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Like Happiness

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
304 Seiten
Englisch
ONEerschienen am04.04.2024
I made up my mind to meet you. Your book had cast a spell on me the previous night. What better way to stay spellbound than to orbit the magician? Razor-sharp and delectably witty, Like Happiness is a headfirst dive into a young woman's destructive obsession with a legendary writer for readers of Sheena Patel's I'm A Fan and Madeleine Grey's Green Dot. 'Deeply felt and achingly intimate' ANNIE LORD 'An epic unravelling of every love story, reclaimed as something sharp, seething, unsettling, and true' T KIRA MADDEN 'Accomplishes a profound emotional electrocution that will leave you floating lighter for days' XOCHITL GONZALEZ __________ NetGalley reviewers love Like Happiness: 'Beautifully written and unputdownable... I would read this over and over again' 'I simply love this book' 'My jaw was on the floor... I'd recommend it for fans of My Dark Vanessa'

Ursula Villarreal-Moura is the author of Math for the Self-Crippling (2022), selected by Zinzi Clemmons as the Gold Line Press fiction contest winner. A graduate of Middlebury College, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was a VONA/Voices fellow. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including Tin House, Catapult, Prairie Schooner, Midnight Breakfast, Washington Square Story, Bennington Review, Wigleaf Top 50, and Gulf Coast. She contributed to Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction, a flash anthology by writers of color, and in 2012, she won the CutBank Big Fish Flash Fiction/Prose Poetry Contest. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, a Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Best American Short Stories 2015.mehr
Verfügbare Formate
BuchGebunden
EUR28,00
BuchGebunden
EUR22,00
TaschenbuchKartoniert, Paperback
EUR18,50
E-BookEPUB2 - DRM Adobe / EPUBE-Book
EUR19,99
E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
EUR15,59

Produkt

KlappentextI made up my mind to meet you. Your book had cast a spell on me the previous night. What better way to stay spellbound than to orbit the magician? Razor-sharp and delectably witty, Like Happiness is a headfirst dive into a young woman's destructive obsession with a legendary writer for readers of Sheena Patel's I'm A Fan and Madeleine Grey's Green Dot. 'Deeply felt and achingly intimate' ANNIE LORD 'An epic unravelling of every love story, reclaimed as something sharp, seething, unsettling, and true' T KIRA MADDEN 'Accomplishes a profound emotional electrocution that will leave you floating lighter for days' XOCHITL GONZALEZ __________ NetGalley reviewers love Like Happiness: 'Beautifully written and unputdownable... I would read this over and over again' 'I simply love this book' 'My jaw was on the floor... I'd recommend it for fans of My Dark Vanessa'

Ursula Villarreal-Moura is the author of Math for the Self-Crippling (2022), selected by Zinzi Clemmons as the Gold Line Press fiction contest winner. A graduate of Middlebury College, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was a VONA/Voices fellow. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including Tin House, Catapult, Prairie Schooner, Midnight Breakfast, Washington Square Story, Bennington Review, Wigleaf Top 50, and Gulf Coast. She contributed to Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction, a flash anthology by writers of color, and in 2012, she won the CutBank Big Fish Flash Fiction/Prose Poetry Contest. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, a Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Best American Short Stories 2015.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781911590934
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum04.04.2024
Seiten304 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse932 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.14286970
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



3.


The problem was that I never fell out of love with reading, or more specifically, with other people´s imaginations. In high school, I realized that nearly every writer I admired was from Massachusetts. Sylvia Plath was the first, followed by Emily Dickinson, then Robert Lowell, Susanna Kaysen, and Anne Sexton. In each of their works, I identified with the suffocating sense of malaise, and in the case of Dickinson, with her isolation and misanthropy. It was a sign, I thought, that all these writers hailed from the same area. The logical choice for college was to situate myself near Boston, that fault line of literary genius.

This daydream of mine included finding a like-minded friend who´d be interested in making the pilgrimage with me to McLean to visit the legendary psychiatric hospital where my heroes had recuperated from their mental breakdowns. Together we would eat tuna fish sandwiches and split a thermos of hot coffee, just like Esther Greenwood did in The Bell Jar. Our lives would imitate art, or so I´d hoped.

In my first semester at Williams College, I realized the literary canon was an exclusive club of white, predominantly well-to-do Americans and Brits. You might want to take credit for my awakening, but the credit doesn´t belong to you. I reached this conclusion before I read your book or had ever heard of you.

What became undeniable for me as an English and art history dual-degree student was that syllabi at Williams were homogenous. My diet consisted of the Brontës, Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and occasionally Henry James or Oscar Wilde.

In art history, the term fine arts meant work created by fair-skinned Europeans. Nearly every art movement chronicled in my textbooks had roots in the United States or Western Europe. Initially, the Clark Institute, a museum in walking distance from campus, had tantalized me. After a few visits, though, its silverware collection and ancient paintings almost convinced me that art spaces were only for the affluent. The Harlem Renaissance painter Jacob Lawrence was the only Black artist I learned about in depth. I didn´t learn about Latino artists at all. The Mexican painter Diego Rivera´s impressive murals were highlighted in a Latin American section of our textbook that my professor chose to skip.

I hungered for writers and painters to teach me something I didn´t know about desire or consciousness. For fun, I read Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel, Wasted by Marya Hornbacher, and the somewhat risqué Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson. I lived in Sawyer Library, thumbing through shelves, searching for art books containing work by Basquiat or Leonora Carrington.

