That was the thing that was really different for me as a writer. I didn’t subscribe to a writerly lifestyle. I was very outside. I was dating. I was outside doing all these things, living a very urban life.

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That was the thing that was really different for me as a writer. I didn’t subscribe to a writerly lifestyle. I was very outside. I was dating. I was outside doing all these things, living a very urban life. 〰️

There’s some contention on whether or not Marlowe Granados crashed a New Years Eve party. The 30-year-old author and filmmaker asserts that her invitation came from three separate people. The party’s host, Emily M. Keeler, an editor in Toronto who throws the party every year with her husband has a different story: “everyone kept asking me ‘Is Marlowe coming? When's Marlowe getting here?’” Says Keeler. “Everyone was obsessed with the idea of this person I'd never met coming to the party.” And then Granados arrived at Keeler’s doorstep, flaunting pink opera-length gloves and a Miu Miu tiara. “I said, ‘You must be Marlowe.’ And she said ‘Of course!’”

In a large city like Toronto, a party can often be the fast-beating heart of a social scene consuming itself. You can be witness or victim to all sorts of charged encounters with complete strangers, where social hierarchies rub against each other so claustrophobically until something uncanny leaks out. You’ll find guests with either means or whimsy: artists, white-collar executives, chiropractors, criminals and students; you will also come across people only there to prove something to their friends or themselves. And the last type of guest, unknowable and distinct. A bar-persona, maybe a party girl, always ready with a smile, a joke, a good time – you don’t ask this person a lot of questions about where they’re from or what they do. They swoop in for a close-up, leaning into you intimately, and there you have struck up a long, heart-breaking conversation in which the four walls of the room collapse to reveal white nothingness, only the two of you ping-ponging the epiphanies of being alive and the ironies of love. It all conforms quite nicely at that moment. And yet you are reminded of the randomness of this friendship, the ephemerality of this connection, only made fuzzier with the alcohol. It will eventually vanish and so will the party girl.

“Happy Hour,” the novel written by Granados, draws from her early twenties as a party girl. The book is told diaristically by Isa Epley, a fast-talking gorgeous good time, and with her friend Gala, the two take a summer in New York City to do nothing but feel it. The title “Happy Hour” operates as shorthand for the girls themselves: chronically extroverted but financially shy. With the assistance of generous friends and situationships, they manage to window-shop the city’s well-off circles while chasing rent money through odd jobs like hostessing to foot fetish modeling. Like the culture it so well captures, “Happy Hour” is a propulsive and peculiar mashup of Truman Capote muses and the sharp scene-reporting of Sally Rooney.

Inasmuch as Isa belongs in the tradition of careless, often solipsistic New York novel protagonists, the book is interested in the inherent contradictions of these archetypes: The liberation of being a cynical and crude party girl in a big city is promised to some more than others. Granados, like Isa is Filipina and Salvadoran and therefore could’ve had an easier summer had she been white. Isa and Gala are also both on temporary visas, a rare predicament in this kind of novel that only heightens their precarity.

“The girls are not living like this because they don’t want to get real jobs. They literally can’t get real jobs.” Granados tells me. “There’s a part in the book where they’re dreaming of getting a reception position at an ad agency.” When Gala gets bitten by a dog, she must forsake medical treatment to both protect her money and residency status. This moment fittingly happens right after she tells someone she came to North America as a refugee: “You know, Bosnian War.”

Granados remembers a lot of her twenties preoccupied with getting visas. When staying with her then-boyfriend in New York City, she would take under the table babysitting gigs. He was too broke to help her out (an indie magazine editor.) “It was annoying because I was like, ‘if I was single, I could’ve had a sugar daddy’” she said. Eventually she had to apply for a fiancé visa as a last resort.

The Philippines and El Salvador are famous for exporting guest workers into the West as both countries struggle with political and social turmoil. The immigrants are simultaneously illegitimate and unwelcome, and necessary and valued labor. “In El Salvador, people are fleeing from cartels.” Granados continues. “I don’t believe in borders. There was a line in the book that got edited out. It’s basically something like marriage is just like a border. Like an institution I don’t believe in.”

