2024-01-20
A troubled woman, haunted by the abuses of her past, attempts to build a future that includes both punishment and forgiveness.
Helen is in her 30s, working as a low-level attorney in Boston; she often uses the office as a set for her side project running “a private social media account where [she] stream[s her] feet for women.” While the foot-fetishist camming site does occasionally lead to in-person meetups, at the novel’s opening Helen is in the market for a longer-term arrangement with Catherine and Katrina—or “the wives”—a married couple she met through an app dedicated to erotic role-play. Helen requests that the wives “mother [her] meanly,” and the symbiotic interplay they create among control, nurture, sexual pleasure, and pleasurable sexual pain fulfills the needs of all three partners. In many ways this seems like an ideal situation for Helen, whose online activities may be revealed to a decidedly un-kink-friendly IT department at work, but Helen’s past trauma reflects on every part of her present life, including her ability to envision the future. While Helen was in college, her parents were convicted and jailed in a horrific case of elder abuse that left her grandmother near death. Helen visits her grandmother in the nursing home regularly, but she’s also in contact with her father, who wants her to be a character witness to help him get parole. Torn between the desires to punish and please her father, Helen’s self-destructive tendencies threaten to destabilize every relationship she has built, including the one she has established with herself. Helen and the wives are compelling characters whose desires—even at their most macabre—stem from relatable places. However, while the book as a whole creates a moving portrait of Helen’s suffering and the potential for healing she finds in the “warm cruelty” of her chosen family, the overly technical depictions of the novel’s many sexual encounters strip away a sense of authentic passion. The result is a stilted distance in the very scenes where the prose should rise to a fever pitch, robbing them of their power.
Full of desire but somewhat lacking in passion. Nevertheless, a provocative read.
A Bookshop Editor's Pick
Nylon, A Must-Read of the Month
Electric Literature, A Must-Read Queer Book of the Year
Named a Most Anticipated Book by Nylon, Bookshop, Goodreads, LGBQT Reads, The Rumpus, Autostraddle, Literary Hub, & The Millions
"Redefine quiet quitting with Marissa Higgins’s taut debut novel, A Good Happy Girl, in which a young lesbian lawyer with a Mariana Trench-size streak of masochism whiles away her work hours posting online videos of her feet in the office restroom, and relitigating the hurts of her Dickensian childhood via sex and self-destruction." —Leah Greenblatt, The New York Times
"A sad, sexy ode to the complexity of human connection." —Emma Specter, Vogue
"Marissa Higgins has an addictive and uncanny ability to write about devastating topics with a shrug. It’s a talent that’s on display in her original and stylish debut novel." —Sophia June, Nylon, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
"It’s impossible to look away or not keep turning the page. Higgins, as the novel demonstrates, is enormously skilled at provoking the reader’s empathy for complex, unsavory characters." —Samantha Paige Rosen, Interview
"Fearless and often shockingly intimate . . . What if we just all followed our innermost desires? Cutting, dynamic, and boldly self-assured for a debut, A Good Happy Girl enters a reader like ice in the veins." —Sam Franzini, Our Culture Mag
"Come for the sapphic throuple, but stay for the profound character study, the questions the novel asks without being moralistic, and the razor-sharp sentences . . . This novel does so much and nails it all." —Rachel León, Split Lip Magazine
"Higgins masterfully oscillates between poignancy and the grotesque as she examines the many dimensions of both care and neglect." —Elizabeth Endicott, Chicago Review of Books
"If you’re a fan of Melissa Broder or Sally Rooney, and have ever wished their work was gayer . . . look no further! . . . A poignant, captivating, observant, and very queer narration following a fraught period of early adulthood." —Tiernan Bertrand-Essington, Queerty
"I am a sucker for any sapphic literary fiction, but the malaise of the protagonist and her unique voice quickly drew me in . . . Helen’s voice is entirely singular, and you’ll keep reading not only because of the impeccable sentences—each one carrying so much weight—but also to find out how deep into desperation Helen will let herself slip before asking to be saved." —Kim Narby, Write or Die
“This is a work of textures, of excess, of grease, of desire. It is a portrait of pleasure as punishment and punishment as pleasure, a gluttonous urge for more until both small joys and small discomforts are compounded into the same nauseating grotesquerie.” —Drew Burnett Gregory, Autostraddle
"One of the sexiest, most sensual, and sapphic books in recent memory . . . Come for the tantalizing text but stay for the subtle, soft humane moments in between." —Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful
"[A] striking and visceral debut . . . Higgins expertly captures the longing and self-loathing that drive Helen’s masochism . . . The results are as captivating as they are disturbing." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Higgins' captivating debut is a disturbing, intimate look at the mind of a young woman struggling mightily to maintain a semblance of normalcy . . . By turns heart-wrenching, upsetting, and racy, this is a unique take on trauma and broken relationships." —Booklist
"A moving portrait of Helen’s suffering and the potential for healing she finds in the 'warm cruelty' of her chosen family . . . A provocative read." —Kirkus Reviews
"Sometimes I could not believe how easily this book moved from gross-out sadism into genuine sympathy. Totally surprising, totally compelling. I loved it." —Halle Butler, author of The New Me
"In A Good Happy Girl, Marissa Higgins writes beautifully about the painful responsibilities that warp our relationships. This novel is equal parts erotic and grotesque and humane. Higgins writes gracefully about queerness and contradiction, bringing tenderness to the regrets that shape a young life." —Isle McElroy, author of People Collide and The Atmopsherians
"A Good Happy Girl is at once a darkly erotic tale, a portrait of a woman on the brink, and a searching exploration of intergenerational poverty and abuse. This is a taut, thorny, and utterly thrilling debut." —Antonia Angress, author of Sirens & Muses
"A Good Happy Girl offers an unwavering look at a young woman for whom wavering has been a way of life. Higgins's heroine makes for a compellingly prickly protagonist, an uncertain someone who the reader nonetheless wants so much to hug. This keen-edged gem of a novel limns the sometimes erotic, often quixotic quest to transcend oneself while trying to retain one's own personhood." —Michelle Hart, author of We Do What We Do in the Dark
"An intensely queer and disarming story about unconventional love. Marissa Higgins’s debut is superbly sad, sapphic, and sexy." —Emily Austin, author of Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead
"Combining the bleak New England edge of Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen with the sapphic psychodrama of Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite, Marissa Higgins's A Good Happy Girl is fearless, twisted, and shockingly tender. A fantastic and moving debut." —Anna Dorn, author of Exalted