A man gives himself two extra minutes in the car with the air conditioning running, because that’s the window he’s learned to leave between arriving and walking in. Any less and he’s a sweat stain. Any more and he’s stalling. Houston in August. A bar in Midtown he’s been going to for six of the eleven years it’s been on the block. He checks the exits every time, front door and the fire exit left of the kitchen, because Santos taught him that.
I didn’t set out to write about any of it. This is one of the books that just grew.
Ethan is thirty-four, sells medical devices, and has spent twelve years perfecting a set of rules that keep him from ever being known. No third dates. No sleepovers past four in the morning. No meeting the friends. Afterward he draws every woman in a leather notebook, starting from whatever detail his attention caught first. The system is physics, and it works, right up until it doesn’t.
Ethan is the most frustrating man I’ve enjoyed writing. I spent the whole book wanting to shake him and still liked him, because every rule he’s built is a smart answer to the wrong question.
What’s the inkblot method?
You drop one concept onto the page, then drop others near it.
Some of the blots touch each other and some don’t. That part isn’t planned and can’t be. Then you write outward from each one, following whatever is there instead of working toward a destination you decided on in advance. What you have for a long stretch is a set of story islands. Separate pieces that work on their own and aren’t yet connected to anything, and you keep writing until they reach each other.
Eventually they join and the thing is a coherent story. That’s how I wrote this novel and it’s how I wrote God Is Everything. The two books have nothing else in common.
The book on this: Gettin’ Laid is a novel about a man with twelve years of rules that keep him from ever being known, and the hurricane that takes away his exit.
What are Ethan’s rules in Gettin’ Laid?
A system built over twelve years to prevent one outcome.
No third dates, because a third date is where a person starts becoming someone. No sleepovers past four in the morning, because the hours after four are where people talk. No meeting the friends, because friends produce context and context produces a version of you that has to be maintained. Every rule looks like a rule about sex. Every rule is a rule about being known.
He experiences the avoidance as engineering, and he isn’t entirely wrong. That’s what makes the character work.
What does the notebook do in Gettin’ Laid?
It’s the one place the system leaks. He draws every woman afterward in a leather notebook, and he starts from whatever detail his attention caught first. A wrist. The way somebody held a phone. Whatever the eye went to before the rest of it registered.
A man with rules against being known is keeping a careful record of other people. He’d tell you it’s a hobby.
Who is Lena and why does the system fail?
An ER nurse at the Texas Medical Center who refuses to perform anything. Not warmth. Not interest. Not patience. Every rule Ethan has assumes the other person is doing something he can read and respond to, and she isn’t doing anything.
The system has no instruction for that. It’s instructions for interest, for reluctance, for enthusiasm, and for withdrawal, and no instruction at all for a person who declines to give him a surface to work with.
Lena was the hardest person in the book for me to write. Somebody who performs nothing gives a writer nothing to hang a scene on, and I had to trust that her stillness would carry the pages without my help.
The book is what he does while the system stops working.
What’s in the shoebox in Gettin’ Laid?
Two notebooks full. Names and dates and pencil faces looking up at the dark in a closet. That image arrived early and it’s the one that told me what the book was. A man with rules designed to prevent anybody knowing him is keeping a careful archive of other people, hidden where nobody will find it. He’d tell you it’s a hobby. He sleeps fine, has two hospital calls tomorrow and lunch with Santos, and the shoebox is in the closet.
A system that has to be documented isn’t a system somebody is comfortable inside.
Who tells Ethan the truth in Gettin’ Laid?
The only person who can say the thing out loud, and he does it over sake. Ethan tries to describe what’s different about Lena. That she doesn’t need him to be anything, that she isn’t filling a space with him, that she’s simply there with whatever he is.
Santos nods once and says that this terrifies him. Ethan agrees. Then Santos completes it. If she isn’t making you into something, you have to be something. And if you’re something, she can see it. And if she can see it, she can be disappointed by it. Twelve years of engineering explained in four lines by a friend in a restaurant. Every novel about a person who can’t look at himself needs somebody in it who will.
Santos is the friend I’d want at that table. He says the true thing once, without cruelty, and then lets Ethan sit in it.
Why give a dating novel a wingman character?
Because the contrast is instructive and it isn’t flattering to Ethan.
Danny walks into a room and the space belongs to him before he claims it, the way weather belongs in a room. Three women at a table near the door tone him before he’s four steps in, quietly, because conspicuous attention is less effective than the other kind and everybody involved knows it.
He receives it with the easy warmth of a man who has been receiving it for thirty years. Danny has no system. He doesn’t need one. Ethan’s twelve years of rules are the work of somebody compensating, and putting an uncompensating man in the same bar makes that visible without anybody having to say it.
Where does the disruption arrive for Ethan in Gettin’ Laid?
It arrives at a birthday party, the correct venue for it. Santos briefs him in the car on the way. Morgan doesn’t believe in small birthday parties, has taken over a bar in Montrose, and will fill it with everybody he knows and stay until they throw him out.
Ethan asks why he’s being briefed. Because you’re going to meet people tonight, Santos says, and I want you to know what you’re walking into.
It’s November and the Houston heat has finally gone. That’s a man being walked into a room he can’t control, by a friend who has decided it’s time, and neither of them says so.
Why does a hurricane arrive in Gettin’ Laid?
Because every rule he has depends on being able to leave.
No third dates, out by four, no meeting the friends. All of it assumes a door and the freedom to walk through it on his own schedule.
A hurricane closes the door. Shelter in place, then day three, then the silence. Time with somebody, in a fixed space, with no exit and nothing to do but be present. That’s the one condition twelve years of engineering never had to survive.
That wasn’t the plan when I started. It’s where the islands ended up connecting.
What kind of book is Gettin’ Laid?
A first person novel about wanting, and it carries a content warning for explicit sexual content and adult themes. The title is doing something deliberate. It promises a book about conquest and delivers a book about a man who has built a machine to protect himself from intimacy and can’t say so, even to himself, for three hundred pages.
Readers who come for the first thing generally stay for the second. I’m proud of the bait and switch in that title. Promising conquest and delivering a man who’s terrified of being seen was the only way I wanted to tell this story, and I’d write it the same way again.
