Ruth was the restaurant critic for the LA Times, then moved to the NY Times where a bad review from Ruth could shutter a restaurant. From there she joined Gourmet Magazine as editor in chief for ten years until it closed in 2009. She has written 12 books, including several cookbooks, five memoirs and two novels. The Paris Novel is her second novel. And it will make you lust for 1980’s Paris.

In The Paris Novel, a young woman named Stella has had a difficult start to life in Manhattan due to her deeply narcissistic and sexy mother Celia and a predatory older man named Mortimer. To cope with her traumatic upbringing, Stella lives a very controlled, friendless, joyless existence. But all that changes when Celia dies unexpectedly and her will orders Stella to go to Paris for reasons undisclosed.

Read some highlights from my talk with Ruth below. They have been edited for brevity. You can listen to our full interview on my podcast Elena Meets the Author wherever you listen to podcasts. So, find it, subscribe to it. And thank you.

Hello Ruth, welcome. Your novel is an enchanting love letter to the world’s most romantic city where the simple, sensual pleasures of life – food, wine, fashion, art, and architecture abound. It’s also a novel with intriguing characters some made up like the loveable octogenarian Jules, others real, like the late writer James Baldwin and the famous Michelin star chef Marc Meneau. When did you first fall in love with Paris?

My parents took me to Paris for the first time when I was 10. And I have loved it ever since.

Your mother was not a talented cook. In your memoir Tender at the Bone, you wrote that she was a bit dangerous in the kitchen. As a child you had to warn guests not to eat the casserole. Can you tell us where your love of food came from?

My first taste memory is in my highchair. My mother put something in my mouth, and it tasted vile. I spit it out. And then my mother takes a bite, and a puzzled look came over her face. What’s wrong with you, she asked. I knew in that moment that my mother and I did not taste the same things and that she was dangerous. From that moment I took a tiny first taste of everything to see if it was going to kill me. The first story in Tender is the Bone is called Queen of Mold. It’s about how she hosted an engagement party for my brother and put 26 guests in the hospital for food poisoning. I quickly learned to push her out of the kitchen. It was not a game. It was survival.

Where did the idea for the book come from?

There’s a chapter in my memoir Save Me the Plums where I go into a vintage clothing store in Paris and try on this dress, which transforms me completely. I became a fabulous creature who I never imagined I could be. I desperately wanted that dress. The sales lady said, This is your dress. How much is it? I asked. And when she said 6,000, I didn’t buy it. After the memoir was done, my editor said, I love that little black dress chapter so much. Could you imagine a novel where the character does buy the dress? And the moment she said that the book pretty much came to me fully formed.

I read that you chose to set the novel in the early 1980’s because you had firsthand knowledge of the restaurant scene then.  Can you tell us about that?

(In the early 1980’s) I was dirt poor, living in a commune in Berkeley, writing about restaurants. In 1984 the LA Times asked me to be their restaurant critic. It was the first time I was not freelance. I get to the LA Times and ask my boss, what is my expense account limit? And he said, we’ll let you know when you’ve gone over it. I had never been to a three-star restaurant in France. And so, I thought, ok, if I have an unlimited expense account, I’m going to Paris and eat in three-star restaurants. It’s ridiculous to be a restaurant critic for a major newspaper and never having eaten in a great French restaurant. All the meals in the novel are meals I actually ate in 1984.

What’s your favorite home cooked meal?

This time of year, summer, pasta with fresh tomato sauce. Just the smell of the sauce cooking is total comfort to me. When you’re a restaurant critic, your tastes get simpler and simpler. A roast chicken is perfect to me, a perfectly poached egg, heaven.

I’m lucky. I live in the Hudson Valley. I’m surrounded by farmers. Most of my food is locally grown and I eat with the seasons.

I think that’s what the American food revolution was really about. Julia Child came and told us that technique would make you into a great cook. You could go to the supermarket and make a great meal. Alice Waters said, no you cannot make great food without great products. It’s not about technique. It’s about getting really good fresh food. And that had a huge impact on me. In my childhood you could not buy a great tomato or a great strawberry.

Thank you so much Ruth.

August 2024

The post Q&A with Ruth Reichl – The Paris Novel appeared first on Elena Bowes.

