Holly Gramazio Interview, plus links to author biography, book summaries, excerpts and reviews

An interview with Holly Gramazio

BookBrowsers Ask Holly Gramazio.

BookBrowse: Please join me in welcoming Holly Gramazio to our BookBrowse Community Forum online discussion.

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 video game Dicey Dungeons. Her recent projects include New Rules, a zine collecting essays about play during the pandemic, and a collaboration with artist Lawrence Lek on a game for his exhibition NOX. She's particularly interested in rules, play, cities, gardens, games that get people acting creatively, stories that buy into a ridiculous premise and then really commit to it, and art that gets people interacting with their surroundings in new ways. The Husbands is her first novel, and BookBrowse recently held a discussion of the novel here.

Holly, thanks for being here! Please tell our group a little about yourself.

Holly Gramazio: 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.

BB: Where did the idea for The Husbands come from?

HG: 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

BB: Did you have a favorite husband (other than Terry, your real-life hubby; you can't count him).

HG: 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.

Marijana_B, BookBrowse member: Yes I agree, I was sooo shocked she didn't keep Jason - I was like "really?!" I have to admit I was a bit disappointed with her for it too.

Question: When she realizes she and Bohai can just live their own lives separate from each other and she can stop cycling through husbands and perhaps meet the right one in everyday life, why doesn't she stick with that instead of continuing to go back to the attic? Personally, I would've just made a pact with Bohai that we are friends but we'll lead our lives separately as we normally would and see what happens, rather than keep taking chances on the attic.

HG: Yeah good question! I think it's a tricky one because there's no single obvious reason, it's a lot of contributing factors that are sort-of scattered through that section.

They clearly shouldn't stay living together, I think - for a start, they're attracted to each other and if you're living together it's easy for that to spill over into something else. Plus Bohai hates London and doesn't want to stay for the whole of the winter, let alone the whole of his life. And they're both interested in finding a romantic partner, I think, which has got to be a challenge to do when you live with your ex. So, no cohabiting. In theory I guess they could have divorced and Bohai could have returned to Australia without resetting the world - but I think that would be very high stress for Lauren, because whatever she does from that point onwards to build a life, it's always possible that Bohai could just decide that he's had enough of the life he's living, come to her house, climb into the attic, and reset everything for her, outside her control. Plus, I think at this point neither of them are really willing to give up on the possibilities of the attic, the idea that something wonderful and magical might be just around the corner.

Plus, on a more practical level - they'd been having a very extravagant few months that involved Bohai in particular spending WAY more money than he was earning! So by the time he went up into the attic he was very much in debt.

BB: 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?

HG: Ah thank you! Yeah that was a really fun part of writing, just thinking of every possible twist and problem and unexpected thing that I could, and figuring out how to pace them and what order to put them in!

Honestly, I don't think I had a bit I really hated writing. By the time I was doing the nine millionth check for typos I'll admit I was very sick of the whole thing, but there wasn't a scene that stood out as a particular slog. I did have to have a few attempts at all the scenes of getting reluctant husbands to go up in the attic - they were a challenge to make hang together logistically and emotionally and within the wider context.

BB: 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?

HG: 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".

BB: 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, though? 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?

HG: 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.

BB: At what point did you think you had something publishable? Did you send it directly to publishing houses, or did you use an agent?

HG: In terms of how long it took: well, I guess I started writing it in March or April 2020, and it found a publisher in something like April 2023. I wasn't working on it the whole time - an hour or so a day on the first draft during 2020, not much during 2021, then in 2022 I came back to it and started pulling it together properly, mostly alongside other work but there were a few months in late 2022 where it was the big project I was working on.

I kind-of already had an agent, who had offered to represent me when a children's publisher wanted to publish a book version of a card game I'd designed - that project had fallen through but I sent the novel to her hoping she hadn't forgotten me completely. She absolutely wasn't expecting a novel from me, but fortunately she liked it and thought she could sell it, so I had a much more straightforward time finding an agent than the usual! I then had another couple of months where I made further changes based on her suggestions. And then she sent it out to editors in I think March. So it all happened pretty quickly.

There was still some work to do after it sold, making changes based on conversations with my editors - that was maybe three months of work, spread out over a six month period or so?

BB: Did you run into writer's block at any point, or did you decide you needed to step away from it for any reason?

HG: Well, because it was a first novel, I didn't really have a deadline or any particular expectation that I would finish it or - if I did - that it would find a publisher or a readership! You know, there are so many blog posts and articles out there talking about how hard it is to find an agent, or a publisher, and how even if you do get published most books don't get widely read. So there were definitely whole 3-6 month periods where I didn't really do anything on it, not necessarily because of writers' block but just because I got busy on other things, or the weather was really nice, or whatever else.

