Happy Like This

by Ashley Wurzbacher

The characters in Happy Like This are smart girls and professional women—social scientists, linguists, speech therapists, plant physiologists, dancers—who search for happiness in roles and relationships that are often unscripted or unconventional. In the midst of their ambivalence about marriage, monogamy, and motherhood and their struggles to accept and love their bodies, they look to other women for solidarity, stability, and validation. Sometimes they find it; sometimes they don’t.

Spanning a wide range of distinct perspectives, voices, styles, and settings, the ten shimmering stories in Happy Like This offer deeply felt, often humorous meditations on the complexity of choice and the ambiguity of happiness.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Book Club

218 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2019

About the author

Ashley Wurzbacher is the author of the novel HOW TO CARE FOR A HUMAN GIRL and the short story collection HAPPY LIKE THIS, which won the 2019 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a New York Times Editors' Choice. Born and raised in Western Pennsylvania, she currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Learn more at ashleywurzbacher.com.

Reviews

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 5 out of 5]

via my blog: https://bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com/
'The rest of her life: looming, open-mouthed. She was heading straight for it on autopilot but couldn’t recall having chosen or engineered it.'

This is an incredibly engaging debut collection of stories, which I devoured! My only complaint is it ended too soon, I wanted more. The writing is beautiful, it brings light to dark thoughts, it speaks of the intelligent minds of women and their choices. The happy pink cover betrays the depth of the female characters within perfectly, just like the world does. I do love the cover though, it’s simplicity, it reminds me of doodles in a journal. There is a line in the very first story, Like That Sickness and Health, that shocked my insides, there are mothers like this (some can’t help themselves really and others are a whole other nightmare) “…her mother, for some reason, making problems in the few places in her life where there weren’t problems already-“, I know there are women out there who feel that like a boulder in their stomach. Mothers can make things so much harder sometimes. Sickness as a study, what afflicts one afflicts in some ways all. Ashley Wurzbacher absolutely pins the female psyche in place for perfect study from the start. This has become one of my favorite short stories collection, and I can’t wait to see what this author rustles up in the future. There is something rich about pain for women, these college girls in particular, how they use it or ignore it and soldier on- this is one of the best short stories I ever read. Pain as expression, a language for what we can’t or won’t say. As Mia works on her dissertation, “A Qualitative Study of the Effects of Factitious Disorders on the Social Lives of College-Attending Females”, she learns more about herself in the midst of these needy, suffering girls and their ‘exaggerated symptoms’.

What does happiness look like? Ambition? Love? Women make choices, sometimes just to feel moments, not to erase what already is. Not everything has to build and intensify, though often they do grow out of our control, these desires. In Happy Like That, Elaine tries to understand her dead friend’s secret affair. How she misses Lillian’s raw honesty, her ‘ease’ that Elaine longed to ‘soak up’. A friendship of opposites, the sort that pulls at you to judge the world less harshly.

I was absolutely charmed by Like This American Moon, “the foreign girl is coming”, it smacks of expectations and the ridiculous assumptions so many make about foreigners, more so when you’re stagnant and haven’t seen anything of the world. Take heart! Those of us who have been abroad and visited by family from other countries know full well over there, wherever there may be, hilarity over how they imagine Americans are can ensue too. Americans aren’t the only ones making outlandish assumptions, though we do make an art form of it. How does author Ashley Wurzbacher manage to tickle me with her characters humor and at the same time knock me senseless with sorrow? Some people never go anywhere, not because they are lost in a swamp of ignorance but because they are forced into a limited existence, so often born into it. You can love a way of life, even while you are dying inside. I think twelve year old Jean has a lot figured out before her time, and largely due to the disappointment adults dish out to her, I warmed to her fast.

