Desire and Self-Destruction in “A Good Happy Girl” https://ift.tt/1khsUgq
Marissa Higgins’s debut novel, A Good Happy Girl, falls securely into the “queer weird-girl lit-fic” canon, situated between Chloe Caldwell’s Women and Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss. A highly character driven novel, with close access to her protagonist Helen’s thought processes, Higgins presents the scaffolding of a deeply layered character without ever showing her hand. Written in intimate first-person narration, A Good Happy Girl offers an omniscient view of the traumatized brain’s attempt to protect itself and the deep-set effects of intergenerational poverty.
The protagonist, Helen, is a 30-something-year-old lawyer who livestreams her feet from the bathroom stall during business hours. Attempting to compartmentalize, she hooks up with lesbian couples she meets online and maintains a sense of control by repressing memories of her troubled childhood. Helen’s attempts to sort out what it means to be good, and regular requests for punishment so she may adequately suffer and earn the title of “good girl,” reflect the self-destructive delusions our brains create to make sense of the chaos.
In the opening pages, Helen is meeting up with a married couple she’s been messaging
online, Catherine and Katrina. This is not her first rodeo, and she’s developed boundaries and requirements as a type of pseudo-contract after learning her limits with other couples. While Catherine and Katrina are presented as distinct individuals, their edges blur together in their relation to Helen, often referred to as simply “the wives.” After observing their interactions, she says:
I recognized them as a couple with their own language. I understood then that Catherine and Katrina were equals at their core, unlike so many couples I had met before, who gave an air of constant dominance and submission. When the wives turned to face me, they did so in unison. I wanted to rupture the unity and to join it.
Helen’s parents are incarcerated for a terrible crime of neglect, having abandoned her father’s elderly mother, leaving her to sit in her own waste for days. In her misguided attempt to regain control after a childhood of not-dissimilar neglect, Helen’s main request of the wives is to “mother me meanly.” Thus begins the turbulent month-long escapade in which Helen wildly oscillates between extreme dichotomies: pleasure and pain, punishment and reward, control and chaos, care and neglect. Helen’s internal dialogue regularly pairs daydreams of erotic desire with violent compulsions, creating a disconcertingly casual, detached tone. Refreshingly, Higgins use of raw, visceral language isn’t just thrown around for shock value but rather is utilized to sharpen the edges of Helen’s view of the world and her place in it. As a character, she is both extremely self-aware and painfully unable to perceive the reality of her situation, demonstrating the complex nature of trauma and the skewed perception of self and self-worth as a result.
Amidst the lesbian kink and violent compulsions, Helen must also contend with her abusive father hounding her to write a character statement on his behalf. In a conversation for Interview Magazine discussing the search for goodness as a driving force of the book, Higgins says, “If Helen could see them as bad, or at least as not good enough to have some role in her life, I think she would have a whole different world of turmoil. I see Helen as a poking child who still really wants her parents to reveal themselves as finally good, despite however many other things show otherwise.” It’s this tension between remaining loyal to her dad despite his neglect, and her human sympathy for his situation that drives Helen to lean further into her distractions. In her most self-destructive moments her internal thoughts of unworthiness and belief that she deserves punishment reveal themselves as coping mechanisms her mind has formed in order to meet the unmet needs of her childhood self. The story never veers so far into the victim-complex that it falls over the edge into making excuses. Instead it shines a light on the surface level responses and reactions and gives us the omniscient ability to see what’s going on in the deeper layers of emotion.
A Good Happy Girl offers a visceral reading experience, tapping into the ways in which the body and physical desire can act as a catalyst for emotional clarity. Among some of the quieter moments in the novel, the scenes where Helen cares for her grandmother are extremely poignant. From the rare soft moments to the utterly engrossing acts of self-destruction, this is a portrait of a woman thrashing her way through the overgrown path her parents left her, reluctantly fighting to clear one of her own.
FICTION A Good Happy Girl
By Marissa Higgins
Catapult
Published April 2, 2024
Paperback March 4, 2025
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