Rufi Thorpe and Grant Ginder on the magic of putting yourself out there

The first exchange between Rufi Thorpe, author of Margo’s Got Money Troubles, and Grant Ginder, author of So, Old, So Young, was a cold DM. Ginder was doing a reading in LA and needed someone to be in conversation with. “I have always been the biggest fan of Rufi’s work, so with my thumbs trembling and my tail between my legs, I sent her a message asking if she would be my conversation partner,” he says. Thorpe wrote back, “Wild horses couldn’t stop me”. 

Thorpe and Ginder, now friends, speak about that moment fondly – it’s a lesson on putting yourself “out there”. “Vulnerability is the scary thing, but it’s also how you get intimacy,” says Thorpe. “It’s the price you pay at the door of getting to have this incredible relationship with someone, whether it’s a friendship or romantic relationship.” Coincidentally, Thorpe’s story in this year’s No Ordinary Love audiobook, This Is How to Touch Me, also involves messages that make your heart beat a little faster while pressing send. 

No Ordinary Love celebrates the risks – both big and small – we take in dating, and reinforces the importance of saying the hard thing out loud. In addition to Thorpe, the new audiobook features real love stories written and read by Raven Smith, Nicola Dinan, Tembe Denton-Hurst and Curtis Garner. This year, Thorpe told the story of a real couple, Roisin and Daniel, entirely from the perspective of Roisin’s grumpy cat. This Is How to Touch Me follows Daniel and Roisin through a series of honest early dating conversations, including a text exchange about “super lush kisses” and an early “are we just casual?” conversation (they were, in fact, not just casual). You can listen to it now on Spotify or Substack. 

Ahead of the release, Thorpe joined Ginder in conversation to speak about life being too short not to ‘send that message’, writing from the POV of a cat and commitment as an act of bravery.

Grant Ginder: Rufi, your story for Hinge’s No Ordinary Love follows Daniel and Roisin, a real couple who take many risks, big and small, over the course of the story and say how they feel out loud for each other. This isn’t the first time writing about love for you. So, did starting with a real couple change your approach?

Rufi Thorpe: Oh, 100 per cent. It was horrifying. I have only ever made things up, and suddenly, I’m trying to do justice to a really magical experience that someone has in their life. I think the easiest way for me to approach this task was to try to make something that would delight them. I wanted them to be like, ‘Oh, look at this weird little thing you made in honour of our love. We get to keep this as a memento of that’. It’s an honour to get to work [on something] representing real people, but it’s all very scary. 

Grant Ginder: Totally. I would be absolutely terrified. Is that why the story is ultimately told from the point of view of a cat?

Rufi Thorpe: Okay, listen. Roisin mentions this hermaphroditic cat that was very much part of their courtship. She’s telling me the story. I mean, the cat is very real. Obviously, the point of view is an invention, but the moment I heard about that cat – because Daniel made the date themed around the cat who has just had kittens, and it was enough a part of her life at the time that she was telling him about it before their date – I was like, ‘The cat is central’. 

Grant Ginder: It definitely sent me googling hermaphroditic cats and being like, ‘Did Rufi make this part up?’

Rufi Thorpe: This is very much part of the story. If anything, there’s a weird way in fiction sometimes [that] you’re limited by how much the reader can believe. You wind up saying, ‘Oh, well that’s too much’ even if it’s based on a story you heard. Their story was so unique and crazy and beautiful that I was like, ‘Oh no, I hope people understand all this is real’. This is how it happened. 

Grant Ginder: The cat allowed you to do this thing that we all, or at least I, love doing, where you’re imagining what they’re thinking about each other. It allows you to be this fly on the wall, or cat on the wall, as it were, of their relationship, which is really awesome. 

I will say, in your story, I was really rooting for Roisin to send the text [after the first date], because my husband messaged me after our first date and was like, ‘I had a lot of fun, I would like to hang out again tonight’. That’s the moment I started falling in love with him, when he was like, ‘Screw this, I’m going to be vulnerable’. 

Rufi Thorpe: Those were their real text messages, too! They sent me screenshots, and I loved the way she said “super lush kisses”. If she texted him like, ‘I feel like you’re the one,’ that would have made him be like, ‘Ooh’, but she stayed with what’s real and what’s true. That kiss was good. What rules of dating etiquette do you think we just need to get rid of?

Grant Ginder: It’s very cliché, but the modern dating etiquette that I want to get rid of is the set periods of time that you’re supposed to wait in between communications, particularly during the first month of dating. I think it’s ridiculous. If you are into someone, life is way too short; just get the ball rolling, send that message and use the momentum that’s there. 

Rufi Thorpe: Oh yeah, don’t play games. It’s too important. What’s the bravest thing you’ve ever done for love? And why did it feel brave?

