Grant Ginder, LET'S NOT DO THAT AGAIN: A Novel
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[0:58]Grant Gander is the author of Let's Not Do That Again, a novel.
[1:02]He's actually the author of five novels, including the people we hate at the wedding,
[1:07]which has been adapted into a major motion picture starring Allison Jenny, Kristin Bell, and Ben Platt.
[1:13]Originally from Southern California, Grant received his MFA from New York University where he teaches writing.
[1:18]Welcome, Grant.
[1:19]Thank you so much for coming.
[1:20]On mom's ton of time to read books to discuss.
[1:22]Let's not do that again.
[1:24]Thank you so much for having me.
[1:26]It's my pleasure.
[1:27]Let's not do that again.
[1:28]Could refer to our ineffective Wi-Fi series that we in which we find ourselves.
[1:34]You know, it's a very versatile title in that way.
[1:37]I can refer to a lot of things.
[1:39]Yes.
[1:40]Okay.
[1:41]Could you please tell us in areas of what your book is about?
[1:43]I would love to.
[1:44]So the book follows the last chaotic weeks of a New York Congresswoman's campaign for Senate.
[1:51]Her name is Nancy Harrison.
[1:53]And she should be a shoe in.
[1:54]She comes from this sort of this long political lineage.
[1:57]And she's a rising star in her party.
[1:59]But as they get closer to election day, as the campaign gets closer to election day, a curveball is thrown.
[2:05]And that curveball is that her daughter from who she is estranged surfaces in a viral video.
[2:12]And in the video, she is throwing a champagne bottle through the window of a very famous French Bistro.
[2:19]And so.
[2:20]Good day.
[2:21]Who's then?
[2:22]How do you pronounce it?
[2:23]Yeah.
[2:24]It's you know what?
[2:25]I like my, my very like that French.
[2:27]I would say who cares.
[2:29]But every time I say that people I know, but every French people I know person I know like it's actually
[2:33]Fukets.
[2:34]And I'm like, but that doesn't follow the rules of your language.
[2:36]But so.
[2:37]So you're all of which is to say your guess is as good as mine.
[2:40]But as you can imagine in a event like that, for a very famous, for a very famous Congresswoman throws the campaign in to even more turmoil.
[2:48]So to that end, the book is about obviously it's about political dysfunction, but it's as much about, about family dysfunction and the way that those two things come together for this family.
[2:57]I love it because when you have the book open, you have the Congresswoman basically watching her daughter and having it and all the news and being like, I would recognize those cheekbones anywhere because they're
[3:07]I gave her to those cheekbones.
[3:09]You know, it's not funny.
[3:11]Anyway, you're your sense of humor.
[3:13]It's it's like a dry wit.
[3:15]It comes to right away.
[3:17]So it's your I just love the way you write.
[3:19]It's a great.
[3:20]Great style.
[3:21]I'm ready.
[3:22]Thank you.
[3:23]I appreciate that.
[3:24]I feel it feels very cinematic type of writing.
[3:27]Jamie like I can really picture myself in the kitchen with her and all that stuff.
[3:33]It's funny.
[3:34]Yeah, I tend to be like a very, very seen driven writer.
[3:37]And I'd be coming.
[3:38]I find, you know, I'm working on a new project right now.
[3:40]And I find that I'm becoming an even more seen driven writer.
[3:43]It's the point where I like when I do have to back up and give it a little, you know, exposition or backstory or anything like that.
[3:50]It's becoming harder and harder for me, which, you know, I think it creates some hurdles with this next book that I'm writing, but particularly with let's not do that again.
[3:57]But I wanted the scope of the story to be incredibly great.
[4:00]It's a New York story, it's a Paris story, it's a political story.
[4:03]And so, so writing these, these very vivid, very, you know, very quick scenes was, was how I set out to write the books.
[4:12]I'm glad that they've resonated.
[4:14]I have to say I just so I wrote this memoir recently.
[4:16]And I had to do it.
[4:17]When I thought about it as a whole project, it was really overwhelming.
[4:20]And so I was like, you know what, I'm just going to write it in scenes.
