Happily: A Personal History-with Fairy Tales

by Sabrina Orah Mark

A beautifully written memoir-in-essays on fairy tales and their surprising relevance to modern life, from a Jewish woman raising Black children in the American South--based on her acclaimed Paris Review column "Happily"

"One of the most inventive, phenomenally executed books I've read in decades."--Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

The literary tradition of the fairy tale has long endured as the vehicle by which we interrogate the laws of reality. These fantastical stories, populated with wolves, kings, and wicked witches, have throughout history served as a template for understanding culture, society, and that muddy terrain we call our collective human psyche. In Happily, Sabrina Orah Mark reimagines the modern fairy tale, turning it inside out and searching it for the wisdom to better understand our contemporary moment in what Mark so incisively calls "this strange American weather."

Set against the backdrop of political upheaval, viral plague, social protest, and climate change, Mark locates the magic in the mundane and illuminates the surreality of life as we know it today. She grapples with a loss of innocence in "Sorry, Peter Pan, We're Over You," when her son decides he would rather dress up as Martin Luther King, Jr., than Peter Pan for Halloween. In "The Evil Stepmother," Mark finds unlikely communion with wicked wives and examines the roots of their bad reputation. And in "Rapunzel, Draft One Thousand," the hunt for a wigmaker in a time of unprecedented civil unrest forces Mark to finally confront her sister's cancer diagnosis and the stories we tell ourselves to get by.

Revelatory, whimsical, and utterly inspired, Happily is a testament to the singularity of Sabrina Orah Mark's voice and the power of the fantastical to reveal essential truths about life, love, and the meaning of family.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Essays, Fairy Tales, Audiobook, Jewish, Biography Memoir

224 pages, Hardcover

First published March 14, 2023

About the author

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of Wild Milk, a collection of fiction, as well as two collections of poetry, The Babies and Tsim Tsum. Happily, which began as a monthly column on fairytales and motherhood inThe Paris Review, is now out from Random House. She has received fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She lives in Athens, Georgia. You can read more about her teaching and her writing at www.sabrinaorahmark.com

Reviews

[Marquise · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a peculiar book about the impact of fairy tales in daily life, very entertaining if you like personal anecdote-style memoirs by someone who isn't a celebrity but has had an interesting life you might relate to all the better than you could with someone famous.

The author mixes snippets of her life and her family's experiences with commentary on fairy tales, how they came to be, what they're supposed to mean, their symbology, and how she views them personally. For example, for Pinocchio, she tells the anecdote of when her son was carving little bits of wood and calling them Ghost People, which spooked his teacher that had to call her apart and lecture her on it. From this, she goes off on the particulars of the tale, a pattern she repeats all over the book. It's not separate analysis, and definitely not academic, it's all so well-mixed she can jump from talking about a fairy tale to telling an anecdote and back to fairy tale and then on to rely conversations with family.

Because of this style, it's a bit all over the place; some parts read like stream-of-consciousness, and the lack of breaks when jumping between topics can make it a bit difficult to read. The chapters are organised by topic and have a title that announces the topic discussed, but the writing style isn't that organised and does require a while to get used to. Personally, I never did, so whilst I enjoyed the commentary and the perspective she brought to the table (the author is Jewish, so she has insights on some tales I'd not have thought of), the writing style meant I didn't as much as I would possibly have. Nonetheless, it was a worthy read, especially because of the layman-friendly and conversational tone.

I received an ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wild Milk by this author is one of my all time favorite books, so I was really excited to get this ARC. It had a lot of what I love about the author's other works, the essays are surreal and strange while also being relatable and sometimes so starkly honest as to be a gut punch. Things aren't what they seem, but they're also somehow piercingly exactly as they are. The fairy tale motif that threads the essays together fits perfectly with the tone of the book. I found it totally engaging and full of surprises and gorgeously, ruthlessly written. Some of the essays hit more than others for me, I'd say this one felt a little less tightly woven than Wild Milk. But I very much enjoyed reading it. Reading this author is always such a strange and engaging experience. I'd definitely recommend it for readers looking for something odd in the best way.

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was given this book and so I read it. It was a cute idea to write about her life and family in terms of fairytales in their pre-Disney lives. I had wanted to learn more about those stories and have been thinking about reading them in their original forms. I'd been chicken so far, so I thought this could be a little bit of a primer. It was - a very little bit. I also did not find myself caring a lick about the writer. This book did not do enough for me.

[Samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m no great fan of memoirs, but I was intrigued by the fairy tale parallels Sabrina Orah Mark offered here.

Unfortunately. this is far more memoir than fairy tale study, and carries all the tropey and angsty narcissism common to this particular breed of memoir.

The author makes some interesting observations about fairy tales, but her attempts to weave them into her own biography are a miss, and in the end the book is just way too much time inside the head of someone I can’t imagine wanting to spend time with.