Elizabeth_L from BookBrowse: Was it difficult to write about the different " sex" scenes with The Husbands, especially the swinging night with Toby?

Marijana_Bankovic from BookBrowse: That was sooo cringy to read about, I wonder what it was like to write about and why that particular twist?

HG: Oh I love this question, I haven't been asked anything like this before! Honestly, I think I had an easier time of it than some writers because of the weird context of all the sex. The sex scenes, such as they are, are kind-of about how Lauren is negotiating this version of the world, the situations she finds herself in as she pretends that it's all familiar, her expanding sense of the sort of lives she might want to live. They're not particularly sexy sex scenes, right? I think the book's not quite what romance calls "closed door", because we do sometimes learn some pretty clear details about what's going on - like, when my mother-in-law read the book, it definitely occurred to me that she would read the line "unusually pendulous balls". But the more explicit details are usually just a line or at most a paragraph or two, a couple of specifics to evoke the whole plus a general sense of how Lauren feels. There aren't any scenes where we're with the characters for four or five pages through all the touches and gasps and moments of connection.

I did think about whether I could or should go into more detail about some of the sex, but I couldn't figure out a way to do it that didn't make those husbands feel much more important than the others, and throw the balance out, shift the general atmosphere - and the book was already on the long side, I definitely wouldn't have had space for, you know, eight full detailed sex scenes!

The swinging night with Toby was actually one of the easiest to write, because I knew when started that I wanted the sex to be just really nothing-y. Clearly not a good fit, in a way that showed us something about both their personalities. I first came up with the idea for that scene because I wanted a clear way to show that Toby wasn't Lauren's perfect partner just waiting for her to notice. Often when you have a comedy with a straight woman dealing with some sort of romantic conundrum, and she has a straight male friend who is just always there, you know where it's going, right? By the end she'll realise her attraction to him and they'll figure out that they were meant to be together all along. Which is often a great plotline, but in this particular case I wanted Lauren to be able to have a friend who was a guy who's attracted to women who we don't read as potential romantic interest - and it turned out that the funniest way to make that work was (a) to have the guy be in a clearly really solid relationship, but also (b), just to be on the safe side, have them hook up and it just be incredibly disappointing. So writing that scene kind-of freed Toby up to be a good friendly constant in her life. And it wasn't too embarrassing to write because I knew that as soon as it was over there'd be a new husband and nobody except Lauren would remember it had happened!

BB: Where did Lauren's character come from? I know you said that her gaining different husbands grew out of peoples' experiences w/ dating apps. Was she a composite of people you know, or in some ways autobiographical, or did she just appear to you? How did she change as you wrote her story?

HG: I once heard Sally Hepworth say that all characters are basically one third the writer, one third a person they know, and one third made up from nowhere, which I enjoyed as a framework! I don't think it's exactly true for me but there's definitely something relatable in there.

For Lauren particularly, the main thing I took from myself is that I'm quite bad at making decisions. I worry a lot about getting something irrevocably wrong. I have a hard time settling on a job, for example - obviously, as my "oh I design four different types of game and also now I've written a novel" shows - or even choosing an ice cream flavour. So that forms part of the heart of Lauren. For her that means that actually the attic is quite joyful at first in a way it might not be for other people - that she doesn't have to worry about getting something wrong because she can just reset the world if she doesn't like the consequences. But as things go on longer and longer it makes it harder for her to figure out what to do and how to get out of the neverending loop of "new husband, new husband". In other respects she's not much like me - I think I'm probably more similar to her friend Elena - but that difficulty with decisions is definitely there.

That core trait also informed the sort of relationships she would have - a bossy best friend, an ex who hates almost everything, Michael who tries so hard to get everything right, Zach who's so easygoing, the way she likes Carter so much because the way he sees her helps recontextualise how she feels about herself and her personality - and so a lot of other details about her kind-of developed while I was working out what different sort of lives she might have lived, the edges of who she could be.

I'm not particularly aware of having taken inspiration for her from specific people, although I'm sure I must have…! I did think a little about friends who seem very consistent in their day-to-day lives regardless of their situation, versus friends who seem to change their habits and hobbies a lot when they're in different jobs or relationships, and what's at the core of that difference. (I don't think either of those things are bad, but they're quite distinct ways of being in the world!)

