To Be Your Own Stranger: Interview with Marlowe Granados
Marlowe Granados is the author of Happy Hour, a novel the New Yorker called an "effervescent debut." In 2021, it was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel award and received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus Review. It is considered a RAVE on Literary Hub’s BookMarks, a website that aggregates reviews from major publications. She writes a substack called "From the Desk of Marlowe Granados" and is currently at work on her second novel. After spending time in New York and London, she now lives in Toronto.
Rebecca Mangra is a Canadian writer and editor. Her fiction, poetry, and interviews have been published in places such as The Malahat Review, Room, This Magazine and elsewhere. She is currently working on her first novel.
In this interview, Canthius communications coordinator Rebecca Mangra talks to Granados about her book, Happy Hour, which follows a summer in the lives of Isa Epley and Gala Novak, two best friends who arrive in New York with little money and plenty of wit. The novel is published by Flying Books and Verso. Their conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.
Marlowe Granados, Happy Hour.
Flying Books. $26.95 CAD
Order a copy from Flying Books.
Rebecca: I’d love to know what your beginnings as a writer were like. Did you know you always wanted to be one or did Happy Hour happen on its own?
Marlowe: I only started taking the fact that I might want to be a writer seriously later [in my life]. When I was a teenager, I was doing more visual work like photography, and moved to London, UK thinking that was what I would pursue. When my visa was up the first time, I thought I should go to school for writing. I applied to one school, Goldsmiths, with a portfolio. I wanted to go because I felt that at the end of it, I would have a body of work. I didn’t want to go for the other reasons normal people want to go to university [to attain prestige, find a high-paying job, etc.]. I’d already had an agent, since I was twenty-three, through one of my professors. I was lucky that way, but I developed Happy Hour when I was in university. I finished it when I was twenty-five.
It took a long time to get published. I shelved the book and didn’t care. I was going through a lot of things at the time, like break-ups and moving back to Toronto. I didn’t know what my life was going to look like. My agent went out with Happy Hour in 2017 and no one wanted it. I knew I had worked really hard and the manuscript was clean—I had gone over it so many different times. At that point, I understood publishers didn’t get it and that’s fine. I didn’t care—no skin off my back! It was disheartening, but I had already grieved at the idea of not being a writer. No one’s regarded me for being smart, ever, so it doesn’t really matter. *laughs*
The way Happy Hour got published was serendipitous and funny. I attended a New Year's Eve party hosted by one of Flying Books’ editors, Emily Keeler. I thought I had left my opera glove at her house and after the party, I got in touch with her. Months later, Emily was inquiring about me and people told her I was a writer, but she couldn't find anything of mine to read. She bumped into me at another party and asked if she could read something I'd written. I told her I had a manuscript, but she didn't have to read the whole thing. I didn't know Emily was an editor or anything, I thought she was just curious. It was afterwards that she told me that she and Martha Sharpe were planning on starting a press and they wanted to use my manuscript as their first book published. The manuscript had just been sitting collecting dust for a few years by then!
For me, as time has passed, I’ve always been bemused by it all. I’m now more established and choose projects when I want to do them. People come to me asking for advice about traditional pathways and I literally don’t know how to do any of that. I don’t even like to pitch! I hate it. Editors are always like, Tell me more, and I say, I don’t know. We’ll figure it out when I write it!
Rebecca: I’ve always felt like if you’re able to sum up your work in a very clean way, how nuanced and layered is it really? I also struggle with pitches or even artist statements.
Marlowe: I don’t even want to do it. I understand why people hire others to write them. It’s my worst nightmare. It’s also fake!
Rebecca: It absolutely is!
I read that Happy Hour is loosely based on a summer of yours. I also saw in the book’s acknowledgments that you thanked real people named Nicolas and Gala. Did you ever experiment with doing full-on autofiction?
