When I read Marissa Higgins’s debut novel, A Good Happy Girl (Catapult, 2024), two words kept coming to mind: hardcore and fully-embodied. In exacting and rich prose, the book tells the story of Helen, a young lawyer living in Boston who gets entangled with a married couple. The wives find Helen on a path of self-destruction and offer her the opportunity for a different life, one with herbal remedies, intimacy, and weekend trips to Maine.
Through it all, Helen’s telling of her life is visceral, paying close attention to food, smells, and feelings in her body. In recounting Helen’s experiences with her deceased brother and her parents’ incarceration, the book assembles a portrait of a person looking for deep connection with others while relentlessly holding herself away from that very thing. Helen’s voice springs fully off the page. In gripping (hardcore, fully-embodied) detail, she documents how a small gesture or turn of phrase can unsettle the self and plunge her into the depths of her mind as she scrutinizes whether the wives even like her.
Higgins and I spoke over Zoom in April to discuss the novel, writing illness, motherhood, and the illegibility of desire.
Michael Colbert: Helen’s voice is so well-defined on the page. How did it feel writing her story with the wives as opposed to a love story between only two people?
Marissa Higgins: That’s a good question. Honestly, I didn’t really think about it. Whenever I write, I really focus in on the music of the line and the rhythm and play of the paragraph, so I will make huge dramatic changes to a story just to make something work in terms of that playfulness. In edits, my agent encouraged me to either make the wives distinct as their own characters or to play into them functioning as one mysterious person in her life, like one mysterious couple.
With that attention to the line, do you have a background as a poet? Were there particular images, ideas, or moments that pulled your attention?
I’m definitely not a poet myself, but I love to read poetry. I felt from the beginning in Helen’s voice that she’s telling the story to the reader like it’s something that happened long ago. Helen’s voice felt like it was withholding, even from me, in a sense. What information might have made some scenes different or made plot points move differently? I embraced and leaned into the sparing unevenness. Helen’s vulnerability is so difficult. I feel like it was even difficult for me to figure out how to plot it while not losing how authentic and pulsing her voice felt to me. With the line, I felt I could control it.
I was impressed by the charting of the micro-dynamics of a scene. Without explicating, the narrator shows how the use of a “we” or a gesture could feel to Helen as the outsider and depict how uneasy her footing is. How did you stay grounded in writing so deeply inside her mind?
It came really naturally to me. Helen’s voice came fully formed. I tried to first draft the book in five or six weeks and write it as quickly as I could, so I think that’s part of why there wasn’t really a plot but Helen’s voice was always the same.
When I write Helen, I feel sensitive and alert, like all my senses are dialed high. I feel like Helen’s been shaped by trauma in those unfortunate formative years, the chaos and dysfunction of her parents living with addiction, and one of the results is her habitual instinct to look for any and every shift in mood or behavior. Helen is chaotic, unstable, but she’s also watchful, observant. She’s looking out for herself while crumbling, making sure she understands all the details of her demise. Helen feels to me like she’s so lonely, so deep inside of herself, that any sliver of disinterest activates her panic brain, and when she receives attention, it upsets her, because she doesn’t know what to do with it. I think Helen’s push and pull, this wanting to be included but also to be flighty and unreliable, is also because she’s frankly uncomfortable with happiness, she doesn’t know how to be around people who don’t see her as a burden . . . or at least a burden they’re willing to put up with.
I also felt that Helen is compelled by these tender desires with the wives, which are then complemented or complicated by her desire to be punished. Does enacting that through sex and kink provide her an opportunity to learn about herself or does it reinforce some other more detrimental understanding of herself?
I wrote a lot about Helen and her body, food, and smells from the beginning. That was always in the earliest pages, but the sex writing didn’t come until later when my agent encouraged me to lean into that part to round out Helen’s experience in the body. I know it sounds crazy to say, because I wrote it, but it’s still kind of mysterious to me too. When I revisit Helen, I do surprise myself. When did I come up with that? It’s still unsettling to me.
I think the sex in the book teaches Helen about herself, and I think it’s also detrimental. It’s all consensual, but I see Helen as sexual mostly as a primitive desire, a compulsion. I think a lot of choices Helen makes could qualify as self-harm, or at the very least, unnecessarily reckless. And still, Helen finds this healing situation with the wives, women who don’t stop her from hurting herself, or who don’t turn her away when she’s increasingly vulnerable. And they’re the same people who bathe her and ask how she’s doing, acts that feel disarmingly caring to her. In the time frame of the book, in my head, Helen is wanting to learn about herself as she self-destructs, like she’s taking notes to leave behind for whoever cleans up the mess of her.
