This Internal Wiring: On Marissa Higgins's A Good Happy Girl
At the risk of getting too personal too fast—sharing something in a book review that probably should be worked out with a licensed therapist—I very much related to the internal obsession of the protagonist of Marissa Higgins’s A Good Happy Girl. Though I suppose Helen has several internal obsessions: sex, her throuple with married Catherine and Katrina, and trying to understand her family’s past. Really, though, all these things connect to what’s at the core of her psyche (and, admittedly, mine), which is right there in the novel’s title: What makes a person good?
While there are likely more shameful inner dialogues one can have, this one—Am I a good person?—is clearly unhealthy, stemming from childhood trauma. It is an obsession with a question whose answer is beside the point; morality can be ambiguous. As much as I resist binaries, including such banal and useless judgement calls about anyone being good or bad, I adjudge myself constantly—does this make me a bad person? As if any one misstep I take could relegate me to a lesser rank on some imaginary scale of goodness.
Helen thinks like that too. She grew up in poverty and is the daughter of parents who’ve long struggled with substance issues, parents who are now both in prison. They’re there because of a crime of neglect, one that she blames herself for in that specific way children of parents with substance issues do. We take the world on our shoulders and believe we’re the cause of things that go wrong. We are often desperate to be good so we can be loved. We’re desperate; we’re needy. Over and over, Helen obsesses about her choices, both small and big, and whether doing, or not doing, something will result in her being relegated to a bad person. Mostly, this stress comes from whether or not she should provide a character reference for her father in order to help him get released from prison. He needs her for his freedom.
Neediness, an idea central to the novel, manifests in different ways. For Helen, it’s her specific sexual desires. Our kinks can be fed by our inner dialogues, and Higgins astutely narrates Helen’s masochistic desires. It’s not only that she’s masterful at writing about sex—the tension of what will happen with these women sexually is delightfully thick—but that Higgins renders a tenderness to the characters in these scenes:
But I could not say a word, what with her hand obstructing my jaw, so I bit down. Not even a bite, not really: pressure, pressure, pressure. I hoped she had doused her fist in bleach but I tasted only specks of flour trapped in lotion. She smiled and told me to step into the closet, then used her free hand to reach around me and open the narrow door. With her skin still in my teeth, I said, Oh. The word was only a throat rustle but that’s all we needed.
Helen’s wish that Catherine’s skin was soaked in a burning chemical is one of many examples throughout the novel of her either imagining something gruesome happening to her or hoping for it. Again, Higgins handles these instances with skill and grace, so the masochistic thoughts aren’t overstated or feel tacked in for dramatic effect. Rather, each moment is organic, deeply felt, and goes back to that central question, the heartbeat throughout the book—how can I be good? When we have this internal wiring, we can slip into subconsciously thinking we deserve to be punished. If only we can adequately suffer for our transgressions and flaws, then—only then—may we possibly be deemed worthy of goodness.
And one such arbitrary criteria of goodness that the novel examines is the idea of allegiance and obedience. Should one be ever loyal to their parents, even if said parents are homophobic, if they’re rendered unwell due to substance abuse or mental health issues? Of course not, you’re probably thinking. Of course one needs to draw boundaries, to protect oneself from harm. But Higgins beautifully illustrates the complicated internal responses a person can have in such an instance:
I admitted I wanted to want my father to get out. I’m not a monster, I said. I know he’s living in a shithole. I considered my unhappy truth: I could forgive my father of his latent homophobia, and I had. I could bear to send empathy to my parents but could not act on it, not without telling my own body goodbye.
That last line hits at the allegiance to self vs. others and shows how loneliness plays a role in Helen’s life, how Helen doesn’t really have anyone in her life aside from the wives, as she refers to them. Whether or not to call them chosen family could warrant an entire essay, but the wives aside, Helen’s support system is sorely lacking. Her parents have their struggles and have hurt her in ways she can’t fully articulate, but they are still people in her life—no need to cue the cliches about not getting to choose our parents or the bonds of blood. I can tell you in my career as a social worker, I’ve witnessed a myriad of complexities on how a thorny parent-child relationship can play out. Here’s the crux: Nothing is simple, and it’s way too complicated to try to categorize anything as wrong or right, good or bad, but that’s how our minds can work.
Another such convolution of our minds is we can start to identify with our pain and loneliness. Perhaps the only constant in Helen’s life is her loneliness, and it’s become part of her sense of self. She can’t act on her empathy to her father without losing what feels like a critical part of who she is: her loneliness. That’s why she can’t have a meaningful relationship with Catherine and/or Katrina—“the wives,” whose names are so laughably similar it’s like we’re not meant to see them as separate people, just as Helen can’t. Real intimacy, or a relationship void of harm, pain, and disconnection, would force Helen not only to open up and be vulnerable, but to have to say goodbye to the person she is—or who she sees herself as.
It’s easy to read A Good Happy Girl as a sexy, if sad, sapphic novel, that treads the line between fantasy and reality. And it is those things, deliciously. Come for the sapphic throuple, but stay for the profound character study, the questions the novel asks without being moralistic, and the razor-sharp sentences. Higgins sometimes plays with repetition of words (like “pressure, pressure, pressure” in the above), is intentional with punctuation, and wields words as weapons. “My dream self slurped vaginal fluid from the pavement no oil no grime no dust only the good stuff and thanked the wives for soothing me with their sharp laughter,” Higgins writes. “In my lived life I didn’t even turn my head. Understand even then I wanted to be equal parts desired and far-flung.”
That “understand even then” shows the narrative distance, another craft choice Higgins makes. So many first-person novels these days are written in present tense, as many consider it to have a more urgent quality, but A Good Happy Girl shows how effective past tense can be when the narrator has enough distance to be astute and reflective, as Helen is, without sacrificing urgency. And the reflective nature of the distance—Helen looking back at this time—accentuates the longing, deftly echoing those themes of loneliness, need, and disconnection threaded through the book. Seriously, this novel does so much and nails it all. Besides, who among us can’t relate to wanting to be both desired and far-flung? Or maybe that’s just another thing I need to work out in therapy.
Marissa Higgins (she/her/hers) is a lesbian writer. A Good Happy Girl is her first novel.
Rachel León (she/they) (@rachellayown) is a writer, editor, and social worker. She serves as Daily Editor for The Chicago Review of Books. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, BOMB Magazine, Catapult, LA Review of Books, The Millions, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.