperier.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
It gets slippier each.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Time she reads the faq one last attempt, but all
she learns is that there are two sizes of menstrual cups,
and that, as a thirty one year old, she's recommended
to take the larger, and she simply declines to remain
in a world that comments immediately on the size of
her vagina.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Loved this. Loved this.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
I loved the graphic nature of her, like trying to
figure out how to do the thing, and then this
idea of looking things.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Up on your phone.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
You're reading the FAQs, you're trying to you know, it's
a very common experience of like trying to figure out
something that you don't want to necessarily like ask you
another person about You're trying to figure it out the
way you can, and then you know, we have this
kind of messy experience. But then the fact that the
kicker is about someone making you know, a comment about
like the man or like Big Pharma making a comment
(35:33):
about the size of her vagina is so funny to me.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
It's unexpected.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
It's growing very organically from the rest of this paragraph.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
I just found it masterful.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
On page one hundred, we have an example of the
kind of humor that's this very kind of sweet and
kind of basic thing. And again this has to do
with expectations. So this is with the American husband. His
name is Carter, and he is there at a wedding
and he is going around. Some have escaped in the chickens,
and so he's going around and he is like scooping
up the chickens. So this is something that seems kind
(36:06):
of awkward. It seems kind of you know, harried, doesn't
seem particularly like sexy or exciting. And we have this description.
He walks with it toward Lauren, so triumphant, his face delighted,
still got it. He says, you try and keep them
out of the barn. If the hawk comes down again,
I'll ferry them over to the coop, and that's what
he does. Over the course of the first dance and
(36:29):
the next song. He collects hens, first one at a time,
and then as his confidence grows and she's more and
more visibly impressed, two at a time, one in each arm.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
It's magnificent.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
What's excellent here is like the grandeur of that word
magnificent is just like not what you are expecting her
to say. We know she's getting more impressed, but he's
like walking around with chickens and he's scooping them up
and he's doing this kind of goofy thing. Also, magnificent
here is italicized, so we have this really i mean
almost on the like it kind of looks like cursive,
you know, italics function. But so the word magnificent and
(37:05):
then together with it being in italics is so it's
just like not what you're expecting from like a chicken situation,
but it is so economical and so strong because it
is showing us what is happening with her, Like she
is seeing this thing that he is doing, and for
her it's this very alluring thing and it seems magnificent.
You see the way that she's elevating him but what
(37:28):
is excellent about this is the thing that she's describing
so aptly, and the thing that we're seeing so vividly
is totally unexpected. I mean, we've talked a lot about
how if you want a reader to really step into
a world and be convinced of that world, you need
to show them details that they wouldn't be able to
imagine on their own. So like, if you have description
(37:49):
of like a country wedding in England, there are lots
of different things. As I am saying that, you're probably
picturing a bunch of different things, but you might not
be picturing like a picturesque little flock of hens.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Who is one around.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
And then you certainly might not be picturing like a
hawk that is arriving and causing all sorts of mayhem.
So this is the kind of choice detail that she's
adding in that feels original, it feels unique, it feels
really well planned because then it's offering up this opportunity
to show us so much about these characters, and then
she's adding things like it's magnificent as this kind of kicker,
(38:23):
it is so strong. On page one to eleven, we
have two different examples of humor one of them is
very quick. I'm going to read it to you here.
And this has to do with this idea of whether
or not she and her husband were cheating. The question
was whether or not they were swinging or cheating with
their neighbors who live down below, one of whom is
named Miriam, and she says this in a new iteration, Well,
(38:46):
at least if Mariam's pissed off at her and the husband,
she won't be trying to fuck them, which is so funny.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
So partially fuck is fuck is a word that I love.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
I think a lot of people know that, but it
is a word that is used very sparingly in this book,
which is excellent because then when it is used, it's
used to very good effect. And in this case, I
like the fact that it's just the verb, Like it's
not used as an explative. She's just using it as
the verb, which is one of my favorite ways. I mean,
it's just like it's so forceful and succinct and excellent.
