A Conversation with Grant Ginder, author of Let’s Not Do That Again

Who are The Harrisons?

The family’s matriarch is Nancy Harrison who is in the final months of her campaign for the U.S. Senate. She’s supposed to be a shoo-in; twenty years ago, she inherited her husband Howard’s seat in the House of Representatives after his accidental death, and has become a star of the Democratic party. As Election Day gets closer, it becomes increasingly clear that the biggest roadblock to Nancy’s victory won’t be her opponent or low voter turnout, but rather her own family.

For starters, there’s her mother-in-law, Eugenia, who, after blaming Nancy for Howard’s death, has committed herself to making Nancy’s life hell. Then, there are her two children. Nick, the oldest, worked for years as Nancy’s fixer in Washington, a position that he abandoned for a teaching gig at NYU. He’s trying to strike out on his own, but that’s proving to be more difficult than anticipated, particularly when his mother keeps showing up asking him to do her dirty work. Meanwhile, his sister Greta inexplicably ditched her job as a paralegal to work at an Apple store in Brooklyn. When she’s not at the store trying to avoid customers, she holes up playing online video games in the room she rents from a Hungarian model in Bushwick. She’s smart, pretty, and existentially adrift. 

She’s also having a secret affair with a French fascist which is about to be a major headache for Nancy.  

Another brilliant title from you! How did you come up with it? 

It’s a nod to what we, just as people living on this earth and in this country, have endured over the past six years. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I’m tired of pandemics and incompetent, pseudo-fascist leaders. While it’s probably wishful thinking, I’m ready to close the door on it all and say let’s not do that again. With my previous novels I had a sense of the titles from the get-go, but this one didn’t come to me until I was well into the editing process—before that, I was calling it Elect Nancy Harrison! But the story I was telling was less about an election, and more about a family struggling to stay together. The political campaign provides a set piece on which all of the drama can unfold, but at its heart this novel is about the sacrifices that a mother and her children make for each other, and the uncomfortable truths those sacrifices compel them to overlook. “Let’s not do that again” is something I imagine these characters might say to one another, once all is said and done—the lies they’ve told, the windows they’ve broken, the bodies they’ve buried.

I laughed out loud when I read that Nick is trying to write a musical about Joan Didion called “Hello to All That.” Is this something you’ve tried to write yourself?

No! Though I will say that—at least while I was writing Nick’s chapters—it was hard not to imagine what it would look like on stage. The idea itself came to me one day after teaching Didon’s “On Self-Respect” to a group of my own students at NYU (not coincidentally, this is how the idea also comes to Nick). Around this time, I was also puzzling over what Nick (I?) should be doing with his (my?) life: I knew he was at a crossroads, having finally escaped his job with his mother, and I thought it would be fun if he was working on a musical (in addition to being a Didion fan, I also love musicals). I was mulling over a few different subjects for it, but after that frustrating day teaching Didion, the idea clicked: a show about her life was perfect precisely because of how imperfect it was. Musicals are famously sentimental, and Didion was famously unsentimental—the thought of it alone makes you go cross-eyed, but in the best way possible. Also—and this is perhaps beside the point—but, in Nick’s defense, much stranger topics have served as the inspiration for musicals. I mean, come on, remember Starlight Express, the world’s only musical performed entirely on roller skates?

Nancy Harrison’s Senate campaign is a rollercoaster. How do you know so much about politics?

When I was in college I had the opportunity to intern for a congresswoman for two summers, once at her district office, in California, and the second time on Capitol Hill. After graduation, I became a speechwriter for John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff. I loved speechwriting—in fact, it taught me more about telling stories than anything I learned while getting my MFA—though I wasn’t particularly well-suited to politics. I found that Washington trades in a currency of access, secrets, and who-knows-what-first, and none of that interested me; when I was an intern on the Hill, the only thing I really loved doing was giving tours of the Capitol to constituents. 

Still, I did develop one very strong opinion during my time in DC: our elected leaders and the staff members who attend to them are just as hapless and screwed up as the rest of us. No one knows what they’re doing until the moment they’re doing it, and any glamor or respectability you might perceive is a trick of setting and camera angles. That is something that interested me, and still interests me. And it’s why Nancy’s campaign is the way that it is. 

Greta is smart but bored and falls in love with a rightwing extremist after meeting him gaming online. Can you talk a bit about what inspired that? 