[4:23]I'm just going to do it.
[4:24]And it made it so much easier. I'm like, I can write 20 scenes.
[4:27]That's like, no problem.
[4:28]I can write 20 scenes.
[4:29]Yeah.
[4:30]Exactly.
[4:31]A book seemed overwhelming.
[4:32]Right.
[4:33]When you put it in the context of the book, when you think about all the connective tissue that has to go into, you know, the pudding scenes together,
[4:39]connecting those scenes, it becomes overwhelming.
[4:41]But when you think of the individual scenes, at least for me, and I'm glad that you go the same way that it ends up becoming really exciting.
[4:46]Right.
[4:47]And you can visualize these moments to start picture of these moments in a way that that the book, the story starts feeling more real.
[4:55]So I'm exactly the same.
[4:56]Yeah.
[4:57]Of course, my scenes are my life.
[4:58]So I, but the ability to then for you to imagine them and figure it out and have it all linked up for a reason.
[5:05]You know, that's, that's a real gift.
[5:08]Thank you.
[5:09]Thank you.
[5:10]So where did the idea for this come from?
[5:12]So I'm hoping it, I'm hoping it came from you walking down the street and being like, what would happen if I threw a champagne bottle in here?
[5:18]You know, it kind of didn't know.
[5:20]I think it came from like a lot of different where about a lot of pieces.
[5:24]What I wanted to write within New York.
[5:26]I wanted to write like what I felt was like a intersection of New York album.
[5:30]I think that, you know, this, this aims to be that with just like a little dash of Paris.
[5:34]I think that that sort of conceptually the idea came from.
[5:38]I started thinking it, I started thinking about it maybe in like 2018 maybe then the end of 2017 where I was looking at politics in the United States and this thing American democracy, which my entire life, I had taken for granted, right?
[5:50]It was like water or air.
[5:52]It was, I was seeing a friend from left, right in center.
[5:55]And so I started asking myself a question of, you know, how far would I a seemingly sometimes rational person go to to protect this thing that I'm now realizing is so important.
[6:07]And is not granted, right?
[6:10]That in fact needs to be protected.
[6:12]And that question is a question that this family, the Harrison's ultimately are faced with towards the end of the book.
[6:19]And the, the, how they decide to answer that question is going to have, you know, repercussions for the rest of their lives.
[6:26]So, so that was kind of like the, the, the seed that started it and it kind of grew from their families and families, dysfunctions are always really interesting to me.
[6:36]And so kind of smashing up family dysfunction against this very public political dysfunction was an exciting challenge for me and seeing again how those how those dynamics play out.
[6:48]And really interested in the ways that, you know, you have politics kind of on the macro level in the sense that you also have politics on the micro level and then the various negotiations that are constantly taking place between siblings, between parents and children.
[7:01]And how they're always those struggles for power, even with an interesting given family was, was really interesting to me as well.
[7:07]Have you ever had any political ambitions of your own?
[7:11]I, you know, I spent, I, and the reason is, well, I don't think I ever had political ambitions.
[7:16]I think, you know, like, like the trouble I got into in college, like kind of killed all that.
[7:20]But I think that, I think we need to hear more.
[7:24]I think we need to get a different into that.
[7:26]That sounds really interesting.
[7:28]That's another book.
[7:29]No, you know, so I did, I worked in DC right after graduation.
[7:36]In college, I graduated, or I'm sorry, I interned for a congresswoman, both in her district office in California and then also on Capitolville where I like, you know, like gave tours to the Capitol and like, like, forgot facts and made them up to these like poor tourists who are wandering on the Capitol.
[7:53]And so I started that and then after I graduated, I moved back to DC and I worked as a speechwriter for John Podesta at the Center for American Progress.
[8:01]But I absolutely loved it.
[8:02]I thought it was fascinating.
[8:04]But I was, I was like, really bad at the political stuff.
[8:08]Like, you know, atrociously bad at it.
[8:10]I feel like you do see as a city where you like trades on knowing things first and access.
[8:18]And I just like did not care to know anything first.
