Q+A: Marlowe Granados, author of Happy Hour

"...People have a certain idea of what I'm talking about or they think I'm talking about this very cool new kind of archetype of women that's sprung up online where it's cool girls who are, like, attractive conventionally. I'm ultimately talking about also the girl that's in a Midwest mall who is not taken seriously by anyone around."

When I call Marlowe Granados, she’s on her way to New York for the second round of interviews and events for her book Happy Hour (Flying Books, 2020). She is not thinking about the book exactly; a guy she’s seeing, an arborist, has fallen out of a tree, which we agree is unfortunate, however, she is looking forward to going on dates “with people who are up to scratch.” (The arborist is fine.)

Like her main character, Isa Epley, Marlowe is a copious note-taker. And she has been seriously studying young women and femininity. Her podcast, Mean Reds, looks at women in film. Her advice columns for The Baffler, Designs for Living, are a font of easy breezy wisdom that if you listen closely are less breeze, more storm. 

Want to step out into the post-pandemic app-forward often-undignified world of dating? Among many things, Marlowe advises “Dignity is not a scam, but unfortunately, you will always have to fight for it.” 

In Happy Hour, Isa and longtime best friend Gala go to New York to be 21. Ostensibly, they’re there to run a market stall, but bumping into the city’s nightlife, artists and men take up most of their time and money. It reminded me of reading Less Than Zero, but, you know, actually fun. Marlowe’s women know danger too, but they live through it and tell it differently. 

Marlowe’s film, The Leaving Party, lets women tell their stories to each other. Marlowe says she’s always thinking of the next project. We talked about writing scripts, the recasting of young women’s lives (again) and why publishing should be more like fashion.

This interview has been condensed for clarity.

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Study Hall: When did writing fiction and novels really strike you as the next project or a project you’d take on? 

Marlowe Granados: When I was about twenty, I was living in England and I had finished a work visa there and I was kind of thinking of what my next step was. And I was like, oh, I guess I should go to university. Like, that’s probably something I should do. And it never really occurred to me before. But for me, I was stuck in this situation where I had done a lot of visual arts. I was doing photography in a more serious way. 

I think the only way that you can improve that really is to continue to do it for a longer period of time. And it is a very slow progression. So with writing, it was one of those situations where I was like, OK, this is something that is quite challenging for me and really pushes me. And it is something that I would be able to improve upon in a way that I could really measure. So I decided to go to university for creative writing. Obviously it’s super expensive, especially for international students. And I just got a million loans [laughs]. And I was kind of like: the only way that this is going to be worth it for me is if I come out of university with a body of work that is something that I could, you know, either publish or create or it would be a project of mine. During my halfway through my second year of university, I started what would be really key parts of Happy Hour. And so that process took me about three years. I started writing it when I was 22 and then I finished it when I was 25. 

SH: What is the lesson you’ve learned so far from publishing a novel?

MG: It’s actually kind of shady. I just think that, like, to be honest, the publishing industry is five years behind. 

SH: Five years behind what?

MG: The zeitgeist [giggles]. They just have a hard time adapting to new forms. Obviously, publishing a novel takes so long. The novel stayed pretty much the same from when my agent first pitched it in 2017. And then no one wanted it. No one cared. I feel there was this kind of consensus that we just needed to have a certain type of narrative for an author who’s a woman of color, and have this trajectory that would sell for them. And everyone’s complaint was they didn’t know how to market it and all these things. And to me, I was like, how could they not know how to market? That’s so crazy to me. I’ll market it. I don’t care. 

SH: Did you have any rules for how not to talk about and market your book?

MG: Yes, totally. I asked a lot of questions in the process. What bothers me is that you can go to school for creative writing. But no one really teaches you how to be in an industry that is a career. No one teaches you how your book is going to be split up into segments of rights and all these technicalities that you only learn when you’re in the process of it.

SH: The work you’ve done for The Baffler connects to the novel in that you have a very dedicated and specific focus on female characters. I don’t even know if I could categorize them, but they’re a very specific kind of female character, that is trivialized, even though I think they’re not trivial.

MG: I’m really lucky because I don’t necessarily have to write full time freelance to supplement my whole income. I am lucky in that way because I can focus on things that I really do care about and I also am obsessed about, and I also want to be the expert at.

It was something that I always focused on for much of my 20s basically that I found interesting. And the books that I write and the films that I watch, and how much in contemporary times, we’ve kind of lost this whole archetype of women that I found really interesting. But I kind of really like the idea of thinking of how you can kind of categorize language as, like, feminine: how does that sound, what is that style of that, what is the feminine writing style of this lineage of authors that came before. And I’ve always thought about everything in terms of that historical context. When I was writing Happy Hour, I always thought of these archetypes of women that came before them: adventuresses, women who use charm as currency. I also thought of geishas and courtesans and all these things that were to me so major in so many novels. 