I can’t crow loudly enough to do this collection justice, it’s not just for the women, though it is about them. Is it the world breaking us, or are we the ones doing the breaking of our own spirit? It depends on circumstance. To be young again and desperate to understand just who you are now, who you are going to be, to feel the rush of first moments like love as if it’s bound to cleave you in two, how do we figure out anything? When do we? How do we get to a point where we fizzle out, or lack ambition? When do we get scared of all the dangerous things that can happen, like Robin in The Problem With You Is That? Why must women so often be the villain, forced into taking a stance to keep others safe? This isn’t a collection about what women are supposed to be, marching together in perfect harmony cocksure about life and their place in it, oh no- these are women who haven’t figured things out, or young girls hungry for identity or sick with expectations and wanting to curl up in the comfort of illness. Women who are just trying to keep people safe, or life together, or figure out what direction the wind is going to blow them next time. Age isn’t the identifier of wisdom, a young girl can be shrewd in the assessment of where she stands socially in the world. She can understand her damaged father more than her mother, who long ago left. Women are wise creatures, but we are a bit faulty sometimes and maybe it’s because the world demands so much of us. Hell yes, read this collection! I have a new favorite author!

Publication Date: October 15, 2019

University of Iowa Press

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 4 out of 5]

I admired this collection very much, particularly its attention to subjects that I don't often see treated with deft nuance as often as I'd like: polyamory ("Happy Like That"), bisexuality ("Fake Mermaid"), and abortion ("Burden"), among other things. Wurzbacher's characters are complex, flawed, interesting. They love big and weirdly. They feel familiar, but not in expected or overdone ways. Plus the collection starts with epigraphs from Carole Maso and Virginia Woolf; so yeah. Read it. It's wonderful stuff.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would like to thank University of Iowa Press and NetGalley for providing me with an e-copy of Ashley Wurzbacher’s Happy Like This, and National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson for bringing it to my attention by choosing Wurzbacher as a National Book Award 5 Under 35 honoree.

Happy Like This is a rare short story collections in which each story — and there are ten if I count correctly — is so engrossing, so well written that upon finishing one I immediately moved on to the next.

Wurzbacher’s stories typically deal with young women — in their teens, 20s, maybe early 30s — living in small cities or towns. The women navigate their relations with partners, sisters, and friends. Their relationships feel deeply unsatisfying.

Most Happy Like This women work, but their work seems vaguely disappointing. Some are accomplished — a doctoral students, a professor, a soloist ballerina — yet still drifting through their lives, while others just drift.

Even the best collections usually contain a mix of excellent, very good, and not-quite-so-good stories. Wurzbacher’s collection is remarkably consistent throughout. I have my favorites — “Like that sickness and health” (don’t bother to investigate the citations) about a doctoral student collecting small sample data on “factitious disorders” in the appropriately nicknamed “waif wing” of a college dormitory, “Fake mermaid” about a woman navigating her sexuality and her relationship, “Happy like that” about the death of a dear friend, “Burden” about a professional dancer struggling in the aftermath of an abortion, and the title story — but even my least favorites and “Like this American moon” and “Ripped” — are compelling. I search to find flaws in Happy Like This, and perhaps my single disappointment is the similarity of the flat emotional tone in some stories, although that same flat emotional tone somehow increases the impact of those stories too.

4.5 stars

[Payton · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75~ rounded up

[Aditi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where do I begin? I absolutely loved this book. Each short story is a snapshot of life from a woman in a different stage of life, and dealing with a completely different set of challenges. Ashley Wurzbacher somehow makes each woman and her story entirely separate yet convincing. I was left wanting more of each story, in a good way. She writes her characters as human, with flaws and indecision and a great deal of introspection. Many of the stories sat long with me after I finished reading them, and contain relatability in one form or another. Her prose is artfully written, and I can’t wait to see what more she has to offer! She manages to capture the very human nature of questioning what happiness looks like and means in very different contexts. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who loves female-centered stories and literary fiction.

Thank you to University Of Iowa Press, NetGalley and Ashley Wurzbacher for a copy of this book.

