A couple of years ago, after reading Brian by Jeremy Cooper—a book about a lonely reclusive film buff—I adopted a new adjective for describing a particular treatment of a protagonist by an author: tender. “This book is so tender!” I’d say to people and would register an immediate look of recognition from those who’d read it too: “That’s it—Brian is tender!” “Tender” means there is a perceptible care, a generosity, in presenting a character who, for the most part, is not receiving that level of care and generosity from the people that inhabit their fictional world. Part of the trick of the tender rendition, I theorized, was writing the character free of the irony that so often accompanies the presentation of off-kilter, “weird,” or hyper-imaginative human beings.
This spring sees the publication of Happiness Forever by Adelaide Faith, who is based in Hastings, England. Faith’s protagonist, a veterinary nurse named Sylvie, is struggling with relatable, huge, and insurmountable issues that concern life and living. They are, in no particular order: “how to become the perfect human,” seeing herself “more as a person,” “carrying on,” “the meaning of life,” not being “an awkward person, a wrong person,” the desire to not feel “disgusting,” to feel “natural on the inside,” and to “fit in.” Coming to peace with the ubiquity of these challenges is a tall order, though Sylvie finds some solace in her daily rituals. She is good at her job, takes her brain-damaged dog to the beach, embraces new friendship with a fellow book-lover, contemplates the benefit of seeing the world through a dog’s eyes, and considers Pierrot, the commedia dell’arte clown, as a stand-in for characters in her own life, even herself.
Sylvie, who has a history of abusive relationships, also attends weekly therapy sessions at the home office of a well-put-together therapist. In Sylvie’s mind, the therapist embodies perfection; she is a cocktail of confidence, charm, professional success, and, above all, beauty. Indeed, in each therapy session, looking at the therapist’s face, her hair, the way the sunlight lands on that day’s choice of slacks and blouse, Sylvie sees “enough beauty … to sustain her for the rest of the week.” This beauty, one could say, crosses into the category of sublime, evoking its paradoxical reaction: Sylvie feels both awed and overwhelmed. The disruptive captivation that ensues is yet another problem Sylvie must deal with. What results is a story of an obsession, and the attempt to figure out one’s way through it, filtered through the mind of a highly imaginative woman with a peculiarly charming take on reality—all of which is rendered with gentle humor, warmth, and yes, tenderness.
Adelaide and I spoke over Zoom, from our respective homes, in Hastings and Toronto.
Marta Balcewicz: A big theme in your novel is perspective. Sylvie is often frustrated over having a limited lens, not knowing what other people are really like beyond their neat-looking exteriors. Since so much of contemporary literary fiction is first-person POV, I have to admit I felt a little pang of surprise upon encountering the third person in your book. Was there a process where you were deciding on the POV? Did you consider other options or was it always a third-person narrator in your mind?
Adelaide Faith: The very first version of this story was an essay called “The Pierrot Cure” and it was an uncomfortable mix of first and second person. It was kind of like self-help. When I decided to make a novel and put the story into scenes, I just automatically used third person. I think I wanted to make a novel that I could love in the same way I loved books as a child. I loved The Magic Faraway Tree and The Enchanted Wood more than anything. The books with Moon-Face and Silky.
I have a pile of my favorite books, ones I like to reread, and I assumed they would pretty much all be third person, but I just looked through them and they are all first! Sweet Days of Discipline I was sure that was third! The First Bad Man, Demian, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, How Should a Person Be, Fuccboi, The Weak Spot, Convenience Store Woman, Earthlings, The Discomfort of Evening, all the Mieko Kawakami, like Heaven, Ms Ice Sandwich, and All the Lovers in the Night. The only ones in third person in the whole pile are Pure Colour and King of Joy.
Anyway! Maybe I also used third person so Happiness Forever wouldn’t be called autofiction, for a kind of privacy, because people do assume things are autofiction nowadays and third person feels safer that way (and I couldn’t bear to call a character Adelaide). I feel like it would be uncomfortable for me to try first person for a whole novel, I’d find it really hard to separate myself from the main character. And maybe I wanted to limit the amount you see in Sylvie’s head; I just think it’s too much a lot of the time, to see inside a person’s head. Especially Sylvie’s.
MB: Did you not want readers to know your protagonist in a complete way?
AF: Does it sound like an ungenerous thing, to not write in first person? I’d not considered that before. But you know, it’s close third. I think if I wrote in first person, I’d find it excruciating. I just feel less embarrassed about being human when I write in third person. At one point in the book, Sylvie wants to video herself, because she thinks it would be easier to really believe she is a person if she saw herself on video. Maybe writing in third person is a bit like that for me. It makes thinking about a human easier, you know, a little bit.
MB: At a few points in the novel, Sylvie discusses books, their function and what they mean for her. She sees books as a means of “getting into heads.” The idea also recalls this fairly quoted and really nice line of Proust’s, from volume seven of In Search of Lost Time: “By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon.” In describing reading novels, Sylvie says to her therapist: “I think maybe people in books are more what I expect people to be like,” and the therapist responds, “Well, you are seeing the inside of a person…you get to see their thoughts… It’s probably why a lot of people read—for human connection.” Did you feel you were following through with these functions and aims of novels in writing Happiness Forever?