I would hope that some of this writing would help people rethink how they approach female characters when they’re consuming media. I think that that’s an important thing to do. I talk about this post-the bimbo piece: people have a certain idea of what I’m talking about or they think I’m talking about this very cool new kind of archetype of women that’s sprung up online where it’s cool girls who are, like, attractive conventionally. I’m ultimately talking about also the girl that’s in a Midwest mall who is not taken seriously by anyone around. 

SH: You grew up reading a lot of magazines like i-D, but also that you grew up watching a lot of old Hollywood movies with your grandparents. Are these the two kinds of cultural imprints that stick with you when you’re doing your work? 

MG: I think they both definitely have an impact. I kind of grew up in that era of girl pop, girl power, the Spice Girls. And of course you’ll see, like, Britney Spears and  the way that these women have been treated in media. And there’s always been this cycle of how we regret how we treated them in media and then they have a comeback afterwards. We feel like we’ve changed as a society. But this happened years and years ago (I forget what year exactly) but in maybe the late 30s, there was this article that came out that was all “Box Office Poison!”. And they listed Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, all these people, and Kay Francis and the way that those careers plummeted after the publication of this article. All of them had to navigate a comeback or just fade into the background. I just find it interesting. 

A big thing is also how all those women presented in a very feminine way. And I’m very much about taking femininity seriously as a topic. I also grew up in a very matriarchal family. So having the example of my grandmother and my mom and my aunt being very feminine women and also being very no nonsense. They knew how to live. They knew what they wanted, and were very strong-willed. I think all of this informs my work. 

SH: How do you feel about this era of pushing back against how starlets and young women in the 2000s were addressed or depicted? 

MG: There are moments where I find the discourse really infantilizing. It’s an ongoing discussion for sure. Even for something like Happy Hour, I’m sure someone could read that novel and then come out of it being like, ‘well, these girls actually had no power at all.’ It’s so dangerous because it also creates this alternate world. And I’ve had that happen to me to where someone’s like, ‘You know you were being taken advantage of.’ Even though the way that I’ve always thought about it and the way that I continue to think about times in mylife, I feel like I wasn’t being taken advantage of and I feel fine. 

And when someone pushes a certain type of narrative on to you, especially on your memories of being a young woman. Like, I just feel like it’s so dangerous. Then you are just then saying all the agency that you’ve ever had was a lie. Then, what do you want young women to do? You’re then painting them into a corner; they feel like anything they do is because of this underlying thing that men wanted them to do it or society hates them. 

For me, all of my work is about women being able to live how they want and live in a way where they don’t necessarily have to be punished all the time. So much literature and narratives have been painted: Oh you were a party girl so now you have a drug addiction then you have to go to rehab and now you’re reformed. Sometimes these things of course happen, but then other times people are like, fine. 

I’m also interested in the narrative that you can say yes to everything you’ve ever wanted to you and you can learn these life lessons on your own, and you can somehow evade punishment or something really bad happening to you, and afterwards you’re fine. That also happens too. 

People don’t realize that we had the Hays Code for decades. If a woman was acting a certain way, she had to punished at the end because that was moral. That was something that we as a society would approve of because she behaved badly and she paid for it in the end. And that’s something that people love for young women. That she got what she deserved in the end. It’s true of my friends and my experience is that bad things do happen. The thing I find really beautiful and fascinating is that there’s a resilience to the way that women handle that and the way they’ll tell the story to their friends like a day or two later and laugh about it, even though they were sobbing for 12 hours before that. I want to talk about and focus my work as opposed to this particular type of victimhood and infantilization. I want there to be an epilogue. There’s more to the story. 

SH: For Happy Hour, did you get notes back from the publishers saying that?

MG: I remember one of them being like, ‘once you start reading this, you just know that the girls are going to be fine so my investment drops off.’ Why should that be part of this narrative? I’ve always disagreed with that. The things that they don’t like about it are the reason why I wrote it. It’s so in the text. 

SH: A colleague and I were talking about how, now that the world is opening up, there’s much more party content. Do you feel like the era of the party girl is coming back? Did it ever leave? 

MG: Definitely, it left. There was a time when it was totally absent. I would hope so. That would be a fun little moment to have. I think lots of things are going to come back. I think party photography is going to come back, which is hilarious. It’s obviously natural to have been indoors for over a year and then naturally want to go off the rails. But so many people over that course of time had a little regret to not saying yes to everything before. Do you remember all of those tweets being like, “if I had known in February 2020 that that would have been one of the last times, I would have said yes to going to karaoke”. I would have just gone. 

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