BB: It seems like living Lauren's life would get exhausting pretty quickly. Is there anything about this character's experience, though, that you're envious of and wish were true of your own?

HG: Ah not really! I mean, when she has a swimming pool in Felix's mansion, I'm envious of that. And I do think attics are cool, but I would definitely prefer a non-magical one.

Holly_K: Have you heard from groups who have discussed The Husbands?

HG: Yeah, I've heard from a few book groups! I've actually done zoom calls with a bunch of them, which is always good fun. At the moment I'm mostly not taking more zoom discussions over summer while I try to get Book 2 done, but the info is here with links to a couple of possible discussion guides that my publisher put out, in case those are useful for anyone.

BB: Moving from Australia to the UK seems like a huge leap! What prompted that? Does your family still live in Australia?

HG: My dad lives in Scotland and I'd been over to the UK to see him a few times, and I'd really enjoyed it (even though I usually went in the Australian summer holidays - which is winter in Scotland of course). Plus I was dating an English guy. So I figured: well, I'd give it a go for a year or two, see how it went. And it turned out I really loved London! And it was great for the sort of work I was doing as well - lots of museums and galleries and cultural venues and weird games things going on.

Nowadays my dad's in Scotland, I have a Scottish brother who's in Scotland too, and two Australian brothers one of whom is in Scotland (coincidentally!), the other's in Italy. My mum's still in Australia along with a bunch of other relatives. So we're pretty spread out.

BB: What kind of support system do you have? Do you mostly rely on family, or are there other authors who help you with your work? Or is writing something you reserve for yourself, and you only show others your work when you're mostly done?

HG: Different people at different stages! There's a little local writing group which I love - we meet once a month and talk over two people's work each time, and that's super useful just for making me pull things together and kind-of make sure I have something written for it. Once I'm a little bit further in I'll probably read it aloud to my husband a chapter at a time, which I did with The Husbands - that's super useful just because it makes you read it aloud, which helps with spotting when a sentence isn't working, but also because you get to see the moment-to-moment reactions, when something's boring, when a joke doesn't land and so on. When I've got a full draft there's also a few friends I'll send it to - they're mostly not writers but they're very enthusiastic readers.

When I wrote The Husbands I didn't know many other writers, but I know a lot more now - I've talked to a few of them about the core concept a bit, and I suspect I'll send them chunks of it to talk over in a month or two!

BB: How involved did you get in the creation of the audio version of The Husbands? Are there any screenplays in the works?

HG: For the audio, I was sent samples of a few different performers and asked what I thought - a couple of them were really strong, but in the end of those we went with Miranda Raison, who's great, because she's so experienced and great at the confused humour of it, and also she has a bunch of accents that she's great at. She did the whole audiobook for Lessons in Chemistry in an American accent(!!!), so we knew she'd be able to do Carter. And she had a decent Australian accent too, which is important to me because obviously I'm Australian and so is one of the most important husbands in the book! It's actually a surprisingly unusual thing to be good at - almost everyone who thinks they can do an Australian accent is terrible at it, like just bafflingly bad, to the ear of actual Australians. I've seen television shows where someone is meant to be an Australian and their accent is so bad that I've taken it as evidence that they're gonna turn out to be an undercover spy or something - but no, the accent is just that bad. (You know who has a shockingly great Australian accent, actually, is Kate Winslet. Absolutely incredible in The Dressmaker.) So anyway, we went with Miranda and she was so great, I'm so happy with how it turned out!

And oh, about screenplays - yes!!! A24 and Apple TV+ are working on it at the moment! A lot of the planning is still under wraps or in development, but the idea is it'll be a limited series. They've got Juno Temple on board to play Lauren, Craig Gillespie as lead director, and Miriam Battye, who's an amazing playwright and TV writer, to lead on the script. It's looking so good, I am so excited.

BB: Speaking of "Book 2," can you share a little about it?

HG: It's another comedy, and it's set in a zoo! It doesn't have a magic thing like The Husbands does, but like The Husbands it is definitely a bit weird. Other than that, can't say much till I've written more I think!

BB: Do you still have time to read others' works, and if so, what are you reading now? Is there an author in particular that inspires you?

HG: Oh yeah, for sure, reading is my main hobby and if anything I do more of it now that I can go "ohhhh actually this kind-of counts as work". Sometimes I read stuff specifically for research or to go "hmm, here's a problem with something I'm writing that I'm dealing with, I wanna see how other people resolved similar situations in their books" but generally I'm a very mood-led reader, and if I'm not enjoying a book I'll stop very quickly.

