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Helen, the mononymous narrator of Marissa Higgins’s new novel, A Good Happy Girl, isn’t anything that by-the-book female protagonists are supposed to be. She’s not perky, perfect, adorkable, or straight—and it’s that genuine complexity that makes her one of the most exciting literary characters in recent memory. A lawyer–slash–foot model, Helen struggles in solitude with the outsized weight of a crime committed by her parents, even as she strives desperately for connection (most notably with Catherine and Katrina, a pair of married women she meets online and begins dating). Her want saturates the novel completely, making for an all-consuming read that never lets you forget about its characters’ essential, not-always-palatable humanity.
This week, Vogue spoke to Higgins about the process of crafting a three-person relationship in fiction, the hustle required to get her book into people’s hands, the contemporary writers who inspire her most, and more.
Vogue: First off, how does it feel to see your book out in the world?
Marissa Higgins: Honestly, I never imagined it would happen. I’m not really a visualizer, but seeing pictures of the book now in bookstores in Ohio or Texas…. It still doesn’t even feel real. I’m just so grateful, and I feel like if it all disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn’t even have anything to be unhappy about because I achieved something that I never conceived would happen.
I’m so interested in the concept of a poly or three-person relationship as a narrative device. Can you talk a little about writing the relationship between Helen, Katrina, and Catherine?
Early in the draft, the Catherine and Katrina characters felt like a unit and less like individual characters. One thing my agent helped pull out of me was whether I wanted to lean into that. Or did I want to make them and their relationships more distinct? I ended up trying to build them out a little more, but honestly, and this feels weird to say, I fell so deeply into Helen’s voice from the beginning—the style of her voice and the movement of it. I struggled to see whether it was a lone person Helen was dating or two because I had a hard time imagining Helen as anything other than that: barely hanging on to reality. If it had just been one person she was seeing, it probably wouldn’t have read the same way in terms of what she was seeking in caretaking and a kind of family. Still, I don’t know that they would have gotten any more room on the page than what Helen allows because I imagine Helen telling someone the story of her life really close-up—like, talking really close to you.