The concept certainly had potential, but needed an author who was both more appealing as a character in her own story.

*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*

[Stephanie Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

so so gorgeous in all senses. Mark spins the past and present together through fairy tale analogy, and makes a surreal sense out of so many types of grief, bigger than imaginable and also deeply personal, that doesn’t discount the full range of its emotional scale at all.

shoutout to Emma for this dear rec + gift earlier in spring, before I even knew that reading this would pull me back together when I was falling apart quietly 🫶

[Cassie]

Best book I'll read this year, hands down.

[Emi Yoshida · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a really interesting collection of what I assume are autobiographical shorts. The author wrote the series for publication in the Paris Review, from Athens, GA where she lives with her husband and 2 little boys. Wildly imaginative, and equally open with readers about her personal life and private thoughts, each story really was a mystery in that you never knew where it would end up. Although each story is based on elements of fairy tales, they incorporate also race and religion, her parents' divorce, her husband's earlier marriages, her point of view as step-daughter as well as step-mother, her sister's health, and the contents of her sons' pockets.

I loved her reference to the über-thorough Bavarian survey of everybody everywhere to gather fairy tales, which I first learned about in Kessel, Germany at Grimmwelt, an amazing museum dedicated to the Brothers Grimm. I come away from Happily with a reinforced fascination with fairytales (not our American happily-ever-after versions, but the others that are more brutally realistic), and also with this list of related reads:

Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
The False Grandmother by Italo Calvo
The Girl, the Wolf, the Crone by Kellie Wells
Little Red Riding Hood by Charles Perrault
Stepmother by Robert Coover

[Ana Hein · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars

Sometimes the overlapping and weaving metaphors between life and fairytales were insightful, and sometimes I could tell this was a collum with a specific angle the writer had to continuously find a way to conform to. Sometimes it felt like the logic leaps weren't always entirely supported, but when it worked it was amazing. The ideas are a little bit repetitive--and I want to be clear--the ideas and themes, not the subject matter. I love books about domesticity and motherhood, but it felt like the same kind of thing was being said about motherhood in the majority of the pieces. Loved the piece about U break it we fix it. It was also really interesting to see the pieces get more and more experimental, more and more speculative, as the collection progressed. Makes me think about the ways we are continually always telling the same kind of stories, looking for sense and meaning-making in everything.

[Jessie Wittman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sabrina's writing draws tears up out of some deep well in my being that I didn't know existed. I leak when I read. She digs and mines in the most unlikely of places for meaning, and somehow finds it, and then weaves it all together into strange new forms like look like us and both show us ourselves and shows us how little we know ourselves. Or something. Her words are so measuredly unmoored and so ghostly true that I love them.

[Audrey Evans · Rating 1 out of 5]

I bought this book and read many chapters because it is my Temple’s Bookclub book. I found the first chapter to be whimsical and amusing. But chapter after chapter of this dibble causes me to ask: why did anyone publish this book? Who are the people who are willing to engage with it, and how are they also functioning as adults. I do not recommend this book, and I strongly discourage anyone from reading it.

[Talia Mermin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Metaphor salad. Spent most of the book unsure whether it was brilliant or fraudulent, I think mostly because the author is so hesitant to commit fully to an idea, often ducking behind paradox to avoid saying one distilled, but potentially impeachable, thing. Great premise, tons of interesting references and ideas in here, but needed to be marshaled into a fuller form. The better version of this book would have been a fav

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

5.0 I am mad for fairy tales. This autobiographical, academic fairy tale (s) is mesmerizing. I can see this will not be for some but for me. Yes.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I adored parts of this book and found it creative and insightful at its best, at its worst, it was repetitive and full of lists.

[Rachel Gorman-Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an intricate collection of poetic and mythic references, resulting in a gorgeous memoir! Please read

[Catherine McNiel · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to know what to say about this book. It's unlike anything I've ever read. I didn't particularly love the chapters but her lines blew me away.

[jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

title says it all- A Personal History with Fairy Tales. lovely prose tells the story of several years in the author's life including covid days... with the history of fairy tales and the tales themselves always working their way into her life. or the other way around?

[Maggie Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 hearts

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too rambling

[Monica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not sure exactly what I expected but this is much more mid-life memoir then a deep dive into the importance of fairy tales. But there are a lot of interesting ideas and beautiful writing here. It didn’t totally land with me, but it is a unique book that deserves to find its audience.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I am so far away from where I’ve never gone and what I’ll never know and who I’ll never be, it is impossible to tell if on that path I am radiant or falling to pieces.”

