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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 (most notably with Catherine and Katrina, a pair of married women she meets online and begins dating). Her want saturates the novel completely, making for an all-consuming read that never lets you forget about its characters’ essential, not-always-palatable humanity.
This week, Vogue spoke to Higgins about the process of crafting a three-person relationship in fiction, the hustle required to get her book into people’s hands, the contemporary writers who inspire her most, and more.
Vogue: First off, how does it feel to see your book out in the world?
Marissa Higgins: Honestly, I never imagined it would happen. I’m not really a visualizer, but seeing pictures of the book now in bookstores in Ohio or Texas…. It still doesn’t even feel real. I’m just so grateful, and I feel like if it all disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn’t even have anything to be unhappy about because I achieved something that I never conceived would happen.
I’m so interested in the concept of a poly or three-person relationship as a narrative device. Can you talk a little about writing the relationship between Helen, Katrina, and Catherine?
Early in the draft, the Catherine and Katrina characters felt like a unit and less like individual characters. One thing my agent helped pull out of me was whether I wanted to lean into that. Or did I want to make them and their relationships more distinct? I ended up trying to build them out a little more, but honestly, and this feels weird to say, I fell so deeply into Helen’s voice from the beginning—the style of her voice and the movement of it. I struggled to see whether it was a lone person Helen was dating or two because I had a hard time imagining Helen as anything other than that: barely hanging on to reality. If it had just been one person she was seeing, it probably wouldn’t have read the same way in terms of what she was seeking in caretaking and a kind of family. Still, I don’t know that they would have gotten any more room on the page than what Helen allows because I imagine Helen telling someone the story of her life really close-up—like, talking really close to you.
Helen is so full of guilt and shame about her parents’ crime, but she also displays so much tenderness—if not really to herself. How do you balance those two dynamics in fiction?
For me, the chapters with the most tenderness are the scenes between Helen and her grandmother. Those were some scenes that I hardly changed in drafting the book, which is 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 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. Once the dynamic of Helen and her grandmother was on the page, I couldn’t pull Helen from it—it’s like the grandma stuff just pulled that sweetness from me.
What was the biggest thing you learned in writing this book?
I learned how to plot a book. When I started querying agents, things happened but there was not really a plot. So I definitely learned a lot about pacing and structure and basically how far I can ask a reader to go with those things. If I go for a really weird voice, something has to give; there has to be some familiarity with movement or pacing in the book so that readers have something to hang onto in order to stay in reality a little bit. On a personal level, though, it has finally started to sink in that writing—or how we measure success in art—is not a sports bracket, right? Like, I had to revise and resubmit to get an agent, and then I had to revise and resubmit to get an offer. I emailed hundreds of bookstores personally, letting them know about my book, and reached out to so many people on TikTok; it’s kind of embarrassing, but it only takes one chance for someone to choose your book.
Are there other books that you feel helped pave the way for yours?
When I was writing, I was totally all in for Luster by Raven Leilani. I was really encouraged by how complicated and weird and compelling that book is, and the public response to it encouraged me to be like, Okay, people can be into a book that is not necessarily bringing a hopeful or fun energy—it’s weird and intriguing, and people are open to it. Brandon Taylor’s Real Life was another one. It’s a campus novel about graduate students, so it’s not super relevant in terms of plot, but Brandon has this incredible way of casting the narrative gaze at characters who are making the choices they make. He doesn’t look away; he doesn’t end the scene or fade out when sometimes it can be tempting to do that. He has this ability to make us as readers look at the full range of meanness and cruelty but also softness and dignity in a way that made me return to his book many times early in drafting mine because I admired it so much. Cleanness by Garth Greenwell is also absolutely fantastic, especially when it comes to sex writing; in an interview that I read, I think he described it as pornography, and I really liked that because I appreciate a clinical, move-by-move approach to sex writing. That was a book that definitely made me feel less crazy about the one I was working on.