[8:21]Like, I didn't care about like what information was coming out of like some subcommittee though.
[8:26]And today I actually am following the news about committee hearings.
[8:29]But like, so far, you know, so I'm like some committee on agriculture.
[8:32]Like, I just didn't care.
[8:34]But what I was really interested in was, I mean, it has been all it sounds like as I say, I sound like such an urban I say this, but kind of bit like political nature.
[8:42]I'm sorry that the narrative nature of politics and how particularly with speech writing that the best speeches are ones that tell stories and news stories as rhetorical means.
[8:55]And so, you know, use stories to change a mind or to make a new policy.
[9:00]And so that I think studying the arc of an argument essentially is what ultimately drove me to write fiction.
[9:10]I had always been a huge reader of, you know, of novels.
[9:14]It was like a real nerd in that way, continue to be a real nerd in that way.
[9:18]I'm here at the beach for three days and I brought four books with me.
[9:23]You're, you're, you're exactly like me.
[9:25]I took my daughter to a birthday party.
[9:27]And I was like, I'll be on for two and a half hours and I packed three books.
[9:30]And I was like, I'm not going to read three books.
[9:32]I'm not even going to read one book.
[9:33]But what if, what if I find that?
[9:36]But if I find time.
[9:37]Yes.
[9:38]Yeah.
[9:39]I'm going to read it.
[9:40]Yes.
[9:41]Yeah.
[9:42]And so, so I, I, that, but storytelling aspect was kind of always there for me.
[9:45]And then what the politics, the writing speeches really got me to focus on, on, on narrative structures.
[9:51]I actually think I, I later went on and bought my, my MFA.
[9:54]I didn't want you.
[9:56]I actually think that I've learned more.
[10:00]about narrative arcs from speech writing that I did in any of my MFA classes.
[10:05]Maybe you shouldn't say that out loud.
[10:08]I know. I learned how to be a writer when I was getting my name.
[10:16]I've got narrative arcs and maybe speech.
[10:20]Okay. Wait, now I'm really curious.
[10:23]What four books did you bring on your vacation?
[10:25]Okay. So I brought, this is a very good question.
[10:28]I brought either or which I finished last night, which is like absolutely.
[10:31]I'm like, I like to finish the book in bed last night that we like got in late.
[10:38]I got on the bed. I finished the book and then stared at the scene like for an hour.
[10:40]I love the writing. I love her writing.
[10:44]So it was one of the things where it's like, I can't sleep.
[10:46]And I usually panic when I can't sleep, but like I couldn't sleep.
[10:49]And I was so happy I couldn't sleep.
[10:51]So I could just think about the book.
[10:52]So I brought that.
[10:53]I brought a calling for Charlie Barnes that the Joshua Ferris novel.
[10:58]I think I'll last year. I love his work.
[10:59]I didn't get around to reading. I went to person analysis.
[11:01]I'm excited to read that.
[11:02]And then Tracy Clinton can't win.
[11:04]And then I brought Sugie Dane with, I haven't read Sugie Dane yet.
[11:08]And so I brought Sugie Dane with me, which are like, these are like, you know,
[11:11]like ambitious books to read over three to three years.
[11:17]So I, you know, that I last year when I came,
[11:21]I remember I read Billie King's writers and lovers.
[11:23]I read.
[11:24]I love writers.
[11:26]I love, loved it, loved it.
[11:28]I mean, it was the sort of thing where I had to be like, like my naces and
[11:31]ideas were like pulling me off the beach.
[11:33]They're like the sun's going down.
[11:34]Like it's time for you to come back inside.
[11:36]But I loved it.
[11:38]I love it.
[11:39]Oh, my gosh.
[11:40]Yeah. That is the best feeling.
[11:41]I think that's what we love you.
[11:42]Like every time we open it up, you know, like open up about, yeah.
[11:46]It's like, you never know.
[11:47]Is this going to be the one that they're going to keep me up?
[11:49]And I'm going to talk about it for the next 20 years or is it?
[11:51]Yeah.
[11:52]And that like, I don't even get more than 20 pages.