(39:15):
What else is really amazing here is the fact that
it's coming at the end of the sentence. It has
a lot of force, But it's also that she's not
trying to fuck them So in the other iteration, Miriam was,
you know, I think there was some bisexuality. She was
interested in kissing both Lauren and Lauren's husband. So this
idea of like, at least if Mariam's mad, she's not
trying to fuck us both of us.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
So and partially that's just delightfully funny and unexpected.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Perhaps you know, in a very like heteronormative world that
like Mariam would only be trying to fuck the husband,
but it's unexpected.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
That it would be both of them.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
And there's also something about that kind of casual reference
that's really important. And this is what's great about a
lot of the humor is folded into the humor is
indication of how she feels about this deal to her
that Mariam is you know, somewhat bisexual or at least,
you know, by curious do we say that anymore? I
don't know if we say that anymore, But anyway, you know,
(40:08):
Mariam is someone who is interested in kissing both of
these people, potentially fucking both of these people, and that
is like not even of note, that is something that
is just going to get folded into this clever line
that is so strong. Then down at the bottom of
the page. This is another example of just the kind
of detail that Gramazio is using that I find so compelling,
(40:30):
and I think it's one of the reasons. I mean,
this book is kind of long. There are parts toward
the end that's like get flagged a little bit for me.
But there's a lot of detail and things are drawn
very specifically. Someone said earlier in the blurbs that it's
richly characterized.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Is that what they said? I think it's Gabrielle Evan,
meaning that the characters are very richly drawn. But it's
not just the characters.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
The whole entire world that she is creating is really
rich with details. So down at the bottom of one
eleven we have this description. She's driving with one of
her husbands. They drive southwest ten minutes in. Felix puts
a podcast on. It's about what economists can learn from trait,
inheritance and snakes, and it is very very boring, hosted
(41:11):
by three men with almost identical voices, two of whom
are called Matt So so far, and it is very
very boring. That extra very was so funny to me.
I mean, you expected her to say like it sucked
or it was boring or whatever, but it.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Is very, very boring.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
I don't know why that added very really put this
over the top for me and made me love it.
Then we go on and it's hosted by three men.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
Of course it is.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
It's also the topic is absurd, you know, the inherited
traits of snakes, and then what that has to do
with economics, which is of course lampooning the idea of
all podcasts, which you know, step away from the podcast here, people,
but this is very but every element of this is
pointing at different things and is very funny. Then we have,
of course the three men who are you know, it's
(41:56):
mostly men out there in the podcasting world who are
trying to tell us how to live our lives and
what we should take from economics and all the rest.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
Of these things. And then the fact that two of
them are called Matt. It's so good.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
This is the kind of detail that she's accruing as
we are moving through this that is kind of making
it funnier and funnier. And then she does this excellent
thing where we have the build up leads to something
that is unexpected. It reads this It is hosted by
three men with almost identical voices, two of whom are
called Matt. And it's calming to just sit there and
(42:27):
look out the window. So again this is the kind
of thing where she's saying, it's very very boring. There
are all these men, and it is so calming because
then she can listen to it and look out the window.
The predictable thing, of course, would be to be annoyed
at how annoying this whole thing is, and yet she
finds it calming, which is that kind of inversion that
she does. So well, Okay, we have three more examples
(42:47):
we're going to look at. On page two oh one,
we have a conversation between our protagonist and someone who
becomes kind of this friend and also kind of a
foil in some ways, who is not Elena, but is
a very close friend who is again and again and
who becomes a kind of a thread throughout the novel.
And he is talking in this case about his younger sister.
(43:07):
She's a good kid, he says.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
A lot younger.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
She was four or five when I moved out, So
we're not super close. I think you two would get on, though.
She does that thing you do sometimes of getting super
polite when someone says something you think is stupid. I
loved this. I thought it was so clever. I mean,
this is not like a haha, funny, but it's an
interesting and unique way to get across some information. I mean,
there are lots of different ways that he could talk
(43:30):
about Lauren together with his sister, but to point out
this thing that they both do. And I think there
is a cultural phenomenon where someone says, you know, somebody
says something really stupid, that maybe people get overly polite
to kind of like compensate and make them sort of
not realize or not feel so bad about having said
something stupid.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
It is so well articulated.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
When she says, right here, she does that thing you
do sometimes of getting super polite when someone says something
you think is stupid.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
So good, so good. That's observational humor. I can get
on to sixteen.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
We have another example of this kind of observational humor.
