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Published during the illustrious Year of the Bisexual, Ursula Villarreal-Moura’s thoughtful debut novel Like Happiness popped up on Best of 2024 reading lists wherever you turned, from NPR and the San Francisco Chronicle to ELLE and Them. The two timelines in this novel trace a young woman’s complicated and troubling relationship with an older male writer she admires, as well as her reaction years later when the writer is accused of sexual misconduct.
With the paperback release of Like Happiness this year, the literary novel is now reaching a new audience. Through Tatum, the bisexual Chicana protagonist, readers enter the cerebral world created by Villarreal-Moura. Tatum evolves from a lonely college student at a majority white school in the Northeast, who is enraptured by M. Domínguez’s novel, into a more confident and fulfilled woman living on her own terms and working abroad in Chile.
Villarreal-Moura’s deft writing and characterization of Tatum gives readers an exceptional portrayal of how literature shapes our identities, how we see and interpret the world, and how we connect with other people.
Liz DeGregorio: At the start of the novel, Tatum says, “I never fell out of love with reading, or more specifically, with other people’s imaginations.” Do you see Like Happiness as being a love letter to literature?
Ursula Villarreal-Moura: Absolutely. The most enduring relationship in Like Happiness is Tatum’s tie to books and reading. She has few acquaintanceships in college and a longstanding situationship with M. Domínguez, but she feels most secure inside of books. It’s her only true relationship. It started when she was a child, and it has carried over into her young adulthood and into womanhood. At least in New York, books are her biggest life preserver. In Chile, it’s Vera.
I love that Books About Books is a genre, too. Not surprisingly, I love so many novels and works of nonfiction that fit into this category. My most recent favorite is Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya. Anyhow, this is all to say that I hope readers delight in all the book allusions, the Easter eggs, I’ve buried in the novel.
LD: Your novel tenderly explores Tatum’s big city coming-of-age story. Is this a genre that has stood out to you in the past?
UVM: I’ve thought about my answer for a bit now. Initially, I was going to say that yes, I love this genre of story, but the truth might be that society is obsessed with youth. As such, the coming-of-age novel is thrust upon us as one of the most compelling types of stories. Who doesn’t like witnessing a young person make sense of their one wild and precious life? I do, for sure. Like Happiness makes the most sense as a coming-of-age story, particularly because I wanted to show Tatum’s growth. Behavior she accepts from others in her twenties becomes unacceptable in her thirties, so I needed a young protagonist to show that development. I think if the novel succeeds, it’s because we get a bit of a juxtaposition in her character as she matures.
I wanted to show Tatum’s growth. Behavior she accepts from others in her twenties becomes unacceptable in her thirties.
That said, if I step back and look at the larger societal picture, I am certainly guilty of placing youth on a pedestal, too. I’ve bought what society has sold me. My next books aren’t going to be centered on young protagonists. I might publish some shorter pieces about youth, but I’ve definitely become fascinated with narratives about older characters. Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead changed my life when I read it in 2021. I’m aiming to write older woman characters with as much verve and tenacity as Tokarczuk does.
LD: Tatum’s realization that she’s bisexual in Like Happiness felt very natural, especially since it’s normalized as being an important part of her life, but not her defining characteristic. How do you feel about the changing representation of bisexuality in not just literature but pop culture as well?
UVM: Oh, I love it. I was born in the final years of the Gen X era, so I had no language for what I was experiencing as a queer teenager. The only terms that were being used in the early ‘90s that I was familiar with in Texas were androgynous and gay. I knew, like you mention in your excellent essay at Electric Literature, that something about Fried Green Tomatoes spoke to me very deeply as a youth. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, queerness was coded, but now it’s commonplace.
Personally, I feel honored to contribute to the history of bi narratives. I love that bi erasure and biphobia are being examined more in literature and pop culture. Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed is one of my favorite bi novels, and I adore the YA series Heartstopper, which explores just about every letter in the LGBTQIA acronym.
Wasn’t 2024 hailed The Year of the Bisexual? [Editor’s Note: Yes, it was!] I feel like I read that online in the fall. Certainly, when word got out that Luigi Mangione was rumored to be bi, his star grew even brighter, and I was definitely loving it.
LD: Upon rereading Like Happiness, I noticed how skillfully subtle foreshadowing was layered into the story. Was M. Domínguez’s specific betrayal something you always had in mind? Or did it come to you later in the writing process?