[Rebecca Pope · Rating 5 out of 5]

I purchased this book from Women and Children First in Chicago based on the cover and the fact that it was published in Iowa City.

What a serendipitous purchase. I read it all day and already have two more purchases planned to gift this book to women in my life. Highly recommend for thoughtful and sincere prose that provokes nostalgia, regret, empathy and understanding.

[Genevieve Trono · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the premise of this book but I really struggled to connect and engage. I think with short stories, the first one really had to get me hooked and I just couldn't relate. I think sharing our stories is super powerful and so important but I really had a hard time with this book. I see that many people just loved it so I could be an outlier with this one. I think the writing style just didn't; work for me and took away from the important topics that were being addressed.

[Sal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Happy Like This is a rare story collection. From the title and the division of the stories into the “Like this” and “Like that” subsections, the central focus of the book as being fundamentally about happiness is readily apparent. “Like this” analyzes happiness from within—the internal signals we have to recognize happiness, the things we want and pursue which make us happy, the organization of our lives around the things we identify as making us happy. “Like that” instead looks at happiness from without—in using the apparent happiness of other people as referents, questions of what things make them happy and how we compare to them, thinking that other people seem to have things figured out where we’re missing some crucial information that would solve our problems and make us really and truly happy. And while this theme and questions surrounding it are the focus of the book at large, the individual stories explore such a wide breadth of people and places and subject matter, that this book feels somehow much larger and more cohesive than a typical story collection. These stories know the craft, but they’re more than that. These stories feel personal and intimate, showing characters grappling with issues big and small, but, again, they’re more than that. Something in the lush prose, the sharp humor, and the smart dialogue leaves these carefully crafted stories with, and there’s no other way to put it, a tremendous beauty.

“Sickness and Health” stands out to me as one of the best stories in the collection. The formal structure of the piece as a scientific study is such a clever device, at once framing the story as the speaker’s work and placing the speaker under the same scrutiny which she places upon her subjects. Underneath this are several layers of understated intimacy, as we feel the tension between urgent emotional connections with people and a restrained, intellectual approach to human interactions. The speaker plainly cares a lot about her work, and wants to dedicate herself to that work, but she also is a person, who wants to be happy, and so finds herself in a tension of trying to balance a sense of personal happiness with a demanding and draining work life. The symbolic weight of the from within view of happiness comes across quite clearly in this story, existing, as it does, at the intersection of the personal and work lives, the necessity and complexity of choices one makes for oneself, and the inevitable compromises and phases of self discovery which inform the view of the self and over time change the substance of happiness. Happiness is neither a finite nor fixed thing, it means something different based on who you are and what phase of your life you’re in.

I was also quite moved by the closing story, the titular “Happy Like This”. It’s a story in which little seems to happen—just two women, sitting in a room—but there’s so much striking imagery, so much personality in the detail and playful turns of phrase that the story seems to carry the greatest emotional weight in the entire collection. It at once views life as something so huge and boundless, impossible to understand or represent cleanly, and as something tiny, fragile, easily wrecked. It’s funny and cruel and beautiful and scary and full of love. This story, along with the others in the “Like That” section, views happiness from without: using our perceptions of other people to inform or even decide the question of whether or not we’re ourselves happy. It suggests that happiness is not just what we feel, but what we see. These stories show that this view is just as complicated as the from within view, because there are different ways we can see people, different contexts in which we can see them, different degrees of candor and transparency, and different ways of interpreting these signals.

While the other stories in the collection continue to explore these ideas, they each go about it in quite different ways, which I find to be quite rare in story collections. I often find that handfuls of the stories have similar shapes and flows and conflicts, as though the author tries several times to get it just right. In Happy Like This, each story could stand on its own. Each story is carefully assembled and has its own ideas, its own personality. There’s the vivid and cinematic “Fake Mermaid”, wherein each detail is so sharp it’s as though I can see the girl in her mermaid tail; the pangs of guilt and uncertainty in “Happy Like That”, of a bursting desire to feel buried beneath the pain of grief; or the vulnerability in “American Moon”, of very carefully trying to present one’s self and one’s home only to find a view of it from the outside which is less flattering than one might’ve hoped.

