Ask ANOTHER Author: Marissa Higgins
Interview with the debut author of A Good Happy Girl
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Some years ago, I “met” author Marissa Higgins online—I don’t even remember exactly when or how. Maybe in a Facebook group for authors on submission that we were both part of??? Anyway, time passed, as it tends to do, and Marissa SOLD HER DEBUT NOVEL, and then some more time passed, and SHE SOLD ANOTHER NOVEL, and now that first novel just released on Tuesday and is a REAL, LIVE BOOK YOU (yes, you!) can go out and devour!!!!!!!!!
I’m so happy for Marissa and found it really inspiring to see her success. It occurred to me that it would be great to hear from *other* authors on this Substsack sometime, and that I’d love to know more about Marissa’s writing and publishing experience and so maybe you would, too? I’m so thankful that Marissa said yes to being here, and was so generous with her time in sharing about herself and her process!
My vision is to make this a semi-regular feature, so let me know if you’d be into that and if there are questions you’d love to have an author answer in the future.
A GOOD HAPPY GIRL just released on Tuesday, April 2 2024, from Catapult:
A poignant, surprising, and immersive read about a young professional woman pursuing an emotionally intense relationship with a married lesbian couple, for readers of Kristen Arnett and Melissa Broder
Helen, a jittery attorney with a self-destructive streak, is secretly reeling from a disturbing crime of neglect that her parents recently committed. Historically happy to compartmentalize—distracting herself by hooking up with lesbian couples, doting on her grandmother, and flirting with a young administrative assistant—Helen finally meets her match with Catherine and Katrina, a married couple who startle and intrigue her with their ever-increasing sexual and emotional intensity.
Perceptive and attentive, Catherine and Katrina prod at Helen’s life, revealing a childhood tragedy she’s been repressing. When her father begs her yet again for help getting parole, she realizes that she has a bargaining chip to get answers to her past.
A Good Happy Girl is interested in worlds without men—and women who will do what they can to get what they want. In her exploration of twisted desires, queer domesticity, and the effects of incarceration on the family, Marissa Higgins offers empathy to characters who often don’t receive it, with unsettling results.
Get your copy:
Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Amazon, Goodreads, and The StoryGraph
Marissa Higgins (she/her) is a lesbian writer. A GOOD HAPPY GIRL is her first novel.
Congratulations on the release of A GOOD HAPPY GIRL! We’ve been connected online since…maybe before your book sold? Or around the time the deal was announced? It’s been a while, and so gratifying and exciting to see you get to this place. A lot of the readers here are working on first novels, and/or querying or starting to query. Can you talk a little about how you connected with your agent? Was A GOOD HAPPY GIRL the book you queried your agent with? How did you know you were ready to start querying, and how did you know when you’d found “the one”? Any advice for folks out there in the querying trenches, or just starting off on this journey?
I connected with my agent over Twitter when I participated in PitMad;1 I tweeted a brief pitch of the novel and emailed her my materials when she expressed interest. It was technically the same book, though my working title then was actually THE WIVES. We went through many edits on the book, even before we formally began working together. My agent asks a lot of questions and it’s really helpful in making my books remotely make sense. I honestly went into querying fairly quickly—I wrote the book in about a month, did a few rounds of edits myself, and then began querying. This is probably part of why I did so much editing after!! I used Manuscript Wishlist and Twitter to find agents, and I read a lot of acknowledgements in books too. My biggest advice is probably not to overthink it; if you feel a pull toward an agent based on other books they've sold, just go for it!
My writing process is similar: drafting really quickly, and then a muuuch slower process of layering in edits upon edits to make it all (hopefully) come together. All that work has clearly paid off, though! You have some amazing early reviews, including a highly coveted starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. PW calls A GOOD HAPPY GIRL “a striking and visceral debut” and Kirkus calls it “a provocative read.” You describe kink, abuse, masochism, a cough-syrup addiction—this isn’t a novel that pulls its punches.
I never like being asked “where do you get your ideas?” because to me, ideas are a dime a dozen—it’s doing something with them that’s the hard part. Nevertheless, I’m curious about how this story initially took shape for you (which is maybe just a fancy way of asking where the idea came from). Did you go into writing it knowing where it was going to turn up, or were there surprises along the way? How much did you outline and plan, and how much does the novel as it exists now resemble that initial novel-shaped thing you had in mind when you began?
I always surprise myself a lot when writing TBH! This book did start and end in the same place where I began writing it; we always opened with Helen running late to meet the wives, and we always ended with Helen seeing the bright light from the window. I relied heavily on Helen’s narrative voice to pull me through, and I honestly mostly move based on rhythm and the music on the sentence level, then the harmony of paragraphs. I knew I was writing something weird and that it wouldn’t sit right with all readers, including the people in publishing who make the decisions! I think right before I went on submission the first time, my agent warned me that romcoms were doing better and people were pretty burned out on dark stories. Internally I was like, Well. Who can blame them, and also, here’s Helen.
All the outlining I did was retrospective, trying to make sense of structure after I’d already gotten a bunch on the page. I honestly can’t remember how many revisions I did of this one before it even got to my editor, and from there, I’ve revised again and again as well. A lot of the middle is what got worked around, and really finding a balance between Helen’s family and the wives, making sure each bit was doing something for her character and the plot, working on both the internal and external for tension. I think my earlier drafts were pretty similar to the final book in terms of voice and mood but quieter on plot, and it’s a pretty character driven story anyway, so I can definitely see why I needed to up the stakes eventually lol.