[11:54]So, you know, you never know.
[11:58]I've had, I will say that like, I mean, not that I've had a, like a really good streak
[12:03]recently.
[12:04]Like, I read either or and then right before that, I read Starrow and Bliss.
[12:09]So that's how you read Starrow and Bliss.
[12:10]I love it.
[12:11]Meg Mason.
[12:12]Yes.
[12:13]Yes.
[12:14]Like, I was in jury duty.
[12:17]I remember like waiting to be called back for one year.
[12:19]And I was like alternating between like laughing and tearing up and laughing and tearing
[12:25]up.
[12:26]It was so expertly done.
[12:28]She was on this podcast also.
[12:29]And I loved it.
[12:30]Do you know Nick Hornby is writing that screenplay?
[12:32]What?
[12:33]Yes.
[12:34]Oh, my God.
[12:36]That is going to be amazing.
[12:37]Yeah.
[12:38]I interviewed him too.
[12:39]And you told me that.
[12:40]Oh, my God.
[12:41]And I was like, that's amazing.
[12:42]Yeah.
[12:43]He's perfect for it.
[12:45]You're actually the first person I've talked to you about.
[12:46]And then that was like, I mean, I put it out.
[12:49]For the podcast, I had like nobody said anything to me.
[12:51]And I was like, oh, my gosh.
[12:53]Yeah.
[12:54]Oh, my gosh.
[12:55]That is going to be fantastic.
[12:56]That's great news.
[12:57]Yeah.
[12:58]Grant, you should have a book club.
[12:59]Do you have all the night?
[13:00]I don't know about it.
[13:01]Yeah.
[13:02]I don't know.
[13:03]But now I'm now my kind of inspired to start with.
[13:05]You should totally start with.
[13:06]First of all, I love all your pics.
[13:08]And they're like, I would love to like follow along with all the stuff you're reading.
[13:12]Because I feel like there's not many things that I love too.
[13:15]So.
[13:16]Yeah.
[13:17]OK.
[13:19]You should totally do that by you.
[13:20]OK.
[13:21]OK.
[13:21]I mean, it's fine.
[13:22]I mean, it's fine.
[13:22]Totally.
[13:23]It's awesome.
[13:24]OK, wait.
[13:24]So back to you back to you back to my book.
[13:29]Back to your book.
[13:30]OK.
[13:31]So you've right in scenes.
[13:33]Tell me, well, I want to hear actually about your next book.
[13:35]And we can come back.
[13:36]But you encourage me what is in spot nine, but is the word.
[13:40]I don't know.
[13:41]You picked my interest.
[13:42]What is the next one that's coming?
[13:44]The next book that's coming, I, you know, I'm pretty
[13:47]early stages.
[13:48]But it follows a, it takes place in the 90s.
[13:52]And like the late 90s.
[13:53]And Laguna Beach, California, which is where I grew up.
[13:56]And it follows the summer and the life of this one family
[14:00]in Laguna Beach.
[14:01]And it's different than my previous three books.
[14:04]And that the entire book is in first person.
[14:07]And it's told from the point of view of the youngest son,
[14:11]who is 15 when the book opens.
[14:13]It's told from his point of view.
[14:14]He's looking back about 20 years later on this summer, where
[14:18]there are a number of different things that happened.
[14:20]And that's like a bow, all I'm ready to kind of share
[14:23]about it right now.
[14:24]The tentative title for it is Beefcake, which there,
[14:29]there's a story behind.
[14:30]But that's the, that's the working title right now is Beefcake.
[14:34]That's so amazing.
[14:34]Wait.
[14:35]OK, so can you go back, you left us off with getting
[14:38]your useless MFA, then what happened in your life?
[14:42]It was not your right, I shouldn't have said that,
[14:44]particularly in a podcast that I'm sure a lot of people
[14:46]would have about 10 people who I know listen to.
[14:49]I, so after I got my MFA, I worked on actually
[14:54]for very briefly for about a year as a literary agent
[14:58]with a small agency that is now part of a much larger agency
[15:02]here in New York.