Helen moves to me like a raw wound, like she’s got all this pus that is leaking out of a scab. She’s not squeezing it; she’s just letting it glob up onto her sleeve. I don’t think any of her decisions in the book are either good or bad for her, and I’m not sure I know what those would look like for Helen. I’ve heard from readers a few times that they’re surprised that Helen is a lawyer, someone who has a job and money and could, for example, get a prescription and go to therapy, even some kind of residential treatment. But for where Helen’s head’s at, that’s not on the agenda, not if it’s feeling honest for her voice.
Looking at the different relationships in the book, her coworker Emma also plays an important role. There’s a lot of attention on her being bisexual, and I think Helen has this sense of Emma looking at the queer world from outside. Did you find that Helen’s understanding of Emma’s experience reflected her own circumstances?
At one point, there was a whole side plot where Emma’s boyfriend shows up when she and Helen are at the bar together. Her boyfriend got into her phone and was able to trace the streams [Emma was watching] to Helen. In one world, that was the reason Helen was fired. I don’t know how people eventually got me away from that because I was stuck on that plotline for a minute. With all of that said, Emma’s circumstances changed.
I think you make a really apt point about looking inside. Helen is always looking inside, always feeling lonely and left out. She has managed to technically assimilate into “normal” life by going to law school, working full time, having her own apartment, and yet she feels disconnected from everything around her, and she doesn’t really work to maintain it or improve on it. She feels both curious and undeserving of the people around her and the “good” choices they make for their lives to run smoothly. I think the depiction of Emma’s sexuality in the book is tinged by Helen’s assumptions and biases; it’s through Helen’s lens, Helen observing Emma.
Emma, to me, is just fine with being bisexual and having a boyfriend, for example, but Helen picks up on Emma’s interest and sort of imposes a whole universe onto it, and I think you’re right that she’s pulling out this sense of otherness or isolation. She’s looking at Emma and thinking, “Oh, you’re looking in on a sort of life and I’m doing the same, just in different directions.” Emma is like, “What?”
It’s interesting. Emma’s boyfriend knows she’s bisexual, so it’s not like she’s being found out, but she has other desires that are uncovered. Meanwhile Helen has these deep, really embodied fantasies throughout the book. I think there’s this desire to be seen but also this desire to withhold.
I thought a lot about the visibility and legibility of Helen’s desire, or their invisibility and illegibility. Does the couple present her the chance to act on those desires, or does this relationship reinforce Helen tunneling deeper inside of her mind and feeling more alone?
I think both. One thing that I remember my agent pushed me on early in drafting the book was understanding what was different about the wives for Helen. What was different about them as a couple in these early dates and in her screening on the app? What actually makes them any more worthy of this story than any other lesbian couple? We narrowed in on them being the ones who were willing to play with Helen, who Helen perceives as having this collective understanding with her of how to understand all of these things she doesn’t really verbalize. I think Helen’s thoughts, her circles, her compulsions, and her sense of self would appear on the page the same way with any couple. I don’t think Helen can be shaken too far from herself.
I think the wives offer Helen a chance to really experience herself, to put her fantasies into action. She keeps being vulnerable and exposed and she keeps coming back because they don’t turn her away, and when they do turn her away, she takes an overnight bus to them. Helen feels alone even when she’s in these intimate moments, even when she’s putting her thoughts and ideas into action. Even when her inner world does come to life in her lived world—the world she shares with other people—Helen is an observer, a watcher. Helen is always assessing and recording, trying to figure people out and how likely they are to hurt her. The wives allow Helen room to experiment and play, to be weird and act weird in the “real world” of her life, outside of her head, but Helen doesn’t necessarily feel immediately healed or cured just by having these moments. It’s like she’s seeking a lifetime of them, and the wives deliver.
I think you’re right that Helen has embodied fantasies that she wants to be known or seen, but also she wants to hide them, to keep them to herself. I think of Helen as a circus conductor, someone who introduces themself as a ring leader and then drops in on the acrobats, clinging to their ankles. You’re like, “Wait, is she supposed to be up there? Is she supposed to be doing that?” Helen is always moving the center, destabilizing the goal post. She’s an unreliable narrator, a complex person, and then she’s also this impish child teasing the reader, like, “Oh, you thought you understood?” Even Helen doesn’t understand herself.