I think we need both the from within and from without views of happiness. Maybe this is why I found the book so resonant, why I’ve thought so much about it. Happiness is not just about finding provisional success, be it professional or personal; it’s not even about finding someone to share it with. In these pages, Wurzbacher has shown me that happiness really is everything: your perception of the world, the people you inhabit that world with, the choices you make, and the things which most directly seem to make you happy. Somehow it’s simultaneously all of these and something else entirely. Something greater than the sum of its parts. This truly is a beautiful book, and I hope to see more from her in the future.

[Joseph Scapellato · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astonishing collection. In these stories, Wurzbacher gives us absolutely compelling glimpses into her characters' complex relationships with themselves and with others, exploring the many contours of their interority with stunning sentences, humor, and incredible insight. Mystery, pain, connection, messy families, shattered romance, beauty -- it's all here! There wasn't a story in this collection that I didn't love.

[Jolee · Rating 5 out of 5]

So obsessed with this.
Make Yourself at Home & Burden were my favorites. So so amazing.
I can’t wait to read more by this author.

[Allie Rowbottom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this book multiple times, first as a reviewer/blurber, then as a fan. It is rare to come across such polished, honest, insightful and graceful fiction writing. Ashley Wurzbacher has a true talent for touching every emotional chord without overwriting or lapsing into overwrought prose. Each story is its own journey - as a whole, this collection does what many collections fail to do, and performs for readers a range of voices and perspectives. I'm also including my "official" blurb below. As a fellow writer and a fan, I highly recommend HAPPY LIKE THIS.

Equal parts graceful and astonishing, the stories in Ashley Wurzbacher’s debut collection HAPPY LIKE THIS do the brave work of building upon established traditions to create worlds and languages all their own. The result is a sweeping, insightful and compassionate portrait not only of women’s lives, losses and loves, but of their anger, its power and the fierce sisterhood forged between those who express it. I ended this book knowing that every story had embedded itself in my body like language; Wurzbacher’s writing has become part of me, and I am forever grateful for it.

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

The stories in this outstanding debut collection are whole and human, with characters so real they feel like people I could reach out and touch long after I’ve closed the book. They reflect the good, bad, messy, flawed, happy, imperfect, searching parts of ourselves, doing what the best fiction is meant to do—help us see ourselves, and others, more clearly. Wurzbacher’s prose is confident, and there’s not an unnecessary word in the entire collection. From the first line, you know you’re in the hands of an expert, making the reading experience that much more enjoyable. An excellent collection, all the more notable for being Wurzbacher’s first. Can’t wait for more.

[Erin A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Top of my list to read again, next time with friends. Lovely short stories filled with compassion, quirkiness, and curiosity. I loved how even the stories I related to least brought back extremely vivid memories of periods of transition. Great book!

[Kelly Brill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wurzbacher gives us short stories about women - a diverse collection of women. I was drawn into each story - young women, grieving women, women worried about their bodies, their relationships, their futures, their purpose. Sisters, friends, mothers. Her writing is lively; words pop off the page. In each story, the women speak truths that often go unsaid - I found that vulnerability extremely compelling.

[Mikayla Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn’t realize it was a collection of short stories - but each one left me wanting to read more about the lives of the characters within, each one unique and a small segment of some detailed life. and i think that’s a win, wanting to continue reading the story after that story has finished

[April Grenier · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like a couple of the stories but some of them I really didn’t see the point of.