I read a couple of books a week, probably, on average? And in most genres except horror, because I'm a giant coward and don't want to be scared. I usually have a few things on the go at once - at the moment, or in the last week or so, I've been enjoying:

• Tony Tulathimutte's Rejection, which is a collection of very funny, awful short stories about people who feel rejected and the things they do as a result - it's incredible but it's probably not something to go for if comedy of embarrassment makes you too uncomfortable.

• Stacey D'Erasmo's The Long Run, which is a series of essays and interviews with eight different artists who've had long careers - most of them are in their seventies or eighties and it's kind-of about what it means to work creatively for a long time, how you figure out the shape of a career and keep making stuff.

• Zen Cho's Behind Frenemy Lines, which is a really fun workplace romcom, the core relationship is very charming.

• Susan Coll's The Literati, which I'm not far into yet but I think it's a kind-of mishap-laden comedy of manners about a young woman who starts working at a literary nonprofit and finds the director's disappeared leaving a whole lot of problems and a large cat behind.

I would say there's not one specific author that inspires me in particular! It very much depends what I'm working on.

Nick Stager from BookBrowse: As you're a game designer, have you read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin and if so what did you think of it?

HG: I have! It's such a joyful gift to game designers to have a book like that in the world - it's such a difficult job to explain sometimes, people just don't get what you do or why you would care about it, so having this incredibly popular and beloved book that really gets into the nitty gritty of it is really wonderful.

BB: What's it been like touring for your book? Do you mostly end up at book stores? How many venues do you hit in a week? Can you share any interesting experiences you've had while on the road?

HG: Ah I've really enjoyed it! The US tour was the most full-on, because that was pretty soon after launch and it was I think ten locations in 12 days or something like that, so it was very much "wake up, travel somewhere, check into hotel, read for an hour, get cleaned up, have dinner, go to bookshop, do event, go to hotel and pack up to leave the next morning". I don't think I would like doing it for a month or anything, but for ten days it was pretty great. One thing that happens on a tour like that is that the publisher plans it out for you and makes a document that tells you exactly where to go and what to do, when to check out of the hotel, how to get to the airport or the train station. A lot of what's exhausting about travelling isn't doing it exactly, it's the mental load of keeping track of things - and when you have this document that just tells you exactly what to do it's almost kind-of relaxing, you can just sink into it.

Whereas in Australia, that was a much more relaxed setup - I was there for three or four weeks and only had I think four events, although obviously I was doing other stuff as well - but that was all with bookshops I'd approached directly, rather than something the publishers had organised for me. So sorting it all out was a lot more stressful, and I'd be more worried about whether people would turn up, and I had a lot of "okay remember to do THIS and go THERE" to keep track of, comparatively!

I love doing events, though. I love meeting other writers - it's great when you get put "in conversation" with someone - and I love the different questions that you get; there's some that come up a lot but there's always something new and unexpected as well. I generally really enjoy public speaking - I was a high school debater, and then did a lot of talks at conferences when I worked mostly in games - so it's a good time.

BB: It's awesome that you've got someone handling all the logistics. Does the publisher pay for the book tour (I hope!)? Do you get to request any specific locations, or do you just go where they tell you?

I'm really curious about who decides which venues you hit. Given the size of the U.S., 10 locations doesn't sound like all that much - and I know you had at least one TV appearance thrown in there, too.

HG: It depends! They pay for events that they organise - but for the Australian events, for example, it probably wouldn't have been worth their money to send me all that way for just a few events. Typically I think if they ask you to do something then they're intending to pay for it, and if you're organising it yourself or asking to be put forward for a specific event then you'll probably be the one paying.

Choosing the venues - well, for the US tour that was the publisher so I can't say for sure but basically I think publicists just talk to bookshops or festivals they have relationships with, say "we have these authors who are going on tour", and if the bookshops are interested they figure it out from there.

BB: Is there anything you'd like to bring up about The Husbands that we didn't touch on, or anything else you'd like to tell us about the book? Are there questions you wish people would ask (or ask more often) about your work?

HG: Honestly, nothing that I can think of - this has been such a fun set of questions, thanks so much for having me along!

BB: Thanks so much for all your comments, Holly! We've really enjoyed talking to you this week; you've been a joy! It's been a true pleasure having you here. Best of luck to you, and we'll be eagerly awaiting your next novel.

To keep updated on Holly, her books and her games, see her web site.



This conversation with Holly Gramazio took place on the BookBrowse Community Forum, July 7-July 9, 2025. It has been lightly edited for clarity and flow.

Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.

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