Granados’ politics sneaks in under Isa’s Old Hollywood inflections or sometimes through the myriad of semi-anonymous partygoers lending as a mouthpiece for the underlying neoliberal spirit of these parties. “How do you think the rich get richer?” An acquaintance tells Isa. “They screw the vulnerable – and that’s you honey!”

Granados sold the book shortly after the house party when she got in touch with editor Emily M. Keeler to ask if she’d left her gloves at the house (they were in her purse the whole time.) Happy Hour became the first novel under Martha Sharpe’s imprint Flying Books. "I was immediately smitten with the novel's arch playfulness.” Keeler tells me over email. “I was completely enchanted by Marlowe's ability to create a work that felt so immediate and contemporary, out of a frothy-tart, jazz age model.” Granados had already shopped the book around before meeting Keeler and shelved it when other publishers weren’t interested. But to Granados, the act of completing the project was the real accomplishment, she tells me. “I have competence and confidence in this thing that I wrote and no one really gets it, that’s fine. I did it – that was enough. I finished it.”

When it came time to sell the book internationally, again, there was a lack of takers, even with its success in Canada. It’s hard to imagine why, given the explosion of biting millennial satires. Though, “Happy Hour” has the distinction of not being enthralled in its own self-image. Many parts of the book feel like ethnographies told by a chameleonic outsider rather than a writer abdicating their own wealth class.

Eventually, Granados’ talent for gathering class and border politics, delivered in an international school girl’s accent led to the book’s acquisition by the Marxist publishing house Verso. To Keeler it made sense: “It feels right to me that Marlowe's delicious novel about capital—social and material—bears the distinctive Verso colophon.”

Granados grew up in Toronto with a single mother, whom she describes as a spendthrift. “My mother was very bad with money.” She says. “Sometimes our electricity would go out and I’m like, I don’t understand, how are you not on top of the electricity bills.” But when basic needs aren’t met, you’re at least guaranteed some pampering. Granados remembers a lot of furs and minks in their small apartment in place of heating. It made her not worry too much about money, or at least not feel controlled by it. “I’m not a saver type of person. I always imagine I can pick up some babysitting. It’s like, if I need this, I can sell that. I’m really trying to get into precious metals just in case.”

In “Happy Hour”, Isa lost her mother at a young age. Granados' mother died at 41. Writing the book became a grieving tool and a process of creative self-interrogation. She’s figured out how much of her mother’s internal philosophies she eventually adopted: the spendthrifting, the urgency for adventure. There’s also the behaviors that come from losing a parent in your early-twenties. You’re not a child anymore but you still need guidance. “A parent creates a structure for living.” She said. “A relationship between a child and their mother is so specific and very complicated. When you feel like you’ve kind of raised yourself, you’re like constantly on this motor of going, going, going, and when you suddenly have this hiccup, it can be destabilizing and all these feelings come and flood back.

The whole thing with Isa is that she has this stance of being a very assertive and self assured person. She makes rules for herself. But then there are these moments of vulnerability, where you’re like, oh, actually this person is a little baby in a world with all these adults and she’s trying her very best to maneuver what she can.”

Granados, like Isa, is sometimes vague about her time in London. She moved there a month after turning eighteen to study creative writing at Goldsmiths, where she spent six-years. Her Canadian loans wouldn’t cover all her expenses, so her father had to co-sign on a line of credit. His generosity came with guilt and it hovered over Granados so much that she didn’t ask him to help out again in her final year of studies. To this day the university is still chasing that final payment which she has no urgency to hand over. “They kept locking my library card.” She said. “I’d be sending them emails like, ‘that’s so weird. The wire must not have gone through.’ It’s very my persona to run a bill on my education (laughs)”

Those years became an electric, unstable period for Granados, whose writing collected a lot of admiration from lecturers and friends in the London writing scenes. She became a muse for several of them as well. But that rarely followed with any money. She worked as a barmaid in Shoreditch, a hostess in Soho and a hotel clerk, among other gigs. She thrived as a hostess, working the room and manufacturing a pleasurable experience. It’s the performance of an enchanting figure, always in the right mood that inspired much of the book. “How do you perform always being able to diffuse a situation in a way that you’re not going to get yelled at?”