Marlowe: No. What’s interesting for me is finding a container for things and a framework that I can find my own style within. That’s interesting, exciting, and challenging for me. I really wanted to build the novel around a voice. Some things may or may not have happened in my life and sometimes, I don’t even remember. I liked how strict the ideas of a summer, a diary, and a voice were—you can build a world around those constraints. The things I took from my life were more funny jokes that only a few people would understand (my friends). When I described the book to people, I told them that I wanted it to be like when you’re at a corner of a party and someone is talking to you, and it feels like you’re both sharing a secret. That’s how Isa’s voice felt like and the building of it. For this novel, it was about style and what a particular feminine voice would sound like. If you read it one way, you think she's naive, but if you read it a different way, you find that she’s tricking you, always. I liked the idea of a double-edged sword. Life in itself when it’s present in fiction is sometimes not as interesting as you think it is. A lot of the feelings [in the book] are real and true and what I’ve felt, but putting them in a circumstance or a situation that wasn’t real is what fiction is for. Those are things you can’t really do when you’re writing a true account.
Rebecca: I also did my undergraduate degree in creative writing and there was always this tension where I was required to write The Truth, but to do it in such a way that felt fake. I needed a Plot, Structure… even petty details would make professors ask, “Well… could this be true?” Well, what is actually Real!
Strange, incredible, creepy things happen all the time. I felt insane.
Marlowe: A lot of the time, when I’m writing something, what people think are the most unrealistic parts are the things that actually happened to me. Sometimes, things just don’t work in a story. It depends. It’s a fine line often. I’m friends with Sheila [Heti] and we talk a lot about being writers and artists and how that works. She has a different approach, and I respect her work so much. Even in the truth of her work, she’s often very experimental with the form, and that’s always really interesting to me. People always talk about autofiction—it’s trickled down now since the early 2010s. A lot of the autofiction coming out now doesn’t have the experimentation that Sheila pioneered.
Rebecca: Happy Hour feels experimental too. We have the diary aspect that becomes larger later in the novel. There’s almost this meta-quality where readers ask: Wait, am I reading Isa’s diary in my hands? It then veers into portrait-of-the-artist territory.
Marlowe Granados, Happy Hour. Verso.
Marlowe: Yeah, a Künstlerroman. I was really interested in the performance of a personality. The performance for yourself, but also when you’re performing in a way that’s meant to be read.
The criticism early on was that the diary made the story seem so distant from what was actually happening. While that was fair, the book isn’t really about what’s happening, but the presentation of what has happened. That’s more interesting to me. I’m interested in how women tell each other stories. When you’re processing something, especially as young women, you often process it not in the moment, but through telling your friends. For a long time, I could never sit quietly in an experience—I would need to tell it to five people, so I could process it. I wasn’t processing things authentically, but in a diluted version, always. It made it easier to handle and get a move on. I think that’s what the girls are always doing—they keep it moving the whole way.
Rebecca: The women in Happy Hour are so refreshing because they are women not often spotlighted in novels—they’re a little reckless and unafraid of what they want and the people that want them. They’re genuinely humorous—there are so many lines from the book that I’ll be dropping in my real-life conversations going forward—and full of gumption. There’s the early scene when they’re at an art gallery reception and people ask about what they are doing in New York. They reply, Nothing! And everyone hates their sense of freedom. What was it like writing young women who know their power and its limits? They aren’t disillusioned.
Marlowe: In my life, since I was very young, I’ve been hard-headed. I only recently realized that often people aren’t themselves all the time. For me, that’s so weird—I can’t even imagine. My friends and I, especially when we were teenagers, were terrible and annoying and… trouble. We didn’t care what people thought of us. It was freeing, especially at that age when most girls are so self-conscious. My close friends and I just wanted to have a good time. I wanted to preserve that in the novel. Young women don’t often have that kind of pathway to feel like, well, I actually don’t need to feel embarrassed about that. I can just choose not to. That’s what I wanted to preserve from what I had seen in my friendship circles and the women that I was friends with. I wanted the book to be a situation where these girls were very strong, but also vulnerable because of their position in the world. They have a sense of feeling like they have a lot of agency.