People are better in books than in real life, mostly because they’re an edited, condensed, distilled version of people.
AF: When you ask that question, I see Sylvie’s predicament in a way I hadn’t seen it before. Maybe the problem is the kind of books she’s reading! Sylvie’s really bad at getting on with people, at work, in her family, in relationships. And everyone disappoints her because they’re not like a character from the books she reads, and she doesn’t know how to relate to people. But she’s reading Herman Hesse and William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, books like that, where the people don’t speak about tons of crap and where everything is symbolic.
People are better in books than in real life, mostly because they’re an edited, condensed, distilled version of people. It’s a really good version of people! You don’t generally include the mistakes or the super boring parts of people. But your question made me think…maybe if Sylvie read more contemporary novels, or more trashy novels, she would be better prepared for contemporary people.
MB: So what book would you loan Sylvie?
AF: [Laughter] Hmm just a really popular book, a door stopper, where there are problems at work, phone calls between the characters and their mothers, wedding scenes, hen parties, sex scenes. [Laughter] I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m not sure if I’m being mean. A book where you feel like you’re watching TV!
MB: I wanted to return to Sylvie’s complaint about books, what she calls the “one way” nature of the exposure and honesty that happens in books, as it’s only the reader who learns about the characters. Sylvie says books are to blame for “making us think we can know another person.” This speaks to her dilemma in the therapy room, where she is desperate for a more intimate relationship with the therapist. She tells her, “It seems crazy that we can never know what it’s like to be another person” and when the therapist answers, “the best we can try is to speak honestly here in the therapy room,” Sylvie points out, “Only one of us can do that.” At one point, Sylvie is reading a book of psychology case studies and hopes that the book will essentially contain a “scene” like the scene she wishes to have with her own therapist. She says that if she found such a scene, she’d give the book to the therapist. Is there a meta quality to these discussions of books in Happiness Forever? Is your novel a wish fulfillment in any way?
AF: I definitely give books to people to give them a message. When I was 15 or so, I gave my mum The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Do you know it? It’s really teenage, it’s kind of corny. There was a poem about children, saying the parents are the bow and the child is the arrow. “You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow.” I gave it to my mum for Mother’s Day and marked that page and when she read it she started crying and I felt so bad, I felt really bad about that for 30 years. And then I saw her recently and I mentioned it and she didn’t remember crying! She was like—no I really appreciated it, and I knew exactly what you meant!
MB: But what about for a writer? When they put their own novel out into the world, when you wrote Happiness Forever, could that fulfill a wish?
AF: Oh! Well, I think the only way my own novel is wish fulfillment is in how it let me order everything, give a girl’s life some order and balance, allow for connections in all parts of her life. Don’t you find that two-thirds of the way through writing something, you start seeing lots of connections? Even in colors and shapes, in dates and days of the week. Everything gets really meaningful, and I really love that part. It feels like magic, it feels like we are meant to be alive. I would like life to be like that.
MB: Wow, so for you it was the process, how the writing happened, that comprised the experience of wish fulfillment. That’s so much more intricate than the content of the book containing a fulfilled wish, a realized dream!
AF: [Laughter] Well, I did have a therapist once that I wanted to make friends with, but I don’t think I would go to the effort of spending years writing a novel to try to get her to be friends with me. This wish fulfillment thing makes me think of a 1storypod episode—Sean Thor Conroe’s podcast. He had Olivia Kan-Sperling on and she was talking about the genius of Sally Rooney, how she’s writing fantasy fulfillment porn for girls that read books because the weird/bookish girl gets the hot boy against all odds. Her books are like catnip for girls who read. But no, I don’t want to do wish fulfilment. I don’t feel that good when wishes are fulfilled, even in books.
MB: In reading a novel so focused on a character’s week-by-week therapy sessions, the query “will they get better?” or “have they been cured?” hovers—this imperative of recovery, however “recovery” or “cured” might be defined. In writing Happiness Forever, did you consider an arc, a trajectory of progress and curing? Or was the arc of “recovery” not at all a concern?
AF: I was on this writing course in Brighton and they were constantly talking about arcs and how the character has to change throughout the book. One teacher said the character has to change even per chapter. It was so exhausting because I feel like people don’t change. I feel like I don’t change. My body’s changing, my body’s doing an arc, but mentally I feel basically the same as when I was 16—more or less—and I like the same things. I wear the same clothes, I eat the same food, I like the same physical things (reading on the beach, swimming), I like the same films, I listen to the same music, my favourite band is still The Cure. I veered off and experimented with loads of crap and now I’m fairly old, and I’m just like, “Oh wow, I’m still enjoying Herman Hesse, I still like William Burroughs and William Faulkner and David Lynch and Harmony Korine.” So I don’t really like the arc thing. I did try to do it, I drew Freytag’s pyramid, because I try to be a good student…but it was just impossible to me.