Hannah, a Hungarian refugee, is in a loveless, safe marriage to a wealthy British diplomat in Cairo in 1951. She meets Lucien, the charming Swiss manager of the famed Shepheard’s Hotel, after she is bitten by a cobra. He saves her life and awakens a longing in her for everything she has lost. Fast forward to 2022 New England, Mallory is a single mother to 13-year-old Sam who desperately needs a kidney transplant. The one person who might be a kidney match for Mallory’s adored son Sam is his famous singer father Monk Adams. But for reasons undisclosed until the final chapters of this page-turner, Mallory refuses to approach Monk, who she hasn’t seen  since the fateful  summer of 2008.

Below are some highlights from our chat. You can listen to the full interview with Beatriz Williams on my podcast Elena Meets the Author on Spotify, Apple or Substack.

You are a prolific writer, writing under your own name, under a pseudonym and you’ve co-authored several books. How long does it typically take you to write a Beatriz Williams novel?

I tend to do a lot of preparation before I write the book. I don’t mean plotting; I mean thinking about the characters and the key scenes.  I love that state of flow where you know your characters as well as your own children. And so, if I’ve done my preparation, (including) the historical research, the actual drafting of the book takes two to three months. It depends on the complexity of the book, how well I’ve prepared and whether my characters throw any curveballs at me. I love that serendipity of writing where once the characters are there on the page, that’s when the alchemy really happens.

You’re originally from Seattle, went to Stanford and then Columbia Business School. How did you get into writing?

I always wanted to write. I come from a very nerdy background. We went to a lot of Shakespeare and opera as a kid. My father who is British used to tell me, that with writers, many are called, few are chosen. So being kind of a pleaser, and wanting to win my parents’ approval, business seemed easier to be successful at. So, it took a ton of courage to say that while I would be an adequately successful management consultant, I really just wanted to write books.

While I know that Monk Adams is very goodlooking early on in your story, I don’t have an idea about what Mallory looks like until the final chapters.

The heart of my books is the gap between persona which is what we present to the world and our true selves. We tend not to see ourselves the way others see us. To Mallory, she’s just Mallory, not exactly ordinary, but… So, I liked in that final chapter we finally see Mallory through Monk’s eyes, and we realise why he loves her so much. That was such a wonderful chapter to write to see how he sees her and how he perceives himself. This incredibly charismatic guy who doesn’t put a foot wrong and (all he wants) is to have this girl love him.

Were any characters hard to write?

Monk was very easy to write. But Hannah (in Cairo) was very difficult. I had so much trouble with her, and it’s partly because she’s hiding so much hurt. She doesn’t want other characters to get close to the real her, the way she didn’t want me to get close to her. She had a first love in Hungary, then she goes through WWII and undergoes some pretty difficult things. My editor made me take a few things out. Remember this is a summer book. So, I left a few things unspoken at the end of the war. But once I got that about her and what she is looking for in Lucien, once I peeled back all those protective layers that she’s got around her, then writing her became much easier.

Happy End of Summer!

August, 2024

The post Q&A with Beatriz Williams – Husbands & Lovers, an Ideal Summer Read appeared first on Elena Bowes.

Clare also shows how friendships with people younger and older can be life enhancing and the importance of finding your own community. She does this in a light, never preachy, often funny way that leaves readers, or at least this reader, feeling a bit better about the world. My Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity. You can listen to the full interview here on my podcast Elena Meets the Author.

Can you briefly tell us about the path that led you to become a novelist at age 50?

When I was younger, I dreamed of being a novelist. From the moment I discovered stories, I wanted to be able to write them. That was my great dream. But life gets in the way. I worked in advertising for 20 years.

I wrote nothing apart from PowerPoint presentations and emails and shopping lists. And then in 2015 I got to the point where I realized that my life was going seriously off track because I had picked up a rather major dependency on alcohol and my wine o’clock habit was completely out of control.

I was drinking about 10 bottles of wine a week, which is way too much. I mean, that’s way over the government guidelines and it was having all sorts of impacts on my life. So, I knew I had to quit drinking, but I was too embarrassed and ashamed about the situation I found myself in to talk to anybody about it.

I didn’t talk to my doctor. I didn’t talk to my husband. I didn’t talk to my friends. What I did do because I needed some form of therapy was I started an anonymous blog, and I called it Mummy was a Secret Drinker. I wrote in that blog every day. I wrote about what I was going through and all the research I’d been doing and how I was feeling. That blog went viral and then became a memoir called The Sober Diaries, which was published at the beginning of 2018.

And by this stage, my new addiction was writing, and I really didn’t want to stop writing. I absolutely loved it. But I didn’t want to carry on writing about my own life, so I thought I’d try writing about imaginary people instead. And that became my whole new career.