I was on the subway one time with my friend and she was with me when we were both underage and going out to parties. She said that we had a false sense of having power and I thought it was so funny. I thought I did have power! I pushed it to the limit a lot of the time. I have never been the type to recast things in an ominous light. I wanted to keep that [feeling] in the book—that we can ignore things and still feel the pressures of it. Often, we can go off and be a little reckless, and also a bit sly. At the end of the day, these girls don’t have very much to lose. In a way, that’s their privilege. There’s this freedom that might be an illusion, but they just go with it.
Rebecca: I also wanted to talk about glamour. The novel takes it seriously in a world that doesn't, especially in the way women use it. I’ve been talking a lot about beauty with my friends and how we can view it less in an individual way, or a capitalistic one, and extend it to focus on how we relate to one another in a bigger community lens. I’ve always had acne since I was very young, and now in my late twenties it has reared its head as hormonal acne, so I’ve known what it’s like to be perceived as ugly. So, I’m always thinking about beauty.
I found the way you explore glamour and beauty in the novel interesting. At one point, Isa says clothes can give one courage. But in the middle of the novel, there’s a scene I love with Isa on the subway. She’s on her way to a party. It’s a gorgeous volta in the novel because we get a longer peek into her interiority and yearnings. She says, “Do those few lonely moments when I return inward, away from noise and glamour, really count?”
This line is so interesting because now we have glamour as both a shield and a shadow. Something that has potential for power and vulnerability. Could you speak to this tension?
Marlowe: I grew up with women and a lot of sayings about what glamour is, or how to be, or different ways of carrying yourself. With Happy Hour in general, it's about what happens when a woman is outside the home. With Isa and Gala, they don’t really have a home. It’s about being so public and then, when you have those moments where you’re unplugged and you no longer have an audience, what does that feel like? When you have crafted this sense of being around having an audience, being lit up and adept at social situations—and then, when you’re alone, you don't know how to be yourself. It’s so strange—I’m my own stranger in a way.
I think it goes back to the idea of telling stories and having to process them through other people. When you’re away from them, everything feels so vast… I’m thinking a lot about water right now. When you’re alone, you’re in this large body of water. Whereas when you’re in social situations, you’re so much more contained, like a puddle. You can see the shallow end. You know where everything is. The idea of glamour is always this sense of mystery and keeping something for yourself as a secret. When you’re a young woman and trying to do it, you don’t have that kind of gravitas yet, but you’re working towards that effect.
I think about glamour all the time. I did a lecture for Trampoline Hall once about it. I talked about how hard it is for someone to be close to you and still be glamorous. It’s so singular. It’s definitely not something you can have with a partner. Absolutely not. Domestic partnerships are the antithesis of glamour! *laughs*
Rebecca: That’s so interesting—glamour, intimacy, and self. For me, it’s always been less about recreation and more about uncovering who you are.
Switching gears, I wanted to talk about your advocacy and bringing attention to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Canthius has recently formally committed to PACBI, but we’ve always had a pro-Palestinian ethos. If you’re comfortable, would you be able to share what your experience has been like with Palestinian advocacy in an era of intense blacklisting and what you think more artists should be doing?
Marlowe: Historically, I’ve always been interested in the HUAC committee [House Un-American Activities Committee] and Hollywood blacklisting—looking at how people were blacklisted for being communists or even associated with the Communist Party. That was such a mark in Hollywood—there were screenwriters and actors being blacklisted. A lot of people sacrificed their careers and never came back from it.
For me, it feels like a part of being an artist. Right now, we’ve really separated the idea of politics from art. It’s worse in the contemporary art world. It’s disgusting.
