Four women meet every Thursday at Thessaly, a Greek restaurant on a block that’s changing around it. Two years of dinners. A cancer diagnosis comes up. Childhood comes up. So do the small daily weights: the man who doesn’t ask about the appointment, the friend who’s a little late in a way that means something, the joke that gets a laugh and costs.
They meet because of a fitting room.
I loved writing these four women. They’re funnier and sharper than I am, they spend two years telling each other the truth across a table at Thessaly, and they never once behave the way women behave in the kind of novel that treats friendship as either saccharine or catty. I resent either version. This book lets them be tender and cutting on the same night, and I think that’s the only honest way to write a friendship that lasts.
Why open a novel in a fitting room?
Because it puts four strangers in the one situation where the thing they have in common is unavoidable and nobody can see each other.
Jo is standing in front of a mirror in a wrap dress that’s beautiful and completely wrong, tilting her head slightly, because sometimes a problem is an angle problem. This isn’t an angle problem.
Through the wall, thin enough to hear everything and thick enough to pretend you can’t, comes the sound of a woman exhaling at a mirror. Short and specific. Jo knows that sound.
What follows is four voices and no faces. Nobody is being polite, because nobody is visible. Nobody is managing an impression, because there’s no impression to manage. And every one of them is standing in front of the same problem at the same moment. A novel is allowed that coincidence exactly once. By the time the curtains open, the friendship has already happened. The scene buys two years of Thursdays in about nine hundred words, and none of it required anybody to explain themselves. That fitting room is one of the openings I’m proudest of. It does in a few pages what a lot of novels spend three chapters trying to do, and it does it without a single introduction, a single backstory dump or a single face.
Where does a four-viewpoint novel start?
With a pair of books written at the same time.
One is Gettin’ Laid, the male version. This is the female version. They aren’t a matched pair in any formal sense, no shared characters or overlapping events, and I wouldn’t tell anybody they have to read both.
What I wanted was to write two books in parallel from opposite viewpoints and see what the difference looked like on the page instead of in an argument. The title is a joke. I’m aware of what it is. I chose it anyway, because the alternative was something tasteful that told you nothing about the book’s tone.
The title deserves one more sentence, since it’s the first thing anybody reacts to.
It’s a joke, and it’s the joke the four of them would make. A tasteful literary title would have promised a different book: quieter, more careful, more interested in being admired. This one tells you within four words that the tone is funny before it’s anything else, and that the women in it are funnier about their own bodies than any narrator would dare be on their behalf.
It also does the filtering. Anybody put off by the title was never going to enjoy four women being blunt with each other for four hundred pages, and it’s better for everyone that they find out on the cover.
What’s the difference between the two?
One thing surprised me, and it came out of writing instead of out of planning. The women learn about each other. The man learns about himself.
That’s what happened when I wrote four women talking every Thursday for two years and one man moving through his own life, and it turns out to be the cleanest statement of the difference I have. The female version shows the camaraderie women often have. It also shows the cattiness, the arguments, the ordinary life running alongside all of it. The male version shows men and a masculine lifestyle. Different shape entirely.
Why does the learning point outward for the women?
Because of how the two groups function, and a great many people miss this.
Four women will sit down together every week and talk about whatever is on their minds. That sounds simple and it isn’t. There’s a certain amount withheld at every one of those tables. There are small things running underneath, adjustments and calculations and things noticed and not said, and the sitting-down is itself the mechanism.
Men tend to be far more matter of fact, and more directly after their own needs. They have emotions. The processing is more logical about them. A man is unlikely to spill his emotions out. A woman is considerably more likely to. So a book about four women at a table is inevitably a book about what they’re learning about each other, because that’s what the table is for. A book about a man is a book about what he works out on his own, because that’s where his working out happens.
I think plenty of novels get this wrong because the writer puts women at a table and has them talk like men waiting for a plot to arrive. Readers who’ve sat at those tables know it immediately, and the book loses them in the first dinner scene.
Where does the observation come from?