[15:03]And it was, I mean, wonderful colleagues.
[15:06]And it was totally eye-opening.
[15:09]And I think a very cool experience.
[15:12]I'm, I'm in awe of people.
[15:15]And I think that there are a few of them out there,
[15:17]like, look like, I mean, who are, who are able to show you.
[15:20]I feel like, yeah, it is work is incredible.
[15:23]But who are able to both kind of be on the business side
[15:27]of this crazy business and also be producing art.
[15:30]For me, it was really difficult, both just finding the time
[15:33]to write.
[15:34]But also you're in a situation where you're kind of seeing
[15:36]how the sausage gets made, right?
[15:37]And you're, you're, you're seeing contracts
[15:40]and you're seeing kind of what work goes where.
[15:42]And that for me, it was really hard to divorce myself,
[15:45]like to kind of keep those two parts of my mind separate.
[15:48]And so, again, I did that for about a year.
[15:53]And then this position opened up in the expository
[15:56]right in program at NYU for a full-time contract
[15:59]faculty member and I applied and got that.
[16:02]And I've been there now for a decade.
[16:05]I just finished my 20th semester, which is pre-wild.
[16:09]But I love it.
[16:10]I love it.
[16:11]It's not creative writing.
[16:12]It's writing essays, which, which I find actually,
[16:17]I, you know, when I was getting my, my useless, I'm
[16:18]okay when I was getting my, I, I, NYU has an opportunity
[16:23]before if you, if you, while you're going to go,
[16:25]I'm okay if you want to teach, I can trade a fiction
[16:27]and writing course.
[16:28]You can do that for undergraduates, which I did.
[16:30]And I absolutely loved.
[16:32]Weirdly, I find that I teach, I like teaching writing
[16:36]for essays even more than that.
[16:39]You know, I mean, like as someone who read novels,
[16:41]and like you were saying like, you don't even know
[16:43]if an novel is gonna speak to when you pick it up,
[16:45]that doesn't necessarily mean that the novel is bad.
[16:47]It's just like not for you.
[16:48]And so I found that like my students were turning in stories
[16:50]that just like worked for me.
[16:51]And I was like, I can't really tell you why they're bad, right?
[16:55]Like I felt like I did not have to be effective in that situation.
[16:57]But with essays, you know, what's, what's interesting
[16:59]is that you, you, you can see the script, right?
[17:02]You can like start talking to them a little bit more
[17:04]about structure and about the ways to form an argument
[17:06]to write a thesis.
[17:08]Interestingly enough, I think that in the same way
[17:11]that writing speeches turned me into a fiction writer,
[17:16]I've had to use my fiction writing skills
[17:19]to talk about writing essays to my students,
[17:21]if that makes sense, because I end up writing,
[17:23]I write so much more fiction than I do essays.
[17:26]And so that idea of a narrative arc
[17:29]that I, you know, that I kind of first hand in speech writing
[17:32]and now really think about when I'm writing fiction,
[17:35]I also apply to the teaching of essays
[17:37]like an idea has an narrative arc, right?
[17:39]And they're in the same way that characters
[17:42]affected by different events in their life
[17:43]over the course of the story.
[17:45]And idea is affected by, you know,
[17:47]different pieces of evidence,
[17:48]different moments of reflection over the course of an essay.
[17:50]And so I've learned, I think over the past decade
[17:54]that the two, you know, fiction writing
[17:56]and expository writing are in fact much more similar
[17:59]than that I once thought.
[18:01]You know, I recently got pitched about called undilivered,
[18:03]I think it was called.
[18:04]about all the speeches that were written for people
[18:07]and that they never ended up giving.
[18:08]And it's like, oh, my gosh.
[18:09]Stream might have changed how they've been given.
[18:12]What a fascinating book.
[18:14]Yeah, undilivered.
[18:15]I'll send you the, I think it's called undilivered.
[18:17]Undilivable, I'll look it up.
[18:19]I can send it to you.
[18:20]Yeah.
[18:20]Oh my God, I would love to read something I got.
