Like Happiness: A Novel

by Ursula Villarreal-Moura

Overview

Named an Indie Next pick, and a Most Anticipated Book by Today.com, ELLE, Electric Literature, Them, HipLatina, LGBT Reads, Debutiful, LA Daily News, NPR, and more

A searing debut about the complexities of gender, power, and fame, told through the story of a young woman’s destructive relationship with a legendary writer.

It’s 2015, and Tatum Vega feels that her life is finally falling into place. Living in sunny Chile with her partner, Vera, she spends her days surrounded by art at the museum where she works. More than anything else, she loves this new life for helping her forget the decade she spent in New York City orbiting the brilliant and famous author M. Domínguez.

When a reporter calls from the US asking for an interview, the careful separation Tatum has constructed between her past and present begins to crumble. Domínguez has been accused of assault, and the reporter is looking for corroboration.

As Tatum is forced to reexamine the all-consuming but undefinable relationship that dominated so much of her early adulthood, long-buried questions surface. What did happen between them? And why is she still struggling with the mark the relationship left on her life?

Told in a dual narrative alternating between her present day and a letter from Tatum to Domínguez, recounting and reclaiming the totality of their relationship, Like Happiness explores the nuances of a complicated and imbalanced relationship, catalyzing a reckoning with gender, celebrity, memory, Latinx identity, and power dynamics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250882851
Publisher:	Celadon Books
Publication date:	03/25/2025
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ursula Villarreal-Moura was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. She is the author of Math for the Self-Crippling, a flash fiction collection. Like Happiness is her first novel.

Editorial Reviews

01/29/2024

In Villarreal-Moura’s accomplished first novel (after the chapbook Math for the Self-Crippling), an American expat in Chile reckons with the fraught friendship she had with an older novelist that began when she was in college. A dual timeline narrative portrays the relationship’s origins. Tatum Vega, a Texan enrolled at Williams College in 2000, writes a fan letter to lauded Puerto Rican short story writer M. Dominguez, and their correspondence rapidly escalates into an obsessive friendship and occasional romance. After graduation, Tatum moves to New York City to be closer to the writer, who insists she call him Mateo. In 2015 Santiago, where Tatum lives with her partner Vera, she’s contacted by a New York Times reporter who’s writing an exposé on Dominguez’s alleged sexual assault of another young Latinx woman. Addressing her narration to Mateo—“I’m sure you recall that the New York Times Book Review devoted two full pages to the release of your long-awaited novel”—Tatum slowly builds to the alarming revelation in that novel’s pages that sent her far away from the writer. Questions of whether and how Mateo groomed Tatum reverberate throughout the subtle and satisfying narrative. This leaves readers with much to chew on. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Most anticipated lists from Today.com, ELLE, Electric Literature, Them, HipLatina, LGBT Reads, Debutiful, LA Daily News, NPR and more

"Thanks to Villarreal-Moura, I found another perfect book to recommend for both Sunday reads and subway commutes - my favorite kind! The retrospective confession of San Antonio-native Tatum about her thorny relationship with a prominent Nuyorican writer intertwines desire, destiny, and a love for art and literature in what feels like a transformative conversation with an old friend. Expertly written with striking intimacy and heartbreaking clarity, Like Happiness accomplishes a profound emotional electrocution that will leave you floating lighter for days."

—Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming

"Like Happiness is a deft and touching coming of age story that resists easy answers to very thorny questions—about sexual consent and power, about fame and persona, about making and loving art."

—Rumaan Alam, bestselling author of Leave the World Behind and finalist for the National Book Award

"Like Happiness is a stunning swirl of a coming of age novel about power, manipulation, and complicity. In Tatum, Ursula Villarreal-Moura has created an eminently relatable character. Readers will connect to her love of books, her complicated relationships, and the different ways she grapples with understanding herself—in relation to class, sexuality, race, and family ties. This is the start of a brilliant career."