Grant Ginder: I think any kind of commitment is an act of bravery. Life is filled with endless possibilities, right? Marrying someone is this tremendous act of bravery. Going on a second date is a tremendous act of bravery. Going to a New Year’s Eve party with someone is a tremendous act of bravery, right? Because you’re saying, ‘I am willing to let go of every other version of my life that doesn’t involve you’, and I think that’s really lovely. 

Rufi Thorpe: There’s a vulnerability in admitting you want someone. 

Grant Ginder: Absolutely. What about you? 

Rufi Thorpe: If you want the honest truth, I met my husband on a dating app and on the first date, he picked me up. I opened the gate and saw him, and a voice in my head was like, ‘You’re going to marry that man’. I was like, ‘Oh my god, don’t think that. That’s crazy!’ Like, hide that thought from yourself and certainly from him. That’s not a thing you’re allowed to think. I just fell in love with him immediately. 

The whole courtship was magic, and then I got pregnant (a broken condom and Plan B situation didn’t work), and we’d been dating for maybe six weeks. We didn’t know each other very well, were both grad students, had no money. So, I told him I was pregnant, and it was really scary. It came out like a hairball, but what was really alarming was that I couldn’t stop smiling as I said it. We decided to get married, so we planned the wedding in 30 days, and we’re still together 15 years later. It was the best decision I ever made. 

Grant Ginder: This is giving me chills. That is the purest version of what I was talking about in terms of commitment. 

Rufi Thorpe: So Old, So Young is a story about friendships. Why do you think that people often downplay the emotional risk of building and maintaining friendships in comparison to romantic love? 

Grant Ginder: I think that pop culture, the movies that we watch, the romance novels that we read, all teach us that our partner, our romantic partner, is supposed to fulfil every single one of our needs. They’re supposed to obviously be the love of your life. They’re supposed to be your best friend. They’re supposed to be the person you want to go on every vacation with and spend every waking moment with, which is impossible. It’s a ridiculous amount of pressure to place on one person.

That ideal kind of detracts us from the fact that we have these platonic relationships in our lives that are, in their own way, sort of romances. For me, in writing So Old, So Young, what was so interesting was that often those platonic relationships require a different kind, though equally large amount, of vulnerability and risk.

Rufi Thorpe: I feel like a good long friendship feels like the best novel you’ve ever read. You’re like, ‘I know who you were at 16. I know who you were at 26. I got to see you at 36, and now here you are at 46’. I get the whole picture of your life, and it’s not blunted by what I need from you or who I need you to be. 

Grant Ginder: Just watching someone change and allowing them to change and still being in love with them is one of the greatest challenges of any relationship

Rufi Thorpe: Oh, absolutely. It’s so scary to be alive. We want to hold on so tight. We want everything to stay the same, but it never does.

What’s a risk that you’re always afraid to take in writing?

Grant Ginder: I often hide behind humour and cynicism in my writing, so that risk of actually trying to capture the breadth of the human experience, which is what we’re all trying to do as fiction writers and yet is also the hardest thing in the entire world, always feels like I’m putting myself out there and revealing a part of my soul in a way that is really scary. 

The other thing that’s always a huge risk for me, and why I love reading your work so much, is I’m often afraid of showing the weirder parts of my imagination, which is counterproductive because often it’s when you get to the truest part of your imagination and the essence of your own idiosyncratic thought, when something happens in your writing that feels real and true and important.

Rufi Thorpe: That’s so amazing because I feel like so often I’m afraid to let something just be normal – to trust that the smaller drama is going to be enough. I strayed away from [writing about] love in the beginning part of my career because I somehow felt, as a woman, there was a chance that my experience of reality wasn’t good enough to write novels about. I thought that I was supposed to be like Hemingway or something. To be a woman writing about young women in love seemed even more vulnerable than just writing about young women. It has taken me longer in my career to be like, ‘Right, this is very central to the experience of being a human’. 

Grant Ginder: I would say one of the most central things to the human experience. How profound it is to fall in love and how profound it is to have your heart broken, and all of the things that it means to be alive. In This Is How to Touch Me, you explore this very sturdy and practical magic that comes from the very human experience of falling in love. What is it about these real and messy moments that are more interesting than the big, grand fairytales of falling in love?

Rufi Thorpe: The mess makes it feel more real, like you can have it, you know? I can remember watching like all those Disney princesses when I was a child and being like, ‘Wow, those have nothing to do with me or how my life is going to go’. But I saw the children’s book, Eloise, and was like, ‘There’s a woman to aspire to being’. Magic is really only interesting when it’s actually in real life. 

Grant Ginder: When someone nails on the page the experience of falling in love, the electricity and the magic of it, there’s nothing better to read.