My first two years of college, I wanted to be brought into the fold so badly that I took a number of risks. Sophomore year, I showed up uninvited to a couple of parties only to quickly learn my lesson. To my disappointment, the like-minded friend of mine-the one who would accompany me to McLean-never materialized. She or he was supposed to be the right ratio of similar to me versus different from me. But true to my inner Emily Dickinson, I preferred the hemisphere of my thoughts, and in my last two years, I made little to no effort to befriend peers.

You could say reaching out to you was another limb I crawled out on in hopes of a best-case scenario. Had I developed healthy friendships at Williams, I doubt I would have sought out a relationship with you.

It was hard to pinpoint what exactly I was learning in class, but I trusted the price tag of my education. Almost 100 percent of the novels I was assigned dealt with Europeans experiencing romantic strife or ennui because they were bored with tea parties, or they disliked a neighbor or family member. Sometimes they were strapped for money or depressed while servants waited on them. This was literature with a capital L and an ascot. This was what English majors like me were supposed to discuss for hours upon hours-books about English people and their universal problems.

Since I usually took two or three English courses a semester, I sometimes confused the assignments. So many novels had parallel structures and conflicts. But I liked these books because they engaged my curiosity about the United Kingdom, an area of the world that remained a gigantic question mark for me. Or the novels addressed religious fervor, a topic that piqued my interest as a lapsed Catholic. Still some books were tedious, requiring the reader to know and care about boat life, horses, or Victorian dance etiquette.

It was hardly surprising, then, that I ended up in a D. H. Lawrence spring seminar my junior year. The novella St. Mawr had been a breeze to read, though not terribly pleasurable. It seemed to me that Lawrence regarded all his characters with disdain, from the rich American Mrs. Witt and her daughter Lou to the British society women and men, down to the servants. Lawrence referred to servants as savages and showed how lacking in substance the society people were with their frivolous banter. The one thing that made me perk up while reading it was when the main characters traveled through San Antonio, my hometown, on their journey through the Southwest. Never before had I read a mention of San Antonio in a novel for class. As much as I had yearned to flee my hometown as a teen, I now considered it a type of geographical mirror, and I craved a bit of it in New England.

I´m not going to bore you with a blow-by-blow of each of my junioror senior-year courses, but you should know about this D. H. Lawrence seminar. If it hadn´t been for this experience, perhaps your book wouldn´t have resonated so deeply with me when I picked it up a few months later.

As I entered the seminar classroom, I wondered how the professor would begin the discussion, what angle he would take on the author´s attitudes toward society.

I took the seat around the oval conference table closest to the door. A handful of faces around the table were familiar to me from my bakery job in town. On the weekends, I worked all day making sandwiches and often had to scrawl my classmates´ names on their food orders. This is to say, I knew their hangover faces and their tipping habits.

Professor Hatch, a man in his sixties with Brillo pad hair and tortoiseshell bifocals, waltzed into class with a smirk. He tossed his paperback of St. Mawr on the conference table, draped his coat around his chair, and took a seat.

It´s two twenty-eight p.m., he said, eyeing the clock. We´ll wait a couple more minutes. Hatch looked across the room before asking, Does anyone have spring break plans yet?

Several students shared about upcoming trips to the Hamptons, while a couple of others chattered about Miami. A reedy boy with pimply skin stumbled in and plopped himself into the only empty seat around the table. All of us had our copies of the book out, and some opened spiral notebooks for note-taking.

It looks like we´re all here, Professor Hatch said as he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. General thoughts about St. Mawr?

There´s not much resolution at the end, someone offered.

Well, okay. But backing up, what´s the book about? Hatch asked as he stood from the table and began circling the classroom.

It is a narrative about a rich family, a horse, masculinity, and the idea that women sometimes can´t find what they´re looking for in men, so they look elsewhere. It´s about boredom and searching, concepts with which I could identify then. I didn´t speak up, but eventually someone did, and she summarized it similarly.

All the women in the book are awful, one of the Hamptons guys announced.

How so? asked Hatch. His stride brought him close to my chair.

It was tempting to say that all the characters, not just the women, were insufferable, but I merely listened.

They basically want to castrate the men, the Hamptons guy continued.

Do others agree with that? Hatch asked.

Well, you can tell that Lawrence hates dumb people, a guy in a North Face pullover said with a chuckle.

I don´t disagree, Marshall. But how can you tell that? Show me in the text, Hatch said.

As Marshall started flipping through pages to find an example, another voice piped up, Look at all his descriptions of the Mexican and the Welsh characters who tend to St. Mawr.

Professor Hatch ran his fingers through his white hair and nodded before asking, And what do we make of the Mexican?

Phoenix? a girl in a dainty sweater set offered.

My breath tightened in my chest as if I were trapped in quicksand. I wanted to say that the character of Mexican and Native ancestry in the novella was named Geronimo Trujillo but called Phoenix because the white ladies refused to adopt his Spanish name. It was no different from when Kunta Kinte in Roots was renamed Toby....

mehr

Autor

Ursula Villarreal-Moura is the author of Math for the Self-Crippling (2022), selected by Zinzi Clemmons as the Gold Line Press fiction contest winner. A graduate of Middlebury College, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was a VONA/Voices fellow. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including Tin House, Catapult, Prairie Schooner, Midnight Breakfast, Washington Square Story, Bennington Review, Wigleaf Top 50, and Gulf Coast. She contributed to Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction, a flash anthology by writers of color, and in 2012, she won the CutBank Big Fish Flash Fiction/Prose Poetry Contest. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, a Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Best American Short Stories 2015.
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