—Megan Giddings, author of The Women Could Fly and Lakewood

"An epic unraveling of every love story trope, reclaimed as something sharp, seething, unsettling, and true. Yes, this has page flipping plot momentum, but it's also a whip smart critique of race in America, art making in the age of neoliberal "feminism," and the crushing humor of trying to exist as a quiet person with big wants. I am so glad Villarreal-Moura's writing is here and thriving."

—T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“Her emotionally astute novel offers a moving perspective on the different kinds of victims abusers leave in their wake. Memorable and incisive, this debut grapples elegantly with the complexity of betrayal.”

– Kirkus Reviews

“A moving portrait of the vulnerabilities of young womanhood”

—Today.com

“A quick but consuming read, Like Happiness is elegant, complex, and altogether familiar.”

— ELLE

“There’s not much I love more than a protagonist needing to reckon with their past, especially when it means trying to understand it from an older, healthier perspective, and that’s exactly what Ursula Villareal-Moura’s novel promises to offer.”

— Ilana Masad, them

“This compelling read delves into the idealism of youth,

the harsh lesson of learning whom to trust, and the complexities of self-actualization.”

—Booklist

"[A] subtle and satisfying narrative. This leaves readers with much to chew on."

—Publishers Weekly

"Seamlessly alternating between these two timelines, Villarreal-Moura writes with stunning emotional clarity about sexual identity, art and marginalization, and the ways control can masquerade as love."

―Bustle

"If I could literally eat a novel, it would be this one, GOOD SOUP."

―Betches

"Like Happiness has given us a beautiful work of fiction that dwells in the gray areas between celebrity and fan, victim and victimizer, absolution and blame."

—NPR

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From the Publisher

Marisa Blake's vocal agility does justice to the emotional roller-coaster ride of Tatum Vega. When a woman accuses the famous Latinx writer M. Dominguez of sexual harassment, a NEW YORK TIMES reporter contacts Tatum. Now living in Chile, Tatum reexamines her long and complicated relationship with the much older Dominguez. Blake has an impressive emotional command of her narration. When portraying Dominguez, Blake's voice projects a deceitful quality. Whenever Blake uses Dominguez's term of endearment for Tatum, mi vida (my life), she does it in an insincere yet sweet tone that reflects Dominguez's manipulative nature. Blake also captures Tatum's path from youthful codependence to maturity and independence. A.M. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2024 - AudioFile

2024-01-05
A woman recalls her friendship with a man caught in the grip of the #MeToo movement.

In Santiago in 2015, Tatum Vega lives with her girlfriend, settled into her life as a museum employee far from her working-class roots in San Antonio, Texas. She’s contacted by a journalist from the New York Times who wants to know about her relationship with the writer M. Dominguez, who has been accused of sexual improprieties. Initially reluctant to discuss her friendship with M., whom she knows as Mateo, and cautioning the journalist that she was never sexually mistreated by him, Tatum finally agrees to a series of conversations; eventually, this onslaught of memories causes her to chronicle her time with M. Addressing Mateo in the second person, Tatum recounts her past as a transplanted Tejana at Williams College in Massachusetts, a place she picked so she could be close to the history of literary heroes like Sylvia Plath. Her desire to exist merely as a “pulsating mind” leaves her lonely and largely friendless; her status as Latina in the white-dominated worlds of the arts and humanities leads her to reach out to the Latino author of the short story collection Happiness, her favorite book. The fan letter she writes kickstarts a decade of a (mostly) platonic relationship in which Tatum and Mateo endure failed romances, Mateo struggles to write a novel, and Tatum gradually comes to understand her sexuality. As the chronicle barrels toward the moment when the relationship implodes, Tatum realizes there are many different kinds of violation. Though Villarreal-Moura’s writing style is a bit buttoned-up, her emotionally astute novel offers a moving perspective on the different kinds of victims abusers leave in their wake.

Memorable and incisive, this debut grapples elegantly with the complexity of betrayal.

Kirkus Reviews