“A Good Happy Girl” is out now from Catapult.
Helen, the mononymous narrator of Marissa Higgins’s new novel, A Good Happy Girl, isn’t anything that by-the-book female protagonists are “supposed” to be. She’s not perky, perfect, “adorkable,” or straight—and it’s that genuine complexity that makes her one of the most exciting literary characters in recent memory. A lawyer-slash-foot model, Helen struggles in solitude with the outsized weight of a crime committed by her parents, even as she strives desperately for connection .
Those were some of the scenes that I hardly changed in drafting the book, which is kind of weird because I changed so much and revised the book probably 30 times. Those scenes where Helen is dressing her grandmother’s doll or trying to sneakily sleep over in her grandmother’s retirement home, they felt so real and intimate to me, and it felt like if Helen had any ability to care for anyone, it would have to show up there.
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