I’m fascinated (and straight-up terrified) by the role that the internet plays in radicalization. I’ve read countless stories of smart, sane, well-meaning people falling down a rabbit hole, only to emerge from it subscribing to some truly dangerous beliefs. Often, there’s an element of loneliness at play in these stories: for whatever reason, the person doesn’t feel seen, or understood, and the radicalizing entities prey on that vulnerability; they offer a sense of community in the form of an ideology. It’s insidious and destructive, and it happens every day on Facebook and YouTube and Twitter. I think this particular facet of it—how love, or the promise of it, can be used to manipulate and control—is what interested me when it comes to Greta. While her roommates are partying in the living room of their Bushwick apartment, she’s locked away in front of her computer, being seduced by a rightwing French extremist that she meets playing a multiplayer online game. She’s appalled by what he believes–she also desperately craves his love. 

Talk about the principle of Chekhov’s Gun and how it’s deployed in this novel. How important was it to you to tie up all the strings? 

So, the principle of Chekhov’s Gun basically says that if you introduce a rifle early in the first chapter of a story, it better be fired by chapter two or three. Essentially, it’s a way for writers to hold themselves accountable for the details they introduce, and to avoid anything extraneous. When I started writing this book I was reading a ton of mysteries, and I was surprised by how much I loved watching all the pieces of a story fall into place. You read Murder on the Orient Express or And Then There Were None, and the satisfaction you feel isn’t necessarily from seeing a world that you recognize, but rather one in which seemingly inconsequential details end up having larger-than-life consequences. There’s pleasure in that, and I wanted to see if I could recreate that pleasure in Let’s Not Do That Again. Granted, in my case the gun becomes a trash compactor, but the principle nonetheless remains the same: I wanted to write a book that was fun. 

Lies—or “alternative facts,” as one former presidential adviser once called them—have had an outsized effect on our country’s politics during the last decade. Do you see that as a parallel to the ways that certain (read: all) families operate?

Absolutely! That’s not to say that I think that most mothers are going around telling their sons that drinking bleach will cure Covid, or that fathers are telling their daughters that Joe Biden stole the election (though, I suspect that some of them sadly are), but rather that the lies we tell to the people we love have consequences that we never could have imagined. 

This particular question—why we tell lies to the people we love—has always been one that has interested me. Is it better to withhold the truth from someone in order to protect them? Or, is honesty always the best policy? The type of lying I’m talking about here, of course, diverges from the type of lying that was done by the previous administration, which I consider to be manipulative, dangerous, and fear-based. Rather, what I’m interested in are the ways that we choose to bend the truth in service of a larger, moral good. At the end of the book, the Harrisons are faced with such a choice, the consequences of which will have reverberations in literally every aspect of their lives. 

Let’s Not Do That Again takes place in New York and in Paris. Why Paris?

I had the opportunity to study there for a bit in college, and I’ve been fortunate enough to spend a good chunk of time in the city since then. I love it for all the cliché reasons (the beauty, the art, the croissants), but I also think that it—and France in general, for that matter—is a very complicated, very troubled place. You see it in the country’s politics, and in its treatment of certain marginalized groups; in a strange way, France almost acts as a funhouse mirror to the problems we’re grappling with here in the U.S. Getting Greta to Paris allowed me to explore those parallels and complexities. 

Also: I wanted an excuse to go to Paris. 

What are you working on now? 

Good question! I always try to stay absurdly busy in the months before a book’s publication, lest I fall into a rabbit hole of reading early reviews on Goodreads, which inevitably leads me to a very dark place involving too much wine and old Damien Rice songs. For starters, the film adaptation of one of my previous novels, The People We Hate at the Wedding, is slated to be released in August of this year. It stars Allison Janney, Kristen Bell, and Ben Platt, and the screenplay was written by Wendy and Lizzie Molyneaux, who are the brilliant minds behind Bob’s Burgers. I had an opportunity to visit the film’s set in London in the fall of 2021, and it was—and I mean this quite literally—a dream come true. The producers, Ashley Fox and Margot Hand, and the director, Claire Scanlon, have done an incredible job of bringing my story to life, and I can’t wait to see it on the screen. 

In terms of my own writing, I’m in the midst of the first draft of a project that I’m tentatively calling Beefcake. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that it traces a single year in the life of a gay teenager who’s living in Laguna Beach, California in the mid 1990s. It draws on some of my own experiences, and it’s a bit different from my previous novels in that it’s written entirely in first person. I think that, in light of the macro-level chaos that we’ve experienced in the last few years, I’ve become more and more interested in retreating to a time when life felt personally more complicated (read: adolescence), but—at least on the societal level—was retrospectively simpler (read: the 90s). I’m still in the early stages of it, which is terrifying, but also terribly exciting; I never quite know how the pieces of a novel are going to come together until, thanks to some miracle (or banging my head hard enough against the wall), they do.