You wrote a wonderful blog about how author Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird, motivated you to keep writing your first book. In a nutshell, for those who haven’t read Anne’s book, can you explain how it applies to so many of life’s challenges?

I love that book. And funny enough, Anne Lamott doesn’t drink either. She quit drinking many years ago. She writes that the expression ‘bird by bird’ comes from a story from her childhood where her little brother had a complete meltdown one evening because he suddenly realized that he had a school project due the next day and he hadn’t done any of it.

He was supposed to have spent the previous semester working on this project about birds. He was supposed to cover I don’t know, 20, 30 different birds. And he was completely beside himself in floods of tears.

He said to his father, ‘I can’t do it. This is the end of my school career. I’m going to be in such trouble.’ And his father sat him down. He said, ‘Now don’t panic. We’ll just take it bird by bird, buddy.’ And they did. They took it bird by bird. And by the end of the night, they had a whole project on birds to hand in.

Anne talks about how writing a novel is very much like that. If you worry about having to produce 100,000 words, the whole thing can seem overwhelming. But if you just think about each page, each chapter, or even each paragraph, you just take it bird by bird, within a relatively short period of time, you find that you’ve got a whole novel.

And giving up alcohol is absolutely about bird by bird. The Alcoholics Anonymous expression of one day at a time, is absolutely what gets you through addiction. If you worry about, can I stop drinking forever? You’ll never even take the first step. If you think, can I stop drinking just for today? The answer to that is always yes. Can I just write about one bird? Yes, of course you can. If you write about one bird enough times, you’ve got a whole project. If you write one chapter enough times, you’ve got a whole novel. If you have one day without drinking enough times, you’ve been sober for a decade.

It’s a really good lesson. Breaking things down to just one little task at a time rather than thinking of something as a humongous project. I have a Post-it taped to my desktop that says, Bird by bird buddy.

Oh, brilliant. It’s good for teenagers as well. If you have young people in your life who are struggling, just saying to them, ‘Look, can you make it through until the end of tomorrow? And if you can do that, you can make it through to the end of the following day and the end of the day after that.’ It helps the whole world stop feeling overwhelming.

Do you know anyone like Daphne, your principal character who at age 70, is sharp, chic, feisty, opinionated, and as witty as they come, an original with a fabulous, checkered past? I want to be Daphne when I grow up. But are there people you modelled her after?

 She’s modelled after the sort of woman I want to be when I’m 70. She isn’t modelled after any one particular person, but she’s modelled after an amalgamation of characteristics that I found aspirational.

At the beginning of the book, Daphne’s not really a very nice person. She’s very spiky. She doesn’t like other people. She’s very critical of everybody around her. And she doesn’t have any friends. She thinks she’s slightly better than everyone else. In many ways, you wouldn’t want to know somebody like Daphne.

I wanted to explore how even the most unlikable people in the right circumstances can be magnificent. And by the end, I think everybody is rooting for Daphne and she’s great, but it’s not where she starts off. She’s certainly not perfect, But I think the most interesting people aren’t perfect.

 I liked that even at the beginning when Daphne was unpleasant and snooty, she was always funny. And had a plan. I never felt sorry for her.

I’m really pleased about that because that was exactly what I wanted to avoid. With older characters in novels, you are encouraged to feel pity for them, and I didn’t want anyone to pity my characters. They’re often in quite precarious situations, and they’re not always the nicest people, but they’ve all got agency.

Daphne does yoga and Pilates every day. And she’s very strong for her age and she carries a walking stick, not because she needs a walking stick to walk with, but because she uses it as a weapon, and she uses it to clear people out of her way if necessary.

The rest of the Q&A can be found here on 26, a UK site to promote the joy of words.

Happy Summer

July 2024

The post Q&A with Clare Pooley – How to Age Disgracefully appeared first on Elena Bowes.

Annabel Monaghan’s  latest book, Summer Romance, came out a few weeks ago and is already an instant USA Today and Washington Post bestseller. If you’re wondering what to throw into that beach bag, wonder no more. I loved this book. Annabel has a gift for creating flawed, funny, charming characters that have enviable chemistry. And a whole quirky community and back story that adds layers and challenges to the plot.

I interviewed Annabel in 2022 about her first novel- Nora Goes Off Script–  which I also loved (for the same reasons as above- she’s nailed the formula yet each story is its very much its own)  Here’s that Q&A. Annabel has written three best sellers in the last three years. And I’m happy to report that she’s  working on a fourth for next summer. She  is clearly on a roll. Her books are funny, smart, philosophical without being too heavy. Feel good without ever being stupid.