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

An endearing collection of short stories that enticed me to think about the deeper messages behind them all.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some beautiful stories here examining the lives of women from all walks of life who are stuck at a crossroads in careers, friendships, marriages, and parenthood, trying to come to terms with what life looked like before, and how it might feel after a choice is made. This is the kind of storytelling that lifts the veil on the experience of being a woman fighting the tide and choices of her past that's a perspective I always find valuable. Still, I got a little fatigued with the flashy descriptors of a scene and meandering details of a character's past used to prop up the narrative, and it made this a slower go than some similar collections.

[fawnlet · Rating 5 out of 5]

So lovely, so simple, the story about the schoolgirls resonated with me a lot <3 I love these stories, published by the press of the university in the college town I grew up in! Might be biased.. but honestly some of the sweetest works I’ve read

[Jennifer Hitchcock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful writing! The stories are so thought provoking!

[Melissa Shephed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not a big short story collection reader, but I really appreciated this book. The stories are beautifully written. They are also very unsettling but in a good way. I read it in the fall which seemed fitting. I enjoyed that the stories were very different. However, there are strong themes that run throughout: women, occupation, and place.

[Othandiwe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have you ever wanted to read a book about the stories of women finding independence, happiness, love, and community in the most honest way possible? Even written by a woman? If so I think Happy Like This by Ashley Wurbacher is the perfect book for you.

Happy Like This is a collection of short stories highlighting the stories and lessons learned by completely unique women written in a non taboo way, but an honest and realistic one. Ashely Wurbacher’s stories about the lives, losses, and loves of all women no matter age and upbringing truly highlights what true feminism is.

I truly loved reading the similarities that followed each character creating unity throughout the book despite it not being one continual story. The author was able to leave you wanting more from each character at the end of each chapter, but still making you feel complete in the lessons they learned and ones you can carry on into your own life. Each story gives the reader the ability to respect each decision even without you having to agree with the final destination of the character. It shows the true compromise of real life, making you hungry for more despite it not always being filling, because it leaves the reader without the satisfaction one desires giving it a four out of five. Happy Like This helped me feel almost less alone as a woman by showing the rough patches rather than sheer perfection that most authors portray when writing a woman character: doe-eyed and put together. From my own personal experiences some stories were more relatable, stronger, and better put together more than others in my opinion.

I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to indulge in these well written stories of pure feminist literature depicting the unique, individual, and truthful stories of multiple strong women.

[Cas · Rating 4 out of 5]

True average is 4.1 stars.
Bought this at the surreal AWP20 because I saw that Carmen Maria Machado had chosen it for the John Simmons award, and I do what she tells me. Overall, I clicked more with the latter half "Happy Like This" than with the first "Happy Like That" half, but I severely enjoyed some part of every story (I also have not been able to concretely identify the thematic dividing lines between the halves, but I don't fault the book for that). The Machado review that made me pick it up described "dark, lyrical, sinewy stories about women's relationships with their bodies and with each other", and I was never disappointed on this front.

“Sickness and Health” (3/5 stars) uses the framework of a sociology doctoral student’s research on college students with various factitious disorders to perform a character study on the protagonist, Mia. I was really drawn in by the topic, and liked the structure of individual vignettes with each girl and interviews with her doubting supervisor, but I felt that neither her study at the college or her “real” life with her friends and ex-boyfriend (of which I was much less interested in) was developed enough for me. I almost wanted this to be a novel or novella, as I was so interested in learning more about all 12 girls and their conditions and personalities, as well as the nature of such disorders in a society that doesn’t necessarily take women and our pain seriously already (which is touched upon loosely, but there is so much else to explore here).

“Ripped” (3.5/5 stars) follows Iris as she works through the rifts in her relationship with her bodybuilder twin sister, Circe. The opening line “Circe’s getting ripped and asks me to be her “before” picture.” was both curious and intense in a way that frames the whole story: I was so interested in the girls’ feminist activist mother and Iris’s Ayn-Rand-reading, highly-specific-fetish-having partner Stefan. (The opening lines in this book are stellar, the closings are mostly successful as well.)