Years of talking to people who had no reason to perform for me. Belly dancers, performers, models, actresses, and people who came in for portraits. A photographer at a shoot or backstage at a show is present for hours and stops being interesting fairly quickly, and then the conversation goes ordinary, and ordinary is where the useful material lives. And the men at the same renaissance fairs and shows, the other half of the sample, collected in the same rooms over the same years.
Plus my own observation, being a man, watching the women in my life and how they worked. I made the same argument directly in The Relationship BULLSHIT Men Fall For. This book doesn’t argue it. It puts four women at a table and lets a reader watch.
Why one restaurant for two years?
Restaurant scenes are wonderful, and for more reasons than people give them credit for. Everybody knows what a restaurant is. You spend nothing establishing it. A reader arrives already equipped with the tables, the noise level, the waiter, the pause when food comes.
A restaurant supplies events. It isn’t a static room. Things happen at other tables. People come and go. The kitchen has a bad night. A regular stops appearing. None of that needs manufacturing, because a restaurant generates it by existing.
It’s public, and public imposes restraint. That constraint is enormously useful in a book about four people who tell each other difficult things. There’s a limit on how far anybody can go at a table with strangers eight feet away, and characters pressing against that limit produces better scenes than characters with no limit at all.
And it means you aren’t re-establishing the setting every chapter. Same place, same night, different subject. The furniture is done and you can get straight to what’s happening. Most of all, the restaurant becomes a character. That happens with a fixed setting used often enough, and it’s worth letting happen instead of fighting. I’d rather have one room a reader knows by heart than a new setting every chapter that I have to build and they have to learn. Writers who keep moving their characters around for variety are paying for scenery with the reader’s attention, and the conversation is what the reader came for.
Why is the block changing?
Deliberately, because that’s part of life.
Thessaly sits on a block that’s changing around it across the two years the book covers. Nothing dramatic happens to the restaurant, and the book doesn’t build to a closure or a sale or a last night. The neighborhood simply moves while four women keep showing up on Thursdays. That’s the structure saying something the dialogue doesn’t have to. What holds is the four of them agreeing, without ever discussing it, to keep arriving.
One more thing about the table itself, since it’s where most of the book happens.
A weekly dinner is a structure with memory. What was said last Thursday is present this Thursday whether or not anybody refers to it, and a thing avoided three weeks running becomes an object at the table that everyone is working around. That’s very difficult to build in a novel where people meet in varied places for varied reasons, and it arrives free once you fix the night and the room.
It also means an absence matters. If one of four chairs is empty, the book doesn’t have to say anything about it. Everybody at that table already knows what it means, and so does the reader by about the fourth dinner.
How do you keep four viewpoints distinct across 406 pages?
Two answers and they only look contradictory.
I didn’t try. I wrote it, and in my writing characters do their own thing. There’s no distinctness technique applied on top, no assigning each woman a verbal tic or a signature rhythm to keep the reader oriented. That approach produces four costumes.
And I kept track. Each of them is a different person with her own life and her own viewpoint, and holding those separate across a long book is real work that I did.
The difference is where the effort goes. It goes into knowing who they are. If you know four people properly, they come out different, because different people say different things in the same situation.
The opening is the proof. Four strangers in adjacent fitting rooms, and one says the dart placement assumes a supporting element that isn’t present. Another offers that her blouse has underwire, and there’s no reason for a blouse to have underwire. The first replies: structural optimism. Flat. Certain.
Nobody has been introduced. You already know which of them is which.
How do you write a cancer diagnosis in fiction?
It shows four different reactions to the same news.
The diagnosis is where it starts. The subject is what the four of them do once they all understand it, and they do four different things, and the differences between them are the point. It’s also very different from how a group of men would react, and I wanted that on the page. Not argued. Shown, so a reader can compare it against whatever they’ve witnessed themselves.
The content warning names it, along with childhood trauma and adult content, and the warning is accurate. This is a book with real weight in it underneath four women being funny at a Greek restaurant.
People who assume a book with this title is fluff are wrong. It has a cancer diagnosis and childhood trauma in it, and four women who stay funny through both, and I think that’s harder to write and closer to real life than a grim book about the same things. Anybody who judges it by the cover is going to miss the part I’m proudest of.