It's disappointing to see people being cagey and worried—I get it, obviously, as it’s people’s livelihood, but I think there’s much more important things. I’ve always been very outspoken about different things, even in 2020 I was. I got in trouble for bullying some people.
Rebecca: Some people deserve to be a little bullied.
Marlowe: Totally. Honestly, in no way would I ever look back and regret anything I’ve ever said about the genocide—right when it happened [October seventh attacks] I was already openly in support for the end of the [Israeli] occupation.
It’s been interesting. My book came out in Germany and when I was doing interviews there and talking about it [the genocide in Gaza] openly, people were a little cautious. Outside of Canada, I’m published by Verso, so it’s not a surprise that I would be open about it. What I always think, too, is that the people who would blacklist me now will probably retire soon, someone new will come in, and it won’t even matter. That’s what’s embarrassing to me about people who haven’t said anything. It’s worse for academics or respected scholars.
It’s all in the lineage of being an artist. When people are in a particular position, they can say certain things and it can be effective in applying pressure. I found that even before I was in the particular position that I’m in now, where I can eloquently say… what the fuck are you doing? Make a stand for something! I don’t suffer cowards. Even with things like men in the community and how they’re treating women—I’m always going to be the one to say, What are you doing? Get your act together.
Rebecca: I’ve also thought if someone is going to blacklist you, then that isn’t someone worth working with. It’s unfortunate that standing in support of a people’s liberation from occupation is considered controversial—it absolutely shouldn’t be the way our world works. It also incredibly bothers me that so many of us, like yourself, in our early careers are willing to risk so much and there’s folks with years of success—who attended the Giller ceremony last November!—who haven’t said or done anything.
It makes me happy to see that we still have large numbers and I’m hoping that the more of us that speak up will add more pressure to the people who haven’t/refuse to.
I also wanted to ask about future projects. I saw on Twitter/X that you’re in a movie that’s screening at TIFF! What was that like?
Marlowe: I’m the Zendaya in the first Dune in that movie! After the experience, I realized that I did like acting. I was working with Matt Johnson in a scene and he was really funny to work with. I’ve been telling my filmmaker friends that they can put me in a movie—I don’t care. I’ll do it. It’s a joke—like wouldn’t it be funny if I accidentally became an actress?
But I’m also working on my second novel. I’ve been working on it for a year and it’s such a different process than the first one. It took so long for Happy Hour to get published, and there was so much time that had passed when I was separated from it. But with this book, I’m writing from a closer time with things I’ve experienced, and it’s a fun challenge. It’s shifting gears to third-person. In the same way of voice and style and a diary being a container, third-person is also interesting. I think it’s underutilized in contemporary fiction. I was thinking of The Group by Mary McCarthy—it's less about the individual and more about an overall community of women. I also have a Substack—I like being able to jot something down and send it out. I’m also trying to do more film stuff, but you always have to find money, which is annoying.
Rebecca: My last question is a fun one. What was your favourite memory from being a nineteen-year-old DJ in Paris?!
Marlowe: Oh, God. In London too. Honestly, I was a real terror. I had an open bar tab, which is crazy. It’s not okay. In Paris, I was deejaying at Colette, which is a store that's closed now. It was really strange—I was deejaying for one half of the party, but further in the store, Claudia Schiffer was having some sort of launch. The other side of the store had all these skaters where I was deejaying. Then I bumped into Carine Roitfeld, the former editor at French Vogue. I was holding a champagne flute and beer and knocked her. It’s so surreal and funny. All those memories jumble together, but there was one night I remember where I was bad—I was throwing glasses off the stage for no reason. Just for fun.
Rebecca: I think the best things happen for no reason!
Note: As the genocide in Gaza and invasions of the West Bank continue to accelerate, we at Canthius encourage readers to use their voice in support of Palestinian liberation, attend protests, and learn more about and engage with the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. We also encourage donations to Crips for eSims for Gaza and Rebecca adds Workshops 4 Gaza. Marlowe is fundraising for Heal Palestine.