“What it’s Like to Be Us” (5/5 stars) follows a divided clique of four girls (who I placed around 13-ish) during what seems to be the very beginnings of an apocalypse. This story reminded me in a few obvious ways of The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, with a primary difference being that I absolutely adored this one. Wurzbacher takes the inner lives and sometimes-irrational stressors of these girls so seriously which serves the story where a lesser writer may have veered into “Are the youth doomed? Local adolescent girls ignore the apocalypse” territory. All of the girls sections (and the collective sections, which I normally don’t vibe with) were very strong, but on an entirely personal level, my heart sings for Jane, who would like “a guitar and a voice” for her birthday.

“Fake Mermaid” (4/5) follows Luna, who performs as a “fake mermaid” and her relationship with her fiancé, Noah. A fun concept with an interesting—and beautifully written— execution.

“Happy like That” (3/5) follows Elaine meeting the man her best friend, Lillian, was having an affair with, shortly after Lillian died. I can see the purpose of the ending, but it felt somewhat anticlimactic and unaligned.

Then we move into the second part of the book, with “American Moon”(4.5/5). It follows 12-year-old Jeannie and her best friend Sadie as Sadie’s family takes in a foreign exchange student from Italy. I think I just really, really love the way that Wurzbacher writes young girls in this book, from Jeannie’s comparison of her own family dynamics to Sadie’s to her attempts to view their rural town through Anna’s eyes.

“Make Yourself at Home” (5/5) follows Caroline, who temporarily moves to the home of her college roommate after her father’s death. I am reticent to give away much else. I loved this one.

“The Problem with You is That” (5/5) follows four members of a family: Sam, who is in her late 20s and moving back in with her parents after a divorce; Stephen, the good natured father who dreams of a one-man, cross-country motorcycle trek; Robin, a nurse and paranoid mother; and Maddy, who is 16 “searching for an identity, Sam knows, and lately, is trying on cruelty for size”. [This one might be my favorite in the collection.] It’s extremely successful as four character studies, and as a construction of this family dynamic, tracing through moments that feel simultaneously cataclysmic and mundane. Selfishly, I want more of these characters and this narrative, but it does not at all feel limited by its form (see again: “Sickness and Health”). Again, a teenage girl. Maybe my heart wants Wurzbacher to be writing YA (not really).

“Burden” (4/5) follows Laura, a professional dancer, shortly after she ends a pregnancy. This is the briefest story in the collection, and goes in some really interesting directions while still remaining beautifully self-contained. On a side note, I love ballet fiction always, but the more of it I read the more I have to notice the story beats that are almost universally touched upon. Maybe there's truly no way to write about dance without descriptions of dancers' feet. I do always remember and have to credit The Cranes Dance for having the narrator stop and ponder (with exasperation) why people are so obsessed with ballerina's feet. I didn't fault this story for that at all though, because the description of breaking in pointe shoes was made both interesting and narratively relevant.

“Happy Like This” (4/5) follows our narrator's relationship with her best friend Hope, and Hope's daughter, "Little Girl". The story calls attention to it's vignette nature with lines like "It's no particular day I'm telling about. It's a pattern, a cycle." and "I wish I could tell you a better story: one in which things happen, one with a climax and a resolution. This isn't any of that. What happens in this story is Hope and I survive." I was very invested in the relationship between Hope and the narrator, but possibly even more so in the adjacence, but not involvement in spirituality that's discussed with the characters living in a predominantly Mormon community as atheists, and with the narrator's ex-boyfriend's interest in new age ritual. I started thinking about this concept in "The Problem with You Is That", with the Amish characters, and it was exciting to see it explored more thoroughly and with a different lens.

I will continue to follow Carmen Maria Machado's advice. Read this book!