[18:24]As we're talking, by the way, I had this new idea,
[18:26]which is you could do a podcast for my zcast network
[18:30]and call it grants book club or something like that
[18:33]or whatever you want to call.
[18:34]And you could have people read along with you
[18:36]and then like do a podcast, either with the author
[18:38]or you could just talk about the books or have it.
[18:41]Oh my God.
[18:42]Something like that.
[18:43]Like, it would be like my dream come true.
[18:44]Like literally she just like nerd out about books.
[18:47]Yeah.
[18:48]This is my, I'm almost getting offended
[18:50]by your frequent use of the word nerd
[18:52]because that is then me because all I do is talk
[18:54]about books and I take such pride in that label,
[19:00]but I use it as a, I, all this is a compliment for myself
[19:03]for the culture.
[19:04]Okay.
[19:05]Well, you're taking me down with you.
[19:07]So thank you for that.
[19:08]But if you are really interested,
[19:09]we should talk about it because that could be really fun.
[19:11]I just want to talk about it.
[19:12]Oh, absolutely.
[19:13]I would love to talk about it.
[19:14]Okay.
[19:15]So we love to.
[19:16]All right.
[19:17]We'll email off.
[19:18]I'll tell you this.
[19:19]You have my, you have my email and stuff now, right?
[19:21]I don't, but I can get it from your publicist or something.
[19:24]Yeah.
[19:25]I'll find you.
[19:27]I'll find you.
[19:27]I'll track you down.
[19:28]Yeah.
[19:29]Okay. Last question.
[19:30]What advice do you have for aspiring authors?
[19:32]Oh, gosh.
[19:33]I think that the most important piece of advice that I give people
[19:38]and that I often have to tell myself is to write the story
[19:43]that you need to tell as opposed to the story
[19:48]that you think you should tell.
[19:50]Twice now I've written books and I mean by full manuscripts
[19:54]of books that were the books that I thought I should be writing
[19:58]at a certain point in my career.
[20:00]or because they were more akin to the books that I would see in on the bestseller list,
[20:05]or, you know, kind of like the grand literary lines were writing in both times they didn't sell.
[20:11]And to cleanse my palette in those moments, I wrote the book that I wanted to write,
[20:18]and they sold one of which was the people we hated the wedding, and then one of which was,
[20:23]let's not do that again. I mean, with people we hated the wedding, I spent four years working
[20:28]on a book that ended up being 190,000 words. That was this sprawling, historical epic,
[20:34]you know, that I started it when I was getting my MFA, and I really thought it was sort of like
[20:39]that the, it was going to be like this very serious literary fiction. And we went on my agent,
[20:45]and I went out with it to just a few people, and no one picked it up. There were like positive
[20:51]responses, but no one really picked it up. And then, so my agent came back and was like,
[20:56]you know, why don't you work on editing it a bit? And I just, I was like, I can't look at this
[21:03]again. So I'm just going to, I'm going to just take a month working on this other idea,
[21:10]people we hated the wedding. That was like funny, and gay, and like had the sort of characters
[21:17]that I see in my daily life in our interest again, and I'm interested in. And I wrote in one month
[21:25]turned into, I wrote it in like nine months. And it was just like, this was the thing that I
[21:31]want to write. And I think that that comes across both in the prose and in the story, and your
[21:36]attitude towards the characters, when it's not the thing that you're writing, because you
[21:40]think that's what the industry is wanting you to do, but rather it's the thing that that is
[21:45]true, and is representative of you and your position with the world. Amazing. Okay, this has been
[21:53]great. I have this vision of turning you into a full-on book fluencer. And like,
[21:59]I don't know why I've decided to make this like a little cause of mine, but anyway,
[22:04]I look forward to it. I am again, I'm so sorry about the technical beginning. I'm glad that
[22:10]this, there's window. I'm like, it's perfect. Okay. Okay. Okay. It's perfect. Okay. We'll stay in touch.
[22:19]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[22:29]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read
[22:33]Books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club
[22:38]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures
[22:43]Sound for the Sound Editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this
[22:47]fantastic intro and outro music.