Like Happiness
A Novel
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Named an Indie Next pick, and a Most Anticipated Book by Today.com, ELLE, Electric Literature, Them, HipLatina, LGBT Reads, Debutiful, LA Daily News, 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.