Please join us for a Q&A with Holly Gramazio, game designer and author of The Husbands.
Please join me in welcoming Holly Gramazio to our BookBrowse Community Forum online discussion. Holly is a game designer and author of the book, The Husbands.
Please use this space to ask Holly questions about her work. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
Holly, thanks for being here! Please tell our group a little about yourself.
Where did the idea for The Husbands come from?
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Did you have a favorite husband (other than Terry Cavanagh, your real-life hubby; you can’t count him).
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Sometimes plots and characters take on a life of their own. Did you find you needed to make any significant changes to your initial outline for either one as the story developed? Did you run into any roadblocks?
Hi everyone! So pleased to be here and get to chat to you all, thanks so much for having me. A bit about me: I’m 43, I live in Walthamstow in London with my (one) husband Terry and our cats. The Husbands is my first novel, although I’ve always done a lot of writing just for fun and as part of my job.
Before The Husbands came out, I freelanced as a games writer and game designer - things like writing the scripts for indie videogames, designing card games for museums that related to the exhibits, putting together little exhibitions of games and playful art. I’m still doing some of this, but definitely less than I used to.
I grew up in Adelaide, in South Australia, and moved to London after uni, so quite a while ago now.
I’ve always been interested in the different versions of my life that I might have lived - which isn’t unusual, of course. Most people do wonder about that sort of thing. But I think making a big move across the world really makes some of the branching points very visible, and encourages that kind of “I wonder what would have happened if…” speculation. (And in fact I was back visiting family in Adelaide when I started writing the book - almost like I was visiting a different version of my life.)
But specifically the idea for exploring different versions of someone’s life through a series of husbands in the attic? I think that came from a few places:
- My own romantic history - I have a real history of jumping from one long-term relationship to another, which… is sometimes a good idea, and sometimes isn’t. I’ve never really been single for more than a couple of months. So, not quite a series of magic husbands, but not too far.
- My friends experiences with dating apps, and the sense of exhaustion so many of them felt about it. The way the apps present you with this endless carousel of faces. It’s like the way it works almost encourages some people to find something wrong with a match, to keep swiping until they find someone “perfect” while always wondering if there’ll be someone even better a swipe or two away.
- Okay, this is a weird one, but - we don’t really have attics in Australia. We have space in the roof, sure, but we don’t use it for anything, it’s too hot up there and full of spiders. The space is just not set up to be used at all, not even for storage. So I only ever encountered attics in books, usually from the UK and the USA - where often they were some sort of magical portal in a kid’s book, or maybe in a nineteenth century gothic novel there’d be a secret wife up there. So attics always seemed really magical and unlikely to me, and it was very weird when I moved to the UK and so many people actually had them for real. The idea for The Husbands really started to come together when I thought: oh yeah, attics, maybe that’s where the husbands come from.
Okay, I’ve thought about this a lot and if I personally had to marry one of the husbands I think I would choose Jason. He’s fun, caring, pretty laid-back, he runs his own business and cares about his work (which I think is probably good for someone married to a writer and freelancer - I feel like it’d be really annoying to go off to a shop or an office every morning while your partner stays home going “oh yeah today I’m going to sit in the garden and make up some imaginary people and write down a story about them”. Actually, running his own gardening business is perfect because it’s something he’s chosen to do and loves, BUT it still gets him out of the house - having two people working from home can be a lot). Lauren sends him back for chewing with his mouth open, which - honestly, I think she could have just talked to him about that and he’d probably have tried to stop. And even if he couldn’t, it’s not ideal but it’s not the worst thing in the world.
My favourite husband to write was Bohai, who was just such a joy to spend time with. It was such a relief to be able to write conversations where he and Lauren could talk about what was going on, to have her feel less lonely in her situation. There were a bunch more scenes with Bohai that I ended up cutting out because they weren’t helping the story, but I’d kept writing them because it was just so much fun to write the two of them hanging out together.
Well, I didn’t really have an outline when I started! And I didn’t write it in order - I would write for an hour each morning before my other work, and sometimes I’d carry on from the previous day but sometimes I’d just write a totally disconnected scene that happened earlier or later or that I didn’t even know where it would fit. People talk about “plotters”, who plot out a book before they write it, and “pantsers”, who fly by the seat of their pants, starting out and then just seeing where it takes them - but my approach is maybe more like “patchwork” or “puzzle”, creating all these different pieces and then sitting down and trying to figure out how to fit them together, what I’m missing, what I should cut. And then going back and editing a lot, smoothing things out, pulling it together. I spent much much longer editing than I did writing. So I didn’t have huge roadblocks during the writing, because if I was struggling with something specific I’d just write a different bit of the book instead.
There were times where there was a big job - like the moment of beginning to piece it all together - but they didn’t feel like “roadblocks” in that I didn’t feel like they were stopping me from proceeding, just that they were a big thing to deal with that would take a lot of time.
I guess the thing I did struggle with a bit was the ending - I knew what I wanted the emotion of the ending to be, the feel and the what it would say about the themes of the book, but I didn’t know what exact plot events would best express that. So I tried a bunch of different things there, writing loads of different possible endings and not being happy with them, and then returning to one of the early versions and going “yeah, I think this works”.
Oh, I loved the ending! I think it more than “works.”
I don’t know that I’ve heard a writer describe their process the way you have in your response.
What inspired you to actually sit down and start writing? You must have had this rumbling around in your head a bit before setting pen to paper.
And how long did it take for you to go from first sentence to feeling it was done?
I have to admit I was disappointed that Carter didn’t work out - that he left too soon the first time, and that they didn’t connect the second time.
One of the things I really enjoyed about the book was the way you kept it fresh. Right about the time I was starting to wonder how you were going to keep the concept going, you threw in a twist - like having Bohai show up. I thought that was pretty inspired.
Which part of the book was your least favorite to write? Did you have a least favorite husband?
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Moving from Australia to the UK seems like a huge leap! What prompted that? Does your family still live in Australia?
At what point did you think you had something publishable? Did you send it directly to publishing houses, or did you use an agent?
Oh, good question! Honestly - like a lot of people who had a debut novel out around 2023-2025, I’d thought about trying to write for a long time, and then there was, y’know, a global pandemic, and a bunch of lockdowns. I know for a lot of people that was if anything a much busier and more hectic time, but I don’t have kids, I didn’t have any caring responsibilities, and I had less work than I usually would have, and I thought “well, if not now, then when? Might as well give it a go”.
I do think I’d have tried pretty soon anyway - I’d got twenty thousand words into a different idea a couple of years earlier before chucking it in when a book by a well-known writer was announced with a very similar premise, which kind-of took the wind out of my sails. But lockdown was definitely the thing that meant I started right then.
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You’ve been on book tours in the U.S., UK, Australia, Canada, and probably some other places too. What differences, if any, have you seen between the audiences of the assorted countries you’ve visited? Has your reception varied?
Was it difficult to write about the different “ sex” scenes with the husbands, especially the swinging night with Toby?
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I’ve never written a book but the one idea that keeps going around my head is exactly this - what would’ve my life been like if… And this was such a different take on that question, I absolutely LOVED it! Especially some of the reasons why the husbands were rejected was absolutely hilarious.
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