A Good Happy Girl
A Novel
by Marissa Higgins
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Pub Date Apr 02 2024 | Archive Date Mar 29 2024
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Description
Helen, a jittery attorney with a self-destructive streak, is secretly reeling from a disturbing crime of neglect that her parents recently committed. Historically happy to compartmentalize—distracting herself by hooking up with lesbian couples, doting on her grandmother, and flirting with a young administrative assistant—Helen finally meets her match with Catherine and Katrina, a married couple who startle and intrigue her with their ever-increasing sexual and emotional intensity.
Perceptive and attentive, Catherine and Katrina prod at Helen’s life, revealing a childhood tragedy she’s been repressing. When her father begs her yet again for help getting parole, she realizes that she has a bargaining chip to get answers to her past.
A Good Happy Girl is interested in worlds without men—and women who will do what they can to get what they want. In her exploration of twisted desires, queer domesticity, and the effects of incarceration on the family, Marissa Higgins offers empathy to characters who often don’t receive it, with unsettling results.
Advance Praise
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR A GOOD HAPPY GIRL
“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.”
—Anna Dorn, author of Exalted
“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
“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
“In A Good Happy Girl, Marissa Higgins beautifully captures 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 The Atmospherians and People Collide
“Weirdly sexy, propulsive, and darkly funny, A Good Happy Girl explores survivor guilt, estrangement, and the thorny roads we take to sabotage, punish, and patch up ourselves. Like a sticky, home-brewed elixir that just might cure you if it doesn’t take you down first, Marissa Higgins's debut is hypnotic and deliciously addictive.”
—Deb Rogers, author of Florida Woman
“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 whom 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
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781646221974 |
| PRICE | $27.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 256 |
Available on NetGalley
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