The couple presents her with different options, especially by the end, so there is a change in Helen’s life, yet there are still these human moments where she continues to be herself. She’s moving into this more stable thing, but there’s still peril attending it.
Helen can be welcomed in shambles in Vermont. She can invite herself and be welcomed in with open arms and still be fussy and moody. She’s still an Eeyore type.
Well, with that, she also has a desire to be mothered, which takes a dark turn. It made me think of Sharp Objects and illness in motherhood. Were you interested in approaching the dialogue or complicating these darker portrayals of motherhood?
I didn’t actually read Sharp Objects, but I did watch the show and I loved it. There was a movie in my mind when I came up with Helen and the pie towards the end: Phantom Thread. That, I thought, was really fun and funny and weird.
In earlier versions of the book, Helen drives out and sees her mom, and there’s a chapter of them one-on-one before Helen goes to see her dad. I think the book is better without it because it provided a sense of closure that wasn’t super honest. At one point, Helen’s mom was a more significant part of the book. That was also part of the reason the storyline with Emma’s boyfriend was cut because I decided that it was a more interesting challenge for me to come up with a way that Helen even more directly self-sabotages as opposed to it technically being the fault of a distant side character. I thought it would be truer to Helen’s world that she would actually be the one to just stop showing up to her job.
Thinking of Phantom Thread, a film which intermingles desire, intimacy, and morbidity or illness, how were you interested in portraying or writing about illness? Were there any ideas you wanted to disrupt or reimagine with the book?
I wrote about Helen’s brother passing from pneumonia or pneumonia-related complications since the earliest version of this draft. That was basically drawn from my own childhood memory of one really cold winter growing up and getting really ill and being in the hospital. I lived, obviously, but even though we don’t go into [her brother] Ryan’s perspective, when I think about my earliest experience of illness like that, it is definitely glimpses of how the illness felt in my body and the sort of strangeness of feeling so unwell and being so small. The glimpses of that are what stayed in my mind in writing sickness.
I sort of love thinking about what is a symptom of something or what is the nature of the thing. How much of Helen is innate to her? If her character were different, if she were on some kind of medication or had a different support system—what would change for Helen, for her voice, for her strangeness? How much weirdness is acceptable and what becomes gross or nauseating? What is the limit? I find it interesting for the body too. For me, what’s most interesting about it is the aspects that are so shared for all of us: the sense that we smell or the feeling of grease and flakes of our skin. It’s such an intimate self-knowing. It’s gross, and I think it’s interesting: what’s the limit of grossing out a reader and having someone stay with a story?
What you’re saying about the cause and symptoms reminds me of the ending when Katrina says that Helen makes horrible decisions. Helen has reached this point of security, and the book poses this really rich question: will security give her an opportunity to change?
I also saw you just sold your next book—congratulations! I’d love to hear what’s exciting to you in fiction, the kinds of things you’re exploring, and what you’re enjoying reading right now.
I’m reading a book called Exposure by Ava Dellaira that’s coming out this summer. It’s a thriller, and it’s queer in some way with very homoerotic friendship, jealousy, and a rotating cast of characters. I’m enjoying it so much. I’m totally in for that ride. I also liked Mood Swings by Frankie Barnet: really weird, really wonderful, science fiction dystopia. A short story collection that I really enjoyed that just came out by Jessie Ren Marshall is Women! In! Peril! It’s also speculative short fiction, amazing. One more is Grown Women by Sarai Johnson. It was so beautiful. It was really impressive, rich writing, and really smart. It’s about a few generations of mothers, and I was all in for it.
My next book is called Sweetener, and it’s out, as of now, August 2025. I think my publisher is embracing it being a dark comedy, like dark slapstick humor. It’s about a woman who is getting a separation as a precursor to divorce. This woman is dating a woman who she thinks wants to be a sugar baby, who is also dating her wife and giving her money that is going toward them maybe fostering a child. It’s a triangle of people deceiving each other. I think the voice will be a little easier than Helen’s for people, but it’s just as weird.
Michael Colbert is a gay writer based in Maine, where he’s at work on a novel. He holds an MFA from UNC Wilmington, and his writing appears in One Story, Esquire, and NYLON, among others. Read more of his work here.
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