Joanie Book Club: Q&A With Holly Gramazio, Author of The Husbands

Calling all book lovers - the Joanie Book Club is back! This month, we're sitting down with Holly Gramazio, author of The Husbands...

Hi Holly! Thanks so much for chatting with us here at Joanie. Let’s start things off with a bit of background, can you tell our readers about yourself?

Thanks so much for having me!

So: I’m a writer and a game designer. (Of the two jobs, “writer” is easier to explain at parties, but “game designer” is probably more fun.) I grew up in Australia, but I’ve been in London for something like fifteen years now. I live in Walthamstow with my husband and our two cats.

I like cities more than the country, I like the sea more than the mountains, I like biscuits more than cake. Paperbacks over hardbacks, spring over autumn, coffee over tea, matte over gloss, trees over flowers (but flowers are pretty good too).

My greatest irrational hatred is probably: mayonnaise.

The Husbands, your debut novel, centres around a woman whose attic seems to be able to create an infinite supply of husbands. What inspired you to write this story?

The inspiration came from a few different places! Part of it was my own dating history, which has really been a story of stumbling from one long-term relationship to another – although not quite as efficiently as a new magical husband from the attic each time. Part of it was just talking to friends who were exhausted by dating apps, and by the never-ending supply of faces and people to swipe through, and the way they felt like it had become this immense chore, this daily duty.

And part of it, I think, is just that attics feel very magical to me – we don’t really have them in Australia, so when I was growing up I only encountered them in books. It’s always so impressive and strange to me when a friend has an attic! The Husbands is basically set in one specific friend’s old flat; she was always shoving stuff into her attic or bringing it down, and I never saw inside it but it seemed like a magical infinite space to me.

Do you have any general tips for aspiring writers? What helps you most when you’re sitting down to start writing?

On a day-to-day basis, I heard some advice once that I love, and it’s basically: stop writing for the day while you’re still having fun. Don’t keep going till you exhaust your interest in the material. Leave a sentence half-finished to go back to. That way your brain is kind of working away on it in the background while you’re doing other things, and when you next sit down to write, you can pick up where you left off. It makes it easier to keep your momentum up.

And more generally, I think - there are a lot of people writing stuff in the world! So why not write the stuff that nobody else would write? Why not indulge your weird obsessions and really dig into ideas that are kinda hard to explain to people? The energy of that specificity can help you keep at it. And, you can leave “How will readers feel about this?” for when you go back and start editing.  

We’re avid readers here at Joanie, and there’s nothing we love more than a good book recommendation. Tell us – what’s your favourite EVER book, and what book did you enjoy reading most in 2024?

Oooh, I don’t think I could pick a favourite EVER book, so I’m gonna cheat and name a few different books I loved in 2024 instead. I really enjoyed Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles, which is a comedy about a young mother who’s trying to figure out how to look after a baby while also trying to run a quite weird OnlyFans. It’s got a lot of logistics in it, and I love a logistics novel. I also loved Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad’s Poor Artists, which is half a novel and half a collection of essays about making art, why people do it and how the money works (or doesn’t work). And Emet North’s In Universes, which is hard to describe, but it’s basically a collection of short stories about the same group of people in a bunch of different and increasingly strange universes.

Outside of work, what do you get up to in your spare time?

I like gardening a lot – but only if it’s the sort of gardening where you can be a bit slapdash and imprecise, stick a few plants in and see how it all goes. The same goes for cooking and baking (some people say you can’t bake like that, but those people are wrong). I love small museums, exploring new bits of town, and bookshops in general, but especially bookshops that have a mix of new and second-hand books.

When things are quiet, I also love to get really into a videogame and just lose all my spare time to it until I get to the end – I spent a week obsessed with Animal Well recently, and it was a lovely time.

Finally, which Joanie pieces are you loving most right now?

I really love a big dress with a good geometric print; maybe something about the contrast between the swoosh of the dress and the sharpness of the print. And geometric prints are so much harder to find than floral prints, so I really love that Joanie does so many.

Currently, I love the look of the Tori Diamond Print Balloon Sleeve Midaxi Dress and the mix of curves and stripes in the Golden Slumbers – unfortunately, yellow doesn’t suit me, so I’ve been resisting that one, but every time I look at it I’m tempted, and I think: well, maybe THIS yellow will be the one that finally suits me…

Holly Gramazio is a writer, game designer and curator from Adelaide, currently based in London. She founded the experimental games festival Now Play This, and wrote the script for the award-winning indie videogame Dicey Dungeons. She’s particularly interested in rules, play, cities, gardens, games that get people acting creatively and art that gets people interacting with their surroundings in new ways. The Husbands is her first novel. Discover the official playlist here!