And what I would like you to note here as
we are reading through this is how skillfully she is
introducing this idea. There are lots of different ways you
could have this idea and this kind of criticism that
you could weave this into your novel, but the way
that she does it is so effective. It is also
(44:22):
yet another underscoring of how this world is functioning, and
that she's having to figure out each time who she is,
which of course is a very large statement on the
fact that who we choose to be our partners, the
choices that we make about matrimony and monogamy do affect
everything in our lives. So it's both funny, but it
is also developing this idea, this deeply philosophical question about
(44:46):
who we are as people. So on to sixteen, they
go to an Alberino tasting night at the wine shop
near Rob and Elena's and she worries that she's going
to have wine opinions, but Michael is happy to take
care of that. So it so funny that she worries
she's going to have wine opinions.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
So, I mean, there are.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Lots of ways you could say that, you know, she's
worried she was going to be a wine snob, or
she was worried that, you know, the evening was going
to be tedious, But this idea of she worries she's
going to have wine opinions, there's also something in that
that is kind of philosophical about this idea of like,
she doesn't have control of who she is and how
she is being shaped, and she has judgment. She does
not want to be someone who has a lot of
(45:25):
wine opinions, and yet there is a world where she
may have been shaped in that direction. And it speaks
to these kinds of preconceived notions that people have and
prejudices that we have that certainly we can get over
if we are exposed to different things. So not only
is this funny and just sort of tucked in very
neatly and very subtly into the middle of this sentence,
(45:46):
but it's also speaking to something larger. The last piece
of humor that we're going to sort of, you know,
look at in terms of analysis, here is on page
two fifty three. I loved this because this is having
to do with the American This is when she's at
a party Denver, actually, because she has gone to see
if she can find one of the past husbands, and
she's talking to these Americans she has just met for
(46:07):
the first time. I don't think I know anyone. In
a movie called Lauren, Ryan says slowly, is that a drawl?
Is he drawling they're not as handsome as Carter, but
they do have something of his expressions, his mode of being.
When she thought it was love, was it just being
from Denver, which I thought was so funny.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
So in being from.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
Denver is an italics and also up above, like is
he drawling? That's also in italics. Whenever people kind of
pick on a city like that, I always just wonder, like,
do they have to think about it? Are they like, like,
what city in the United States? Do I not know anyone?
So I can just like be a little bit critical
of the city. I mean, it's not like a skewering
of Denver, but it's not like it's not like an
elevation of Denver either. And I think what's especially charming
(46:52):
here as an American, I mean a lot of people
like a Southern accent, the drawing. Although it's funny because
I don't think of Colorado as people who are drawling,
which maybe she doesn't know her American geography super well.
Also maybe Ryan is from the South. Also, she's not
even sure if he is actually drawling. That word just
starting to sound very strange to me, drawling. But anyway,
you know, she doesn't actually know. Maybe he's just speaking
(47:13):
with a Colorado accent or a planolled American accent, not
super regional that she is interpreting. And as with all
of the different examples of humor in this book, there
is a larger question there. Why do we fall in
love with certain people? Why are we attracted to certain people?
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Does it matter? Do we have any control?
Speaker 1 (47:29):
All of these are very large questions that she is
posing in a way that is very funny. So we're
going to close bye. I'm just going to read through
a list. It's actually all of the notes that I've
made in the back of my book. Those of you
who are on the YouTube, I'll put it up there
so you can see. I Usually as I'm going through
a book, I will note different elements that I might
want to talk about, and then I'll have little page numbers.
(47:50):
I must admit, because this book is a bit lighter,
I didn't really dig into a lot of heavy duty
examples except where humor is concerned. My little page numbers
for humor go all the way across this page that
I was writing on. But some of the elements that
really struck me, aside from the humor, is just her
tone throughout the tone is so good. It's the perfect
amount of heaviness and sort of philosophical inquiry together with
(48:12):
just you know, frivolity, which is a very difficult thing
to attain and to maintain. She also does an amazing
job I've mentioned this a couple of times of really
filling out these worlds and asking important questions about how
marriage affects us. The pros We've spoken about it a
bit excellent in so many different ways. There are a
(48:32):
lot of questions about what it means to be a wife,
which is obviously an extension of marriage, but it's a
very interesting question that is different than what it's like
to be in a marriage. It's like, you know, there's
some feminist issues there, just just the question of what
wifedom looks like. She does a really good job with
chapter breaks. That was something I really enjoyed throughout their
unexpected and oftentimes it'll be kind of right in the
(48:54):
middle of something, but it really because it seems kind
of unexpected and somewhat arbitrary.
Speaker 2 (48:59):
It really makes you look at how the chapter breaks
are functioning, which is always cool.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
I mean, there's some certain conventions that we take for
granted in any novel, and when someone pushes up against
them a little bit and does something unusual, it's really
interesting to step back and be like, oh, why do
chapters function the way they do, and why are people
ending them in certain ways and then beginning in others.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
Hers are very interesting.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
There's a whole kind of meta fiction, kind of sci
fi thing that's happening here that to me feels a
little bit like the video game portion of the book,
but it's.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
Really well done.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
She does a very good job of describing kind of
how this phenomenon is working. I have a lot of
notes about how the attic is functioning and the different
rules about what it affects and what it doesn't, and
it seems like it would be very basic, and it
is on some level, but then she creates this whole
cascade of things that comes from this premise, and in
a lesser writer's hands, it could be kind of clunky
(49:53):
or illogical or kind of contradictory, but it is not.
