A Good Happy Girl – Marissa Higgins

Starting off strong with a scathing review

For the last year I have been reading sapphic novels and rating them on my Instagram.

But THIS book was so bad that I had to make a Substack to rant about it.

It falls into a genre of sapphic literature that I would describe as traumatized white lesbian who acts out her neuroses by neglecting her body and having “edgy” sex.

(also see Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman and Perfume & Pain by Anna Dorn in this category)

My favorite measure of a good book is how often I sit back and think “that was a beautiful sentence.” It doesn’t have to be flowery writing — in fact, I prefer clean editing — but a sentence that packs an emotion larger than the page.

I did not think that once reading this book.

Most often my response was… ew. Here are my favorite examples of that:

“I wanted to flush the vomit away, but could not quite lift either of my arms. Instead, I rubbed my fingers inside and against my crevices: armpits arch of feet top of ass crack behind the ears my nostrils.”

“My dream self slurped vaginal fluid from the pavement no oil no grime no dust only the good stuff…”

“I covered my crotch with my hands. I felt a crusted substance between my thighs and wondered if it were urine or feces and did not have the energy to check.”

“I wanted to ask her what she smelled, and if her nostril hairs ever grew long enough to tug.”

And in followup to that gem…

“I stuck my tongue up and trailed the edge of her nostrils, happy to realize she did not trim her nose hairs with any appearance of regularity.”

The author is relying on vulgarity to grab your attention, but when it’s every other line, it loses its punch.

The sex in this book is very graphic, almost clinically so, and not at all sexy.

“Catherine rubbed the ice cube in the crease between my vulva and my thighs, up and around and across my mound, and tapped it across my clitoral hood. My hood is long and thick even when aroused, so it was not until she turned the cube to a chiseled edge and pressed it between my labia that I really shuddered. After a few minutes, I felt the fingers of her other hand reach around and tug up my hood to reveal my clitoris.”

While it may have been radical to use purely anatomically correct terms ten years ago, these sex scenes feel like a dissection.

The main character has no redeeming qualities, and the surrounding characters — mainly the married couple that she is hooking up with — are so poorly developed that I could not tell them apart.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a problematic protagonist — Fleabag being my favorite example of this — It’s just that it’s done badly. I don’t root for her, I don’t even root against her.

It’s too obvious. Her parents were neglectful, and she wants to be taken care of. She eats like shit, makes herself sick, drinks cough syrup, and then vomits it back up — and I’m sorry, but I think puking is just the laziest way to convey emotion. Everything is spelled out. The character has no intrigue.

While the author believes herself to be pushing the envelope, her fetishization of illness is actually quite regressive. The protagonist spends the majority of the book fantasizing about being incapacitated in the hands of her caretakers.

“I laughed, but was thinking about how to earn their love, how to get poisoned, how to get sick.”

“…slipping a DayQuil from my pocket and placing it on my tongue. I drank it down hot hot hot. Catherine asked if I was contagious and I felt a thrill… I imagined her offering to examine my throat and wondering how much of her face I could fit inside my jaw.”

I think this book prides itself on being bizarre, but it’s really not even strange enough to claim that title. If anything, it is about the gross in the mundane, but it’s trying too hard to be something else to make that work.

The writing feels both pretentious and juvenile. Flashy, graphic, short sentences are not as revolutionary as some of y’all think they are. And when she isn’t relying on shock value, the author seems to be just repeating adjectives.

“I rubbed her hands in mine, as I realized the skin was cold cold cold. I sensed I was again becoming hot hot hot.”

She missed the mark on both ends.

Part of what makes this such a painful read is that I can see what she was trying to do: fixating on little moments to tell the larger story of how trauma informs our relationships. But if you are going to tell a story that way, you need to be able to tap into something human. You need to choose the right moments. You need to tell us just enough and then pull back.

Like her protagonist, this author doesn’t know where to stop.