I Hope You’re Happy – Marni Appleton

[The Indigo Press; 2025]

Things sure have gotten weird, haven’t they? Younger generations, contextualized by the internet since birth, face the breakdown of their relationships to art. This breakdown reflects the jumbled, murky, often irretrievably frayed relationships they try to form with each other in a time when it’s difficult to identify the purpose of their own human selves in the world allegedly created for them. The concept of microinfluencers alone is an end times indicator. Could someone please explain what’s going on? Make a comprehensive graph of which vapid pursuits are merely laughable and which are deeply sinister? Or, at least, could someone validate this looming feeling of precarity?

Maybe British author Marni Appleton can. Appleton writes about this world by writing about its closest parallel worlds, those only a breath to the side. Imagine just one strand of cosmic DNA was genetically modified; those are the worlds Appleton’s characters inhabit in I Hope You’re Happy, her new short story collection from The Indigo Press. In one story, the online public promotes food freedom by posting photos of women eating in public, but the movement winds up raising more concerns of privacy and safety and leads to the widespread adoption of mouth coverings, the mouth itself rendered vulgar. A couple’s new romantic arrangement with a third woman breaks down when one of them starts seeing massive rats everywhere. An engaged woman hooks up with a man from work only to find he wears a “cock cage” that his girlfriend has the keys to. Most of the stories are set in England, though their attachment to the online realm often makes this setting moot. The characters are desperate for something real, nonmalleable, but are at once afraid of their reality—“a place,” as the engaged woman describes, that feels “like a merry-go-round she couldn’t get off.” A later character, who works in a performance space, emerges into daylight to find not “some pretend street with flimsy walls that shudder when slammed” but rather “the real thing,” “something I cannot tear down, no matter how hard I try.” As scary as the outside world is, the world of performance is murky. This murkiness plagues and agonizes these people. Perhaps scariest is that it seeps into their lives, which become performances—of online personas, shakily constructed relationship dynamics, and friendships founded for social acceptance.

Appleton can stretch suspense through a story, binding her reader to the page, so effectively it should be studied. I read the second story, “Under the Circumstances,” about a friend’s betrayal and subsequent ostracization from a group of students on a class trip to Athens, with a racing heart and even faster glance. The drama is delicious:

Molly told Katy after we boarded the ship, the two of them alone in the toilets. She locked the door and said: Can I tell you something? Katy is a kind person. Of course she said yes. She didn’t know what was going to come next.

Appleton infuses a typical cheating scandal with such intrigue that it feels as urgent to the reader as if they were part of the class trip themself. In some other stories, I got impatient with the suspense being drawn out, but when Appleton does it well, a fire alarm couldn’t have torn me from this book.

While some of the stories in I Hope You’re Happy mainly depict, rather than comment on, their scenarios, the collection can be seen together as a pool of questions about the modern world.

QUESTION: When is social media helpful, and when is it dangerous, horrible, rotten?

In “Shut Your Mouth,” the first story and one of the strongest, a girl disappears after leaving a fried chicken shop. Then a photo of a young woman eating a hot dog goes so viral it is said to have “single-handedly eliminated food-based shame.” This first leads to something seemingly supportive, something that so fleetingly, as these things go, seems capable of changing a spoiled part of society: an online group where people post photos of women eating in public. The comments are “amusing and unproblematic.” The story prods at the reader’s own perhaps buried discomfort with the idea of women eating the food necessary to survive that we are somehow still ashamed to need. The narrator, who has become obsessed with the case of the girl who disappeared, is concerned when her friend/competitor Kirsten proudly reveals that a photo secretly taken of her was shared in the group. The narrator tells her it’s creepy, but this doesn’t stop her from privately scrolling through the forum, seemingly unsure how to feel about it and surprised it hasn’t faced “feminist backlash” yet. This feels almost funny, but to laugh would mean acknowledging the equally ridiculous concerns of your own reality.

Shortly afterward, the potential for liberation gives way to increased danger: the comments turn negative, and a group of women whose photographs eating in a private room at a restaurant take the restaurant to court after the photos are shared in the group. Kirsten, soon followed by the narrator, starts wearing mouth-coverings called voiles. The story expertly shows the way a well-intentioned online movement can, in often unintelligible ways, become twisted instead back into further subjugation.

In other stories, social media poses a more subtle, sedating threat. In “Positive Vibes,” art student Lia struggles to create a work that will impress her professor and finds solace—or perhaps a soothing apathy—in a positivity influencer her coffee shop coworker Cora shows her. Their relationship is strained when Cora takes Lia’s idea for an albeit surface-level, “feminist” art project and starts posting it on her own Instagram, gaining a following despite telling Lia she could “come up with something better.” Unable to find an artistic pursuit that feels distinctly meaningful nor to get Cora to admit to stealing her idea, Lia shifts from misunderstood (or maybe just uninspired?) artist to pacified viewer. The reader wonders if it’s valid to find peace in what feels like performative, neon-spandex-covered life advice—in what feels fake. Appleton won’t give us a conclusion, just invites us to consider the problem at hand.

QUESTION: What kinds of value can and should we place on friendship?