In this interview you’ll learn about hard pants, , how to write a sex scene and how anthropological it is to be a seventh grade girl and get ditched by your friends, ‘cheetahs going in for the kill’.

Summer Romance is about a woman named Ali Morris who lives in a suburb outside of Manhattan. She’s a professional organizer, but her life is a mess. Her mother died two years ago. Her husband left her a year ago. Her pantry is a sight to behold. She hasn’t worn hard pants, (i. e. pants with a zipper) in she can’t remember how long. She has three kids who she’s trying to hold it together for. Ali is stuck.

Then one day, Ali takes off her wedding ring. She puts on overalls, which kind of count as hard pants. And she goes to the dog park with her little dog. She meets a cute guy named Ethan. And as the title of Annabel’s book suggests, things start looking up for Ali.

First question. I’m a big fan of romantic comedies, intelligent romantic comedies, the Harry Met Sally’s of the book world. But they do get a hard time like they’re not proper literature. Annabel, why do you think that is? Do you think it has something to do with how they look like they’re easy to write but are anything but?

 I think it is. They’re easy to read so they probably seem like they’re easy to write but I don’t know why something to have value has to be hard to read to begin with. I read for pleasure. I read for escape. I don’t read to make my life harder than it already is.

 I agree. I love knowing I’m going to go to sleep with a smile on my face after reading a few chapters. I think Summer Romance has got to be made into a movie. Your descriptions of Ethan really made me want to meet him. He’s the perfect guy who not only really sees Ali but is crazy about her. He’s gorgeous without an ounce of vanity. And he’s always bringing her snacks and glasses of wine. If you could choose any actor to play both Ali and Ethan who would they be?

 I think maybe I was hungry while I was writing this book. I really do like how he would show up with chocolate pretzels and a little bit of Sancerre. It’s really not that hard to please a woman. For Ali, I would say Jennifer Lawrence. She is always my first choice, and I would actually have her play any of my heroines in any of my books.

And Ethan, I have a harder time with because I see him as a complete person, but I sort of think of him as a younger Sean Penn, but Sean Penn is not younger, so we couldn’t get him to do it. So, I don’t know who that actor is.

 In your notes at the end of the book, you talk about how after your mother’s death in 2009, a nun who knew your mother emailed your sister to say she’s as close as your breath. What do you think she meant?

I think about that sentence all the time. I think what it means is that if somebody loves you a lot and loves you your whole life, it becomes a part of you. And so, once they’re gone, you don’t feel so much that they’re gone because they’re inside of you and they’re also outside of you, like your breath.

A couple times a week I get in the car, and I say, Mom, can you believe what just happened or what am I going to do? And it’s not like I hear a response from her. I’m not hearing dead people, but I know in my head and in my memory and in my heart what she would say to comfort me in a certain situation.

I read that this is your most personal novel yet. Can you expand on how this book has a lot of parallels to your own life? You talked about your mother. Do you hate dog parks?

I really can’t express how much I hate dog parks. The meet cute in this book (happens when) Ali goes to the dog park and her little dog runs over to this very attractive man, lifts his leg and pees on him. (The dog)  chooses him for Ali in that way.

The first time that I ever took my dog to the dog park was also the last time I ever took my dog to the dog park. He just ran over to this lady, just this perfectly nice lady, lifted up his leg and peed on her flip flop. No joke.

 Oh no!

The look on her face, and I just apologized and backed away and frankly never went back to the dog park again. So certainly, that’s part of my life. And the grieving of my mother is in this book.

But also, this idea that I think about all the time, I put into this book, which is what is the right amount of involvement to have in your children’s lives? You know, what is the right amount to step in? Ali’s mother steps into her marriage a lot while she was alive. Ali’s mother steps in when her husband is absent to sort of make everything okay. And her over-helping in her marriage sort of makes Ali lose her voice and sort of keeps her from ever really learning how to be married.

I think this is a thing that we do as parents as our children get older. We don’t let them learn how to live because we are just trying to prevent them from feeling any kind of pain.

I was raised on a really heavy dose of negligence, and I survived, and it was fine. There’s this idea that I think all of us would love to do everything we can to keep our children from ever suffering. But that is not really best practice. Because they’re going to suffer, and if they haven’t ever suffered along the way, you know, their first step out is, it’s a doozy.

 I agree, all this helicopter parenting is not healthy for the kids or the parents. You have two main older women characters in your book, Ali’s dead mother and Ali’s 94-year-old neighbour, Phyllis. How would you compare these two women and can you talk about the importance of intergenerational friendships.