One evening she had to tell a guest that the wait for a table would be over an hour and he threw a liter bottle of water at her. The head chef immediately came out to escort the guest off. That night crystallized how class operates in England: there’s no imagined ladder of class mobility. Someone will eventually remind you. A Scottish twang or working class accent gets clocked. You are read before you have a chance to charm anyone, and poor you for thinking you can squeeze yourself in. “I remember this British guy said to me, ‘Marlowe, it's going to be very hard to marry up. In London, no one marries up – they marry the same class.”

New York City on the other hand is more anarchic with its class delineation. One can pass as wealthy with luck and the right attitude. The New Yorkers in “Happy Hour” feel consistent with the 2013 summer it's set. Take the supermodels at one of the parties who have henna on their hands for no apparent reason. But more so the men, who appear as if they cliff dived straight into therapy and came out enlightened about toxic masculinity, but still clutching some insecurities and ironic pick-up lines. They’re a stark difference to the British men Granados dated in London, who gave her a lesson in “repressed alcoholism.”

She still takes some of the posh English men with her to New York City still. In one of the few truly frightening moments in the book, Isa accompanies a British advertising bro to the Hamptons to act as both arm candy and society girl – the life of the party, and her reward is a warm bed in the attic. “I was interested, not in an entry point into sex work, but that haziness of where you’re not actually getting money in return.” Granados tells me. “You’re getting something like a place to stay or dinner or whatever. It’s like this exchange happening that’s a little more murky because there are no rules. There’s no actual system that has been in place for how things should be. It’s very much based on things like chivalry or generosity and having to play that role without really knowing what you get in return.”

It’s important for Granados that her audience pick up on these fuzzier narratives. That you might not end up liking Isa. She knows some people don’t like her either. Ironically, her biggest critics are the ones that find community in the affluent circles she jabs at.

After the book’s publication, Granados made another rule for herself:
to not get lost in the hype.

As she scales up, she finds it increasingly difficult to party the same way she used to. She used to be able to float around and be kinda anonymous. Now it’s *Marlowe the Author, seated at the bar.*

“I think there’s definitely a reason why, like, Ottessa Moshfegh lives in Pasadena. Sally Rooney, who even knows where she is. That was the thing that was really different for me as a writer. I didn’t subscribe to a writerly lifestyle. I was very outside. I was dating. I was outside doing all these things, living a very urban life.” She ended up tightening her circles and being more intentional with who she shares experiences with. Maybe that’s the party girl growing up, or someone dimming the lights on the muse-persona before it’s shut from them.

It becomes clear Granados isn’t looking for people to feel good about themselves just because they picked up the book. You’re asked to question where a city’s vibrancy and lifeforms is really coming from – is it the invisible laborers absorbing customer abuse, or truly those who have the capital to own the restaurant?

These questions were pulled from Granados' life, but right now, she’s busy trying to understand the scale of her success since the international release. She garnered attention from the New York Times and a profile in New York magazine. She’s also working on a few screenplays – romcoms close to the screwball comedies she grew up watching. She’s going to play a writer in an indie film soon. She has an idea of what her second novel will be.

But at this moment, as we speak, she’s really enjoying TikTok. If you search her name, you’ll see dozens of positive reviews from BookTok, the literary community on the video sharing app. They gush at her prose; they tell us what perfume the book would be (Debaser by D.S. & Durga., because it’s fresh and outgoing, but has an artificial quality that keeps it from feeling intimate.)

The book also became a decorative piece for fashion TikTok, where vloggers stage the novel on dining tables and white linen sheets next to pearls and oysters, like you bought a Barbie doll of Granados and these were its accessories. On other parts of the app, creators instruct readers on the ideal locations to read Happy Hour: mostly fancy bars, or just as the sun is setting and the nightlife starts humming. One creator, after reading the novel, asked their followers how to live like the characters while still working a corporate day job.

Another TikTok calls her the true it-girl of our time, while a slideshow of Granados in different photoshoots play over. And with that cue, Marlowe Granados becomes a muse again.

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Life of the Party, with Marlowe Granados

That was the thing that was really different for me as a writer. I didn’t subscribe to a writerly lifestyle. I was very outside. I was dating. I was outside doing all these things, living a very urban life.

〰️