Speaker 2 (49:56):
It's very well done.
Speaker 1 (49:57):
She has really good use of figurative language, which is excellent.
You guys know, I'm very picky about that meaning, you know,
metaphor and simile and foreshadowing all of that kind of
stuff symbolism. To be honest, it's mostly metaphor and simile,
and honestly, as someone who doesn't really read for plot
very much.
Speaker 2 (50:13):
I really enjoyed the plot.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
There were parts toward you know, like three quarters three,
where I was like, Okay, I think we could move
this along a bit more quickly. I might have edited
a little bit more aggressively, but I really was interested
in how things were going to be tied up, like
how are we going to finish this? How were we
going to you know, cut this cycle, and what kinds
of decisions was she going to make and what kind
of a statement would Grimazio be making with however she
(50:37):
ended the book, So the plot was extremely strong. I'm
looking here, and actually, in terms of quibbles, I only
have two tiny things.
Speaker 2 (50:44):
One is that well three.
Speaker 1 (50:46):
The first thing being what I just mentioned, which is
I do think it's a bit long in places. The
other is like the kid antics. I noted that earlier.
It's such a hard thing to do. I just think,
I don't know. My advice to any writers out there
is is like, don't have your kids and your books
be doing like things that are like wacky cute things.
I don't know what else they're going to be doing,
but you know, I would tread easy on the like endearing, awkward,
(51:09):
goofy kid stuff. She also at one point used the
word impossibly, and anyone who's listened to the Fox Page
knows that it's just it absolutely makes me want to die.
So for like the last fifteen years or so, every
time I'm reading something that purports to be literary fiction,
not everything, but like honestly ninety nine percent, I will
come across the use of the word impossibly somewhere. They'll
(51:31):
be like, you know, he was impossibly tall, or it
was impossibly hot, or whatever the thing is, and I'm
just like, never, never is it good? Never does it
add he is not impossibly tall. You know, there are
many many different ways to describe that, but impossibly first
of all adverbs not great, not great, and certainly that one.
Speaker 2 (51:49):
I just I want to die.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
It does the signal, you know, like a certain kind
of echelon, like a certain level of literary fiction. And
I do think this definitely qualifies as literary fiction. It's
also kind of light. It's is it a rom com?
Speaker 2 (52:01):
Not quite? I don't know.
Speaker 1 (52:02):
We used to call it chick lit. Now I think
we call it book club lit. This is definitely like
book club lit.
Speaker 2 (52:07):
It's light, it's fun, it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
So maybe the inclusion of impossibly, you know, really situates
it firmly in like the literary fiction kind of world.
But I was not super happy when I came across
that tiny, tiny quibble, obviously. So we're going to end
just by looking at the acknowledgments and looking at the
first line of the acknowledgments, because even in the acknowledgments,
she's funny. So at the very back of the book,
(52:31):
this is what she says at the beginning of the acknowledgments.
Every time I get to the end of the book,
I read the acknowledgments and I think, I don't know,
there's no way it takes so many people to make
a book, though, right, which is so funny and so cute.
And I will tell you that this really speaks to
her to the way that she is constructing her humor
and a certain tone. There is a way that you
(52:52):
could have said this and it would not have been
very funny, And it has everything to do with her
syntax here. So I'm going to describe this every time
I get to the end of a book, I read
the acknowledgments, and I think, then she has a colon,
which is very good, and the rest of it is
in italics, which is setting off the fact that this
is different. She is, you know, she is speaking this question,
(53:13):
and the question says, I don't know, which is d
U n n O. Which it's crucial that we have
that kind of casual thing. And it sounds very much
like what you might say to a girlfriend. And there's
also like a way that it's softening.
Speaker 2 (53:25):
It's not like this.
Speaker 1 (53:25):
There's no way this is you know that all these
people need to be thanked. So she says, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (53:30):
There's no way.
Speaker 1 (53:31):
It takes that many people to make a book. Though
right it feels very colloquial, though coming late in the
sentence is very is very individual to the syntax and
to the voice that we are hearing here. It's so
well done. It's casual, it's not like too aggressive. I
just thought it was very well done, and I loved
the fact that we have her beginning even the acknowledgments,
(53:52):
with something that I found very funny. So I'm going
to go ahead and leave it there. I hope that
this little dive into how humor is functioning in the
book has been interesting. Holly Gramontio is so good at this.
I hope that she, frankly, I hope that she turns
her back on the video game world and that she
keeps writing novels because she's very, very good at this,
and I would love to read something else by her.
Speaker 2 (54:13):
So thank you so much for tuning in. Happy reading,
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