And the question of there being an arc of recovery, I don’t know about that either. There’s this book by Irvin Yalom called Every Day Gets a Little Closer: A Twice Told Therapy where a girl gets free therapy sessions if she writes about them afterwards. Both she and the therapist write a report after each therapy session. At one point I think she feels “cured”… she’s able to talk to her therapist in a mature way and react in a mature way. But it’s this “therapist’s cure”: she’s only changed with him, because she wants to please him, which you kind of do with your therapist, you want them to like you. But with everyone else, she’s exactly the same. I think that’s a real danger in therapy.
I think for Sylvie, the most important thing that the therapist does for her is make her feel not weird. I think that’s what she needs. She’s felt like a weirdo her whole life—at home, at school, at work—and the therapist lets her experience someone treating her like she’s not weird, even though Sylvie tells her kind of weird thoughts.
I guess though, in this novel, what she goes to therapy to cure ends up not being her main problem. The problem becomes the obsession with the therapist. I suppose a therapist would suggest it is the same problem but…
MB: Is writing for a writer ideally akin to a client talking in a therapy room?
AF: Yes, I think so! Because you have complete freedom in these two places. I like to watch this clip of Sheila Heti talking about writing where she says: “Writing is the only place you can be free.” I went to some of her online classes, they’re brilliant, and she says things like: “You can write what you want! Follow your curiosity! No one’s looking over your shoulder.” It’s the same in therapy, it’s the one place you’re allowed to, or actually supposed to, say what you really want to say without worrying how it will be received. Once on a writing course, one of the exercises was to write something and then burn it or delete it from your computer… that was an exercise to try to help you to write whatever you want without worrying.
MB: How did you feel about adding autobiographical elements in your novel? You gave Sylvie the same job you have; she’s a veterinary nurse.
I wanted to write short chapters you could hold in your head in one go.
AF: Because Sylvie’s so awkward with people it just made sense to have her do my job, which is working with animals. I mean it’s easiest to write about your own job; you know the lexicon, you know the procedures. I really like specific job details in books. Like in Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi where the character is working for Postmates, delivering food, and he does a whole description of how he keeps everything dry and makes sure the drink doesn’t spill, how he gets his bike ready, what he wears, it’s really really specific. I love that. When Shy Watson was on Conroe’s podcast, they were talking about how propulsive it is when the character is at work. The novel she was writing had the character working in McDonalds. I’m really looking forward to that one.
MB: Were there any books you held close to your heart (and your writing desk) while working on Happiness Forever?
AF: I think Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, and also King of Joy by Richard Chiem. Sweet Days of Discipline is about obsession in a boarding school. King of Joy is so beautiful—it’s not my usual scene, I mean because the characters are making porn films, but he is such a beautiful writer. I suppose King of Joy to me feels more like Hermann Hesse or something. There’s not loads of never-ending detail, it’s more sparse and careful, and it’s constantly fascinating, and devastating, with beautiful scenes. It’s quite magical. It’s a very, very sad story, but it’s just so beautiful the way he does it.
MB: Is sparsity of detail particularly important to you, or was it when you composed Happiness Forever?
AF: A lot of stuff I’ve tried to read recently has felt like watching TV, when people just go on and on. In modern life, there’s just so much detail, it’s constant detail, it’s exhausting. And where does all this detail go?! Do you think it stays in your brain? I don’t really want it to stay in my brain. I wanted to write short chapters you could hold in your head in one go. I didn’t want tons of characters and tons of scenes, with so much backstory. I wanted it to be simpler, like living in a small town, not a city. I think when there are loads of scenes and loads of characters, it’s harder to hold it in your head and attach meaning to it. I just don’t think too many details are that important, I guess. I think it’s easier for a book to hold meaning and emotion if you are more careful with the amount of detail you put in.
MB: Speaking of a simpler approach to things (and evoking my earlier mention of Proust), I heard that you like questionnaires. I wanted to ask you what your favorite question is in the Proust questionnaire, and how you’d answer it.
AF: I love questionnaires! There was this one old boyfriend of mine who I hadn’t spoken to for 15 years. And when we got back in touch, it was so overwhelming to speak to him again, so I made him a questionnaire. Then we didn’t have to catch up in endless messages, he could just fill in the questionnaire. There were questions like: “Have any of your friends died?” “What’s the best invention you’ve seen in the last 15 years?” It was all like stuff like that. Questionnaires are a nice, controlled way of doing things [laughter].
In the Proust questionnaire, I like the question: “What do you consider your great achievement?” For me, I think that would be leaving my editing job and instead working at an animal shelter. I’d done an English Literature degree, I was editing in an office, and it was good pay, it was a good job, you got treated well, you got sick pay, etc. But I quit and got this minimum wage job, basically cleaning up dog shit for like eight hours a day. A “kennel hand.” On paper, it was such a stupid thing to do. But I feel like that was my greatest achievement because I was happier. I want to be around things I want to be around—which is dogs, even though they keep shitting—and not a big whirring computer, a photocopier, and a mocha machine.
MB: What about Sylvie, what would her favorite question be?
AF: I think it would be: “Your favorite heroine in fiction?” And she would answer: Frédérique, from Sweet Days of Discipline.
