How to Talk to Girls at Parties

“How to Talk to Girls at Parties” is a short story by the prolific author Neil Gaiman, who is widely known for the Sandman series, Coraline, and American Gods. “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” was originally published in Gaiman’s collection Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders (2006). The story won the 2007 Locus Award for Best Short Story and was nominated for the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. In 2016, Dark Horse Comics published a comic book adaptation by N. G. Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá, and in 2017, John Cameron Mitchell directed a film adaptation.

Gaiman is known for his quirky, fantastical approach to science fiction, and “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” fits that profile. The story, narrated by Enn, now a middle-aged man, opens in 1970 in the south London borough of Croydon. Enn and his friend Vic, both 15 years old, search for a party at which Vic promises there will be girls. Vic has had more experience with girls than Enn, and Enn expects this time will be like every other time, where Vic kisses a pretty girl and Enn spends his time in the kitchen making conversation with someone’s mother. Vic tells Enn, “You just have to talk to them” (Paragraph 7), giving him advice about girls.

The boys arrive at a party, but it isn’t the one they were looking for. Nonetheless, a pretty girl named Stella invites them inside. More pretty girls dance to unrecognizable music, and because Vic has his eyes on Stella, Enn sets out to meet another girl.

Enn finds a girl named Wain’s Wain. She shows him that her little finger splits at the end into two fingertips. She says, “Soon I must return to Wain, and tell her all I have seen. All my impressions of this place of yours” (Paragraph 47). Enn tries to have a conversation, but she continues to speak in ways he finds incomprehensible. When he comes back from getting her water, she is no longer there, so he wanders through the main floor of the house.

Enn comes across a second girl and reminds himself to talk to her. He offers her the water, and she speaks about being a tourist on the sun. When she asks Enn if he likes “world,” he tries to respond to the girl’s baffling way of speaking. He then puts his arm around her. Vic calls Enn to let him know the party is not the one they thought it was. Everyone there, he explains, is a foreign tourist. He reminds Enn to talk to the girls and listen to them too.

Enn notices that the girls at the party “had perfect faces, but more important than that, they had whatever strangeness of proportion, of oddness or humanity it is that makes a beauty something more than a shop window dummy” (Paragraph 84). He also sees that the second girl he spoke with is now surrounded by others, so he goes to the kitchen where he meets Triolet, who explains to him that she is “a verse form” (Paragraph 95). She then delivers a speech, saying,

[W]e put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for […] until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the pattern would be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again (Paragraph 106).

He encourages her to go on, and she notes, “You cannot hear a poem without it changing you” (Paragraph 108). He moves closer, and she places her hand on his arm. Triolet then tells Enn about her travels. “There are places that we are welcomed […] and places where we are regarded as a noxious weed, or as a disease, something immediately to be quarantined and eliminated. But where does contagion end and art begin?” (Paragraph 111). Enn, enthralled by her touch, says he doesn’t know. She then presses her lips to his. She asks if he would like to hear the poem, and he nods. She whispers the poem in his ear. Enn says,

I didn’t know the language, but her words washed through me, perfect, and in my mind’s eye I saw towers of glass and diamond; and people with eyes of the palest green; and, unstoppable, beneath every syllable, I could feel the relentless advance of the ocean (Paragraph 115).

Vic shakes Enn, bringing him out of the trance. Vic is eager to leave. Enn recognizes the music for the first time. As they head to the door, Enn looks back and sees Stella at the top of the stairs. He says, “You wouldn’t want to make a universe angry. I bet an angry universe would look at you with eyes like that” (Paragraph 126).

Once outside, Vic and Enn run until they can’t breathe, and Vic vomits. Vic admits he thinks he has been changed because he went too far. Enn asks if Vic means sex, and Vic almost hits him. Vic then sobs and takes off ahead of Enn. The story ends as Enn follows Vic down the street, saying, “[M]y feet treading out the measure of a poem that, try as I might, I could not properly remember and would never be able to repeat” (Paragraph 136).