 I love my intergenerational friendships both up and down. I think they give me so much context. Ali has this neighbour who’s 94 years old, who she’s known forever, but she got closer to after her mother passed away. And Ali’s mother, as I said, was overly involved in everything in her life. Phyllis, her neighbour, has the opposite attitude about things.

She says, pull the weeds and let God do the rest. She’s very hands off about everything. Phyllis is kind of how my mom was. I appreciated Phyllis’s outlook on everything. So, they were a contrast to each other and hopefully to have Ali change throughout the novel.

I think those relationships help wherever we are in our lives. We get so full in our heads about where we are and what we’re doing and what our particular circumstances are. Our older friends give us context for where we’re going and how maybe some of (the things in our head) aren’t so important. And our younger friends give us context for where we’ve been.

You have three sons, no daughters, yet you really captured what Greer is going through. How did you know how traumatic it is to be a seventh-grade girl?

 I was doing an event this week and I asked the crowd of a hundred people, I said, who here knows what it is to be a seventh-grade girl and get ditched? And every single one of them raised their hands, every single person in the audience. It is the most universal feeling. So, I don’t have a daughter, but I was in the seventh grade, and I remember what it was like.

It’s anthropological. It’s like when the cheetahs are going in for a kill and they surround the prey. They pick out the weaker girl and pounce and then everybody turns on her. It’s bananas. I wrote about what I remembered.

Changing tack here. Your sex scenes hit just the right note. They’re suggestive and sexy without anything too embarrassing. No Fifty Shades of Grey. Do you have any tips on writing about sex?

 When I wrote Nora Goes Off Script, I needed to write a sex scene, and I just panicked. I didn’t know how to approach that, and I actually googled it.  I talked to a bunch of people. What I realized is that there are two kinds of sex scenes, and you just have to make a decision. One is a scene where there are body parts. And you are seeing where the body parts are going and that’s spicier. And then the other kind is where the people are together and you know how it feels that they’re together emotionally and you can kind of feel it, but you’re not seeing any body parts. That’s where I’m comfortable.

My editor always says, especially in this book, I want to be dying for that kiss. Make us just die for it. That takes a lot of revision to get right.

 I also liked how Ethan dealt with ex-husband Pete’s put downs. He deflected rather than replied aggressively. Were those scenes fun to write?

 So fun. I really like writing a horrible guy. And the thing about Pete, her ex-husband, is he’s not physically abusive. He just talks to her in a way that can literally wear you down after time. It’s just belittling and demeaning and dismissive in a way that just makes you want to punch him in the face.

So, in the scenes where Ethan is just quietly putting him in his place, it was very satisfying writing. I loved writing those scenes.

 Are there some constants that we can always expect from an Annabel Monaghan novel?

 I will always write a love story. I have tried to write a murder, I’ve tried to write a thriller, and they’ve been disasters. They’ve crumbled because I’ve turned them into a love story immediately. I can’t stay in the darkness for very long when I’m writing. So, it’ll always be a love story.

There will always be a heroine who, starts out in a certain situation and ends up just being more herself. And it will not be because of the relationship, she’ll never have a man solve all her problems. It drives me crazy, where everything’s terrible, but then the guy calls and everything’s fine.

That’s not how it works in real life. She will always, come back to her truer self by the end. For me that’s really satisfying. I think that’s the journey we’re all on, just to get back to ourselves and away from all the nonsense that we learn for 50 years.

To who we once were. Can you promise us a happy ending?

 That goes without saying. And I’ll never kill a dog.

 Very reassuring. Thank you so much. In the words of the Morris family, I’d like to wish you a champagne summer.

 So far so good with the champagne summer over here. It’s been great.

You can read the rest of my edited Q&A here on 26.

June 2024

The post Q&A with Bestselling Author Annabel Monaghan… Summer Romance appeared first on Elena Bowes.

There’s the one who pretends to play music on her toes.                                      

The one who’s too hot (there must be a catch)                                                    

The one who makes a great breakfast sandwich                                                     

The one who turns everything into double entendres (I’ll weed your garden)     

And the one who can calm her unruly thoughts with a single touch

Holly and I had an insightful conversation about husband swapping (pros and cons), when too much choice is not a good thing, and sometimes how you just have to bite the bullet and choose one. (Stretch, for the record, I was not biting any bullet when I chose you).

You can read the rest of the interview here on 26. Or listen to the full chat on my podcast Elena Meets the Author.

