Gaiman’s Boys Can Start a Conversation. Can They Hear the Answer?

Before the party, Vic reassures his friend: girls are not from another planet. In How to Talk to Girls at Parties, Neil Gaiman makes that ordinary phrase a dangerously literal assumption. Two boys find a house with music, walk in and start meeting people. The problem is not that nobody wants to talk. The answers simply do not resemble the ones they expected.

Enn, who narrates the story, believes Vic knows how to behave around girls while he does not. Vic smiles, immediately meets Stella and leaves his friend to find somewhere to fit in. That imbalance gives Enn a simple task for the evening: finally get close to someone himself. Everything his conversational partners say is involuntarily measured against that goal.

The question is right; the listener is not ready

The first girl explains her origins, her duty to report back and why she cannot reproduce. She shows him a finger that forks at the tip. Enn notices the physical difference, but tries to fit her account of travel and return into a familiar scale: he explains that he is not from Croydon himself and wonders whether she is American.

The comedy comes from the mismatch in scale. The girl describes her nature; the boy responds as though they merely come from different neighbourhoods. Gaiman does not need another voice announcing that the narrator understands nothing. We can see how little an answer changes Enn’s next question. He offers a dance, then a drink.

A second girl describes a journey to the Sun and the unfamiliar experience of inhabiting a human body. Meanwhile, Enn plans how to move his arm discreetly from the back of the sofa onto her back. Both things happen within the same stretch of conversation, but belong to different stories: she is trying to explain an experience; he is trying to recognise a courtship situation.

There is a particularly good irony when Vic later offers sound advice: conversation also means listening. Yet he explains the unfamiliar party as a tourist exchange, modelled on their school trip to Germany. Even the confident friend has a ready-made category into which he can place the strange and stop examining it.

When a metaphor refuses to stay a metaphor

The third girl calls herself Triolet and says she is a poem. Enn asks again. She clarifies: a poem, a pattern or a people whose world the sea consumed. When he objects that she cannot be three things at once, she answers symmetrically: he is Enn, male and bipedal.

The conditions of conversation change here. Understanding an answer requires more than translating an unfamiliar word into a familiar one. Enn must allow that his usual categories do not exhaust the person before him. The story moves beyond teenage awkwardness: the wish to identify someone quickly can prevent us from hearing what that person, or not-quite-person, actually says.

This is no instructional guide to good communication. An adult Enn remembers the evening thirty years later. He acknowledges gaps in his memory, and still cannot explain some events. We receive his experience and the limits of his understanding, rather than a reliable handbook to the house’s inhabitants.

Read the story in full. A summary can preserve the fantastical premise while erasing the central effect: the distance between what the reader has already heard and what Enn will yet allow himself to understand. The title promises to teach you how to start talking. The story is much more interested in what happens after the first answer.

Source and limits

Neil Gaiman, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, Headline, 2013. The complete story was read; the promotional extract from another novel included in the EPUB is outside this discussion. The essay describes the early conversations without recounting the final events. The conclusion about listening is an interpretation of the story, not a claim about the blog author’s personal experience.