I love hearing about this process, and how much reimagining you did to make sure every piece of the story was driving the narrative forward. I frequently write on here about revision and giving a manuscript the time it truly needs to cook. I recently submitted a final-ish draft of my forthcoming novel to my publisher, and I say “ish” because I’m sure there will still be even more changes along the way. I think it can be hard when a manuscript feels “done” to imagine continuing to work on it, or even finding things that still need attention. But it turns out it can take a lot more to get a manuscript from good to great, or from almost-there to actually finished. You’ve already touched on this a bit, but what was it like working with your agent, and then with your editor at Catapult? What sort of editing did you do to the manuscript, and were there any significant changes that you made—whether they were things you maybe saw coming, or that came as a surprise?
My agent is really editorial, so I’ve done tons of edits before going on submission. My agent is really my only reader at this point and I rely on her feedback pretty heavily; she asks a lot of questions, and thinks deeply about my work, and I really can’t thank her enough for that labor. She was also the one who initially encouraged me to write sex into the book: I’d been pretty worried about querying agents with explicit sex scenes, just feeling like a creep and not wanting to offend anyone, but she pulled some out of me and they made it to print lol.
That said, I've also done many edits with my editor at Catapult! A GOOD HAPPY GIRL was actually accepted as a revise & resubmit for Catapult; my editor, Alicia, was part of our first round of submissions and they returned with a revise & resubmit that I spent about a month on before my agent sent it back. We had a phone call and then they offered from there.
One of the biggest changes for A GOOD HAPPY GIRL is we cut a chapter that had been in the MS for a while; Helen had a chapter where she meets up with her mom IRL and my editor suggested cutting it because it just didn't do much but offer a sense of closure, and the book is more honest without it. We also cut a side plot that had to do with Emma's boyfriend!
In terms of practical revision, I've found reading out loud really helps. I also try to read with different fonts and on different mediums, computer screen versus Kindle versus printing the whole thing, though I do hate wasting all that paper. I also use the pomodoro method, trying to get as much done within 25 minutes. I find it most helpful to stay in the world of the book as long as I can, so practically speaking I just end up writing books as fast as I can, so then I have something to edit.
And now you’ve managed not just one book, but two! SWEETENER is coming out, again from Catapult, in Spring 2025—congrats!! This one is about two recently separated wives, both named Rebecca, who unknowingly start dating the same woman. (As an aside, I have a short story coming out in No Tokens this spring about a breakup between two women both named Jenny, so clearly this is A Thing in queer lady fiction and I feel very hip!) We’re so often told to start the next project while waiting on the first one (waiting to hear from an agent or editor, waiting on early reviews, waiting on sales numbers, etc.). How did you wrap your head around starting a new book, and how you did you juggle writing SWEETENER while getting A GOOD HAPPY GIRL out into the world? Plus your day job and whatever other life responsibilities you have (because we’re all full people, not just writing machines). Did having one book under your belt help with the second, or did SWEETENER bring a new set of challenges to tackle?
I was working on SWEETENER when I was on submission for A GOOD HAPPY GIRL! When rejections from editors started coming in on my first round of submission, I was already well into SWEETENER and had made peace with it probably not selling; Helen’s voice is weird, the plot is weird, and I have no connections or clout to speak of so I went in with low expectations about my ability to break through.
I got an offer on SWEETENER last fall, about a month after I submitted the full MS to my current editor at Catapult. I was really surprised because it’s also a weird book and I don’t really have a sales record to speak of, but I’m super grateful. A GOOD HAPPY GIRL has felt like a long (but probably standard!) lead time, but things with SWEETENER are happening a lot faster; I’ve already sent in ideas for the cover and the book hasn't finished developmental edits, which feels so weird!
SWEETENER comes out a few weeks after the paperback of A GOOD HAPPY GIRL, so it’s super surreal to imagine not one but two books with my name on them. One issue I’ve come up against is that I did start getting reviews (including Not Good ones!) for A GOOD HAPPY GIRL while still editing SWEETENER, and it shook my confidence some—I felt a lot of dread at possibly working so hard on something else that just didn’t deliver for readers. That said, I’m glad I already have a new book underway because I can imagine the low rankings leading to some serious writer’s block otherwise tbh.
In terms of the actual book, I knew I wanted to write something different from A GOOD HAPPY GIRL. It feels funny because in many ways, I am writing something so similar: short, moody adult literary fiction with a lesbian protagonist. For me Helen’s story is her voice, like she’s telling the reader her story and the result isn’t an authorial choice but hers. For SWEETENER, I went for two POVs that rotate back and forth. One is the first person present and one is third person limited; initially it was all one point of view (first person present) and after edits from my agent, I started to hear the other POV as the answer to her questions, and thankfully it worked out okay! I felt a lot of loyalty to Helen’s voice and narration and never strayed far from it, but with SWEETENER, I feel like I need to keep cracking the book open and surprising myself with it. I think that helps me with the humor writing a bit, keeping the editing process sort of playful. That said, I have more edits to go, so we’ll see how different it looks between this running and the book coming out lol.
You can buy A GOOD HAPPY GIRL at these links:
Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Amazon, Goodreads, and The StoryGraph
And don’t forget that you can request books from your local library! Writing a review is also a free way to support writers and help spread the word about their work.
I’ll be back in two weeks answering more questions, so get in touch with anything you want to ask about craft or publishing, and keep going on your own work!
Kate
A pitch event that, sadly, no longer exists, thank you X for ruining everything.