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ashley Wurzbacher's 'Happy Like This' provides us with a series of snapshots into womanhood at its various stages and iterations. Each story provides a unique voice and narrative style that help differentiate each story and effectively create little caveats into the characters' lives. Some pieces are told in first-person, while others are conveyed in close-third. Each character feels fully actualized, flawed, and heartbreakingly human. There's angst, indecision, love, and pain interwoven into each tale. There are astonishingly beautiful moments, and mundane moments that are told so convincingly, they feel anything but. These stories are the kind that stay with you, that you'll want to revisit to further analyze.

In all, 'Happy Like This' is a stunning work that reflects the gamut of womanhood in all its complexity. Wurzbacher's writing is revelatory, and I can't wait to see what she writes next.

**Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with an ARC for my honest review.**

[Joanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Happy Like This | Ashley Wurzbacher
⭐⭐⭐ / 5
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Happy Like This is a collection of short stories about women. Smart women, professional women, wives, daughters and mother's. And they have one thing in common. They're all searching for happiness.
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On paper, this book should have been right up my street. I LOVE strong independent women. And above all, I love women being happy. But I enjoy depth of characters which you just don't get with short stories. Just as I get into the flow of a story, it's over. Some of the stories I enjoyed more than others. I really loved some of the earlier ones, but by the time I got to the later ones, I was fed up of the lack of depth to stories.
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It's just a personal preference when it comes to short stories really, but this wasn't for me. Having said that, I've gone down the middle on my stars as some of the stories were very good.
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I received this advanced read copy from @NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Steffy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wurzbacher skillfully tells the stories of different women at different stages in their life, who are challenged and burdened by indecision and the way they seek happiness. As blunt and mundane a problem might seem at first, the author convincingly portrayed their motives and emotions so well, that it made me feel with each of the women. The problems and issues that they are struggling with are depicted with such a raw honesty. It is written so easily to read through, but in a tone that holds quality and brilliance. The characters are flawed and so human, their thoughts real, and they speak with a frankness that make their definition for happiness seems so justified, though some cases certainly aren't healthy. The insightfulness Wurzbacher brings with her stories is powerful and very brave.

*I received an advance digital copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

[Shruti · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley.

Original rating: 2.5 out of 5

Happy Like This is an anthology about smart women who look for happiness and validation in the most unusual places, in the most unconventional ways. It was one of my anticipated literary fiction reads this year, but sadly, my expectations weren't met.

I did love some of the stories in the collection, but found the writing fatphobic in multiple stories, even playing into the stereotype of fat people being lazy (they're called "lumpen and languid" in the book).

Read the entire review on This is Lit.

[rowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Mary Louise steps over the body of a blackbird and remembers her mother's warning: the end is near. But she believes that endings are less grandiose than her mother suggests, that the real danger and the real surprises are in the world's simple things, the things that seem safe and normal, the way strangers in stories entice with candy, the way a dull blade cuts the deepest. Mary Louise rubs at the cut on her leg where she nicked it last night before the birds fell. She senses that the world will end slowly, that it has been ending for a long time, that part of it, in fact, is already gone. Gone. And this very moment, now: gone. Now: gone."

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not always easy to be a woman, but life provides us with a variety of circumstances and choices! Ashley Wurzbacher has skillfully crafted a series of essays that examine the lives and choices of her female protagonists. The circumstances in the essays range from bizarre to common place, but each entry provides a glimpse into the introspective process of women in different stages of life. This is a timely set of essays that will speak to multiple generations and doesn't focus on exaggerated events, but rather choices made in the day to day.

[Alias Valia · Rating 1 out of 5]

(dnf 36%)
I wanted so much more.
The story intrigued me because could have been really a beautiful redemption story. In the end, it was a collection of stories, all around these women that insult one another and lie all the time. The conversation about mental illness was intriguing but overall didn't save this book.
Everything was forced, and just uncomfortable to read. I found some stories that had fatphobic characters without a redemption arc and that made me mad.

-NetGalley