UVM: The turning point, the betrayal, came to me later in the writing process. In fact, it came to me years into the writing. I kept wondering how this dynamic would end, what would be the final straw. For years, Tatum has no red line with M. Domínguez, so I had to live deeply in their world to figure it out.
I knew the turning point had to be organic, believable for the characters as well as for the reader. When it came to me, it felt inevitable, like, “Oh yes, of course.”
LD: At a certain point, a male journalist who is reporting on M. Domínguez’s patterns of abuse makes a condescending comment to Tatum. Why did you put this moment in the story?
UVM: I think about that choice a lot. I don’t want to divulge too much about that dynamic, but I wanted the reader to trust [the journalist] Jamal, or want to trust Jamal, because Tatum needs him to be a good guy.
In a way, Tatum talking with Jamal turns out to be thorny. They’re not friends, but they are in an exchange that has the potential to change both their lives. Tatum initially believes she has the opportunity to tell her side of the story by collaborating with this journalist, but reality is a lot more complicated. Jamal can’t be the ventriloquist and Tatum his dummy. It won’t work.
LD: Did you always plan on having Tatum relocate to Chile? Similarly, did you decide to have her live in Chile before or after deciding on the Alejandro Zambra quote that opens Like Happiness?
UVM: Oh, the Zambra epigraph [“Why would you want to be with someone if they didn’t change your life?… Life only made sense if you found someone who would change it, who would destroy your life as you knew it.”] came late in the progress. I think it was during second-pass pages right before it went to print. The epigraph encapsulates the explosive nature of Tatum and M. Domínguez’s relationship quite well.
The decision for Tatum to live in Chile came early in the drafting. We’re all familiar with the notion that a geographical change can’t solve a person’s problems. I wanted to interrogate that idea, or at least turn it, if not upside down, on its side. For Tatum, living in Chile is an improvement, and she’s forced to spread her wings there in a way she was never forced to in New York. She must figure out who she is, not in relationship to others, but as her own island with wants and needs.
LD: I loved the moments where you drop in Tatum’s cultural interests – she listens to Cat Power on repeat during a breakup, she longs to see a Marina Abramović performance, she has Jean-Michel Basquiat prints hanging in her college dorm. How did you decide what kind of art she would gravitate to?
UVM: It was my aim to show how her taste, at the beginning of the novel, is still fairly dominated by white culture. She’s trying to wade through Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence for her degree, but then she even gives herself these types of assignments outside of class. Yes, she admires Basquiat and reads Sandra Cisneros, but until she falls in love with M. Domínguez’s novel Happiness, it’s as if she doesn’t understand those works can take center stage. They don’t have to be minor satellites.
It was my aim to show how her taste, at the beginning of the novel, is still fairly dominated by white culture.
While she does listen to a bit of music in Spanish, her life in New York could be read as an attempt to find a home in a somewhat white heteronormative life. But despite her best efforts, it just doesn’t pan out. All the things she tries to make fit will never be her keys to success: a relationship with a (famous) man, speaking English, even working an assistant teacher is an approximate fit for her. Her destiny is queerer, browner, and thankfully freer.
LD: Did you ever contemplate an ending where there was another interaction between Tatum and M. Domínguez?
UVM: This is a funny question because the final version has one additional last interaction between Tatum and M. Domínguez. Originally the scene at the school didn’t exist, but my agent suggested I write beyond what I thought was the ending. The classroom chapter is actually my favorite part of the entire book now.
I’d argue the book doesn’t need more scenes between Tatum and M. Domínguez. I know some readers wanted M. Domínguez’s side of the story, which *woman face-palming emoji* goes to show how ingrained misogyny is if a woman’s account isn’t enough and needs to be validated by a man’s account.
LD: For much of the novel, M. Domínguez’s book Happiness is Tatum’s literary touchstone – or “lifeline,” as she tells him. Was there a book (or books) that you felt similarly about?
UVM: I most definitely had a literary roster of touchstone books as a young person. Like Tatum, as a child, I was obsessed with Say Goodnight, Gracie by Julie Reece Deaver. In my twenties, I reread Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey every October; it’s how I welcomed autumn.
Since then, my rereads of Muriel Spark’s novella The Driver’s Seat and of Roberto Bolaño’s story collection Last Evenings on Earth have taken over. The short story “Gómez Palacio” is out-of-this-world brilliant. If I were on a desert island, I honestly think I could reread those two books for the rest of my life and feel satisfied.
My goal this year is to reread Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong. Although I’ve only read it once, I think about it all the time. I sense it’s going to join my literary pantheon.
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