Elena: Choosing amongst an endless supply of husbands can be as hard work and soul destroying as online dating. Sending him back to the attic is a bit like swiping right. Can you tell us about the paradox of choice?

Holly:  I think it is very, very overwhelming. I’m terrible at making decisions. When I went on my U. S. tour, the very first night I got in, I checked into my hotel in New York. I thought, okay, this is great. I should go out and get some dinner. It’s about 7. 30, 8 o’clock. And there’s a burger place on one side of the hotel and a ramen place on the other side. They opened the menus. I thought, Oh, I can order to pick up. That’s great.’ I filled in all of the criteria for the burger and then was like, Oh, maybe I don’t want a burger. Maybe I want ramen.

I took a break, made a decaf coffee, had a sit, looked out of the window, tried to sense within me what choice I wanted. I do want ramen. (But) they had both closed. I had spent so long dithering between just two choices that I had to go around the corner, get a carton of cardboard tasting strawberries and have that for my dinner.

Elena: And it was only between two.

Holly: I was talking to someone about this who was saying that even when you’re literally on a date, you feel like there’s probably someone better in your phone, in your pocket.  I think the sense of abundance certainly makes me, and I think a lot of other people, feel like there must be one correct choice, and you just have to figure out what that correct choice is.

But the truth is with potential partners, or with restaurants to get your dinner out before they close, or places to live or jobs to do, there are some that would be terrible for you, right? It’s not that anything will do. There’d be some that would be fine, you could probably make them work. And there’d be some that would be great. Everything will have its little annoyances Everything will have its strengths and joys.

Elena: not deal breakers.

Holly: Yeah, and feeling like you need to pick the exact correct one is what ends up with me eating some cardboard strawberries because the restaurants have all closed,

Elena: Exactly. And at some point, you have to decide. At some point, Lauren has to decide.

Holly: And it might be that you decide on a thing that doesn’t work out, and that’s fine. It’s better to have given it a go and gone, ah, this didn’t work out, rather than perpetually suspending the attempt until you’re totally convinced that this is the right meal, this is the right job to apply for, whatever it might be.

Elena: You might not have met your husband had you only read his dating profile. Can you tell us that story?

Holly: Yes. Oh, my goodness. So, after we’d been dating for a couple of months, he suddenly sat up and looked at his phone and was like, Oh no, I forgot to delete my dating profile. I made him let me read it before he, he deleted it.

It wasn’t red flaggy or anything. It was just really, really dull. It was mostly about his work. It was written in this sort of very perky tone where everything had an exclamation mark, and it didn’t really speak to a personality. It was just this kind of splurging of indiscriminate enthusiasm.

I thought, there’s nothing wrong with this. If a friend told me she was dating this man, I’d be like, yeah, okay, fine. Hope that works out for you. But I would never have sent a message to it. I would have just scrolled right through and gone, Well, that seems a little bit dull. But because we met in the real world and had a conversation, long before I ever saw the profile, it went a very different way.

Elena; Is there a solution to how you could improve online sites so you really see the real honest person?

Holly: It’s very difficult, isn’t it? Everyone wants to put their best foot forward and people don’t necessarily have a good sense of what about them will be appealing to the people scrolling through. Maybe there’s a twist on it, maybe you only get shown five faces a day, or maybe women have to send the message first or whatever it is, but the fundamental interaction in most dating apps is still this same look at the profile. Swipe yes or no, see if there’s a match.

I think it’s a shame. There are some people that it works really well for, but I think an ecology where there’s a greater variety of different types of interaction is really healthy. I was on Ok Cupid, the dating app for giant nerds who want to answer 800 questions and get weird percentage matches. I thought it was fun to be able to see which deal breaker questions people had answered in different ways. Seeing the way people had responded to the different prompts was amusing. It’s not like there’s one methodology that’s the solution for everyone.

I used to love writing profiles for friends. My favourite was I put out the offer to anyone I’d met saying, I will write your dating profile if you want me to this week. And the one that I enjoyed most was for a guy that I’d only met a couple of times. So, I just guessed a lot of things. I gave him opinions about types of cookies that perhaps he didn’t really have. Made up a lot of stuff and at the end just said this profile was written for me by someone who met me twice. If we go on three dates you will know me better than she does, and you can then rewrite one of these answers at your will.

And apparently that went quite well for him. I met him again a few months later and he was like, “Yeah, yeah, I’m dating someone now.’

May, 2024

The post Q&A with Holly Gramazio – The Husbands appeared first on Elena Bowes.