Getting started in life has its difficulties. In recent years, thanks to crippling student debt and, eventually, the COVID-19 pandemic, young people have found it harder than ever, with record numbers either returning home to live in the family manse after college or never leaving in the first place. Millennials were the first generation of Americans to come of age bankrupt, so it’s not surprising to see this new, depressing reality reflected in fiction. What is surprising is seeing it treated with a light, cheerful touch and a narrator who does not dwell on the all-too-obvious downsides. But that is exactly what Maryland author Eden Appiah–Kubi pulls off in her new novel, Her Own Happiness.
This story zooms in on the relationship between Maya, a 31-year-old queer woman, and her best friend, the younger and asexual Ant. Both are Black, and much is made of Maya being fat—not in a fat-shaming way, but to show that it’s a big part of her consciousness, self-conception, and identity. Both characters are at loose ends, though Maya more so. She has finally finished college with a social work degree and has a job lined up in Honolulu. But a freak accident leaves her with no prospects, so she heads back to her parents’ house in the D.C. area. Ant follows because he can’t imagine life without Maya. He quickly snags a job; Maya does not. She stays in bed for weeks on end, coping with “the octopus”—her word for depression.
However, a scene at an airport portrays Maya as the one who copes, remaining calm and preventing Ant from dissolving into a puddle of terror at the thought of air travel. “You should know that I’m not just an emergency support human—I’m also a witch, specializing in the magic of holding hands,” Maya tells Ant. Thus Maya buoys her friend’s mood, while her own—pre-depression—soars. “Now she was flying first class and she had a surprise cookie? Her birthday was truly starting to look up.”
Maya’s basic cheerfulness saves her until she settles into her childhood bedroom. Then a sense of failure, misery, and uncertainty takes over. “Her Hawaiian dream was over. Now all she had was the rest of her life,” Appiah-Kubi writes.
Maya’s parents are uncommonly understanding. They open their house to her and make no remark when she stays in bed for weeks on end. Their lives have contracted too, largely due to COVID-19. Both are older and living with health conditions, so they are at greater risk from the virus. The pandemic is a major player in Her Own Happiness—the last section is titled “Enter Omicron.” The novel successfully conjures the panic and caution the virus caused at its height. But don’t expect the darkness and death of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. This novel is, instead, relentlessly upbeat.
None of the main characters get sick. Peripheral ones do, but the virus is mainly an omnipresent threat. The characters structure their lives around it. They wear masks, avoid socializing, and when someone’s exposed, that person and everyone they could have infected, moves into a hotel. Though Her Own Happiness omits the anti-vax hallucination and does not portray those afflicted with it, the story remains an artifact of the pandemic, one that depicts life at an extraordinarily dismal historical moment.
This may have something to do with the novel’s light, happy optimism. It suggests that while all this dreadful disease and death is happening, people still struggle to get their lives together, to work, love, and stay cheerful. Just as the book shows that even getting a late start in life—that failing to “launch” with society’s expected quick rigor—need not be a catastrophe. Her Own Happiness tackles these two difficulties head on and shows how people overcome them without losing their enjoyment of life. In fact, as the title suggests with its allusion to Jane Austen’s Emma (it’s actually a direct quote from Emma Woodhouse herself), it is a novel about happiness, and how neither pandemic nor getting a late start in life can defeat love and joy.
Her Own Happiness, by Eden Appiah-Kubi and released by Montlake Romance, is now available.