We often conflate what is morally right with what is socially acceptable (or, at any rate, accepted by the people we would like to accept us). “Under the Circumstances” is written in first person plural, making it impossible for any narrator to break through into individual agency. We, together, cropped Molly the betrayer out of the group photo. We stopped talking to her. We nodded in agreement when Sophie the betrayed justifies firing all of her anger at Molly and not Sophie’s boyfriend, the one Molly slept with on the class trip. Being in agreement with the majority here feels like doing the “right thing” to this “we,” but when Molly starts saying she was taken advantage of while drunk, we don’t hesitate to dismiss her excuses, and suddenly their morality feels more like jumping on a bandwagon out of fear of their own treatment of a former friend. It’s not unlike the way social issues are treated in online discourse today. In the title story, the narrator is distraught after speaking her mind to her admittedly shitty best friend who responded to her honest criticism by cutting her off entirely. She agonizes over whether to send a text apologizing or send a cookie with “I hope you’re happy” written in icing, stalks her friend’s Instagram and mourns the glamorous life the friend appears to live, even after her boyfriend reminds her the friend is surely posting so often to elicit that very remorse. Reading the story took me straight back to my high school bedroom floor, where I spent hours breathlessly parsing my friends’ Instagram spam posts, trying to determine who was pining after whom and whether anyone secretly hated me. The story is a resonant depiction of platonic heartbreak. This woman misses a person who understood her in particular, irreplaceable ways yet mistreated her, took her for granted. This heartbreak is made infinitely more difficult in the age of the internet, when cutting someone completely from your life, resisting the temptation to see who is “winning” the fallout, is near impossible.

QUESTION: When does filling a role provide meaning and comfort, and when is it a trap?

Maybe the collection’s weakest story is “Chastity,” the one with the engaged waitress, Harri, and her hookup with the cock cage. Appleton sets out to explore different sexual dynamics: Jakob, the one with the cage, is in a happy, open relationship and explains that the cage is part of what makes his sexual relationship with his girlfriend work: “Sometimes I’m submissive, sometimes she’s submissive. But when it’s my turn to be submissive, I like Lola to deny me. It’s hard to explain, but it’s phenomenal. It works for us, anyway.” Regardless of the reader’s own experiences, Harri is offered as our stand-in as she learns about the possibility of a relationship dynamic unlike her own conventional one, which has begun to bore and confine her. She lacks much real agency, which is aggravating for the reader meant to see her as a mirror, as is her ultimate failure to change any part of her own life. She briefly considers leaving her boyfriend but ends up staying with him, choosing some illusion of safety or familiarity in a last-page decision that feels as unexpected to her as it is unsatisfying.

A more interesting exploration of the arbitrary roles we fall into comes in “Cowboy/Superhero/Spaceman/Monster,” a story intriguing merely from its setting in a mysterious event venue that puts on an “immersive,” “site-specific theatre dance experience.” The protagonist works on the stage management team. The characters she interacts with are labeled with their roles. The Friend, the Boyfriend, the Boss, Some Guy Who Seems to Be Friends with Danny. The setting suggests how arbitrary our roles in the “real world” are. Her relationship to her boyfriend is as much a performance, it seems, as her masked performance for a work event. When the Boyfriend breaks her phone, she hid her anger and “made sure I looked sorry.” Their relationship is also nearly as predictable as a scripted performance, despite being technically more “authentic.” When he is angry at her for staying out later than planned, she already knows that he will be waiting for her when she gets home. As reality and performance mesh, the protagonist finds herself in a dissociative state: “I feel like I am outside my body, watching someone else go through the motions.”   

QUESTION: What is our relationship to art supposed to be. How should it make us feel? Should it comfort or ignite us?

Art comes up in other stories, as well, including “Cowboy” and “Positive Vibes” — where the pursuit of meaningful artistic creation means less to anyone involved than surface level positivity posts that any so-called intellectual would likely roll their eyes at. The story that primarily addresses this question, however, is the final story, “Intimacy,” which takes up nearly fifty pages. The story revolves around a titular play, but calling it a play is misleading; it is its own, mysterious and ethically questionable type of performance piece. The main character, a struggling actress, works the bar at a theater where the play is to be performed when her agent surprises her with an audition for that very show. Her excitement over what could be a big break is dampened by both a peculiar audition process—she ends up singing “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” by Kylie Minogue and dancing like she’s at a club —and the revelation that nearly every one of her coworkers has also gotten an audition. The casting process only becomes more dubious from there. In the quest for something “genuine,” the show relies on an actor’s unpreparedness, their fear, their “vulnerability.”

If this this show were real, I would be adamantly against its existence. At the same time, I’d do anything to see it performed. This story most explicitly questions the role of the audience, and once it does so, this question arises in the previous stories as well. Today, there is always an audience, be that an online group, your professor, or blog followers. As an audience has become more accessible, it has also, perhaps misguidedly, become more widely desired. We are constantly the audience of something, of each other and our little performances, while also trying to curate our own selves for whatever audience we think we are catering to. The role of the audience is perhaps the most important for us to understand today, and “Intimacy” gives us an audience much too close for comfort, watching a completely unprepared, uncurated person who finds herself in front of them too soon, desperate to leave but trapped before them, unscripted responses unspooling on a stage in front of them. Raw emotion, an authentic emotional response, is so rare that it’s become a coveted artistic work. And I can’t say I wouldn’t want to be in the audience. Like Appleton’s characters, I crave the promise of something real.

Erin Evans is a writer from Michigan, now living in New York. She studied Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she also worked as an arts writer and editor for The Michigan Daily. Her essays and criticism have appeared there and in Vestoj.