Happily is stunning and heartbreaking and unlike anything I’ve ever read before. Sabrina Orah Mark’s gorgeous prose weaves together a memoir and fairy tales, and the result is a collection of essays that blur the lines between reality and fantasy and spill over with emotions so visceral that I wanted to buy a physical copy of this book, cut out (or just take photos of) entire paragraphs, and send them to my friends so they could experience these words alongside me.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for sending me this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, thought provoking, and not the right book for me. I read it on a surface level which means I won't fully understand it. The book deserves a deeper level of reading than I can give it.

[Joyce Schiff · Rating 1 out of 5]

Probably very clever but was extremely confusing and not worth the effort to figure it out ...

[Ceallaigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The reason fairy tales last is that they allow us to gaze at ourselves through a glass that is at once transparent and reflective. They give us a double gaze to see ourselves from the inside out and the outside in, and they exaggerate our roles just enough to bring into focus the little pieces of monster that grow on our hearts.”

TITLE—Happily
AUTHOR—Sabrina Orah Mark
PUBLISHED—2023
PUBLISHER—Random House

GENRE—memoir, essays
SETTING—modern day u.s.
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—motherhood &
stepmotherhood, marriage (specifically being your partner’s third spouse), fairy tales, Jewish culture & identity, life in america, queer author, the cov*d pandemic, a loved one with cancer, mother-daughter relationship, writing / being a writer, heritage & inheritance, navigating generational divides in your family

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️—my absolute favorite thing about this collection
CHARACTERIZATION—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
STORYTELLING/FLOW—⭐️⭐️⭐️

BONUS ELEMENT/S—Absolutely loved her exploration of all the different themes commonly found in fairy tales in the context of her own life and experiences, especially against the backdrop of the particular idiosyncrasies of modern life.

PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
PREMISE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
EXECUTION—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“The citizens of fairy tales have lived under these laws long enough to know the tale they're in has stitched a ‘y’ to the end of ‘fair’—it's a weirdly shaped wing that carries fairness away. The word ‘fairy’, from ‘fata’, is rooted in fate but lifted by magic. Here comes the wind.”

My thoughts:
This was my most anticipated read of 2023 and was also one of those books that I really wanted to inhale but kept trying to slow down my reading pace because I would be so sad when it was over. I have been a fan of Sabrina Orah Mark’s fairy tale-inspired memoir-ish essays since I started reading them on The Paris Review five years ago so when I saw that she was finally publishing a book of them I immediately had to preorder it.

And this book exceeded my expectations with its gorgeous writing and beautiful use of fairy tale themes, imagery, and reimaginings.
I also especially loved all the reflections on her childhood, growing up Jewish in NYC and how learning (& unlearning) fairy tale lessons informs her navigation of motherhood.

I was surprised to see so 👏🏻 many 👏🏻 essays 👏🏻 were about being her husband’s third wife. At first it started to feel repetitive until I realized that that was because this is an experience that just has an effect on so many different parts of her life and is one of the things that she has turned to writing in particular in order to work out all the complex feelings and situations that come with being a person’s third spouse. It was the same with the motherhood essays which felt kind of repetitive (to me) too after a while but were still all very intentionally written.

“Like marriage, the cultural resilience of "Bluebeard" is mystifying. And like a fairy tale, marriage belongs to a never-ending circulation of happily-ever-afters in the shape of a cliff.”

My favorite essays were: “I Am the Tooth Fairy”, “The Silence of Witches”, “Bah, Humbug”, “Sleeping with the Wizard”, “U Break It We Fix It”, and “An Epilogue: After Ever”.

I would recommend this book to readers who are interested in fairy and folk tale themes and subjects and enjoy memoir essays. This book is best read slowly, maybe even one essay a day, first thing in the morning or before bed.

Final note: I feel like I’m horrible at writing reviews for my favorite books. I never make them sound as good as they are. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Oh well. 😂 Can’t wait to see what Mark writes next!

“It's a shard of glass that fits with my shard of glass perfectly. When I put the two pieces together, it looks like a transparent hand reaching out to help someone up. I want to jump for joy. We have only one hundred million billion pieces to go.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CW // animal cruelty (she describes the lemmings thing from that horrible 1958 “documentary”) (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—
- “A Psychotronic Childhood,” by Colson Whitehead, published in The New Yorker, May 2012—TBR
- THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH, by Robert Kirk—TBR
- Helen Oyeyemi
- Gregory Maguire
- HOW TO BE EATEN, by Maria Adelmann
- HAG: FORGOTTEN FOLKTALES RETOLD, edited by Carolyne Larrington
- THE BLOODY CHAMBER, by Angela Carter
- LETTERS TO MY WEIRD SISTERS, by Joanne Limburg—TBR

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

7: “An Israeli congregant explains he keeps nothing from his children. He uses the word inoculation. Like, if you inject a little pieces of horror into your children, they won’t shatter when the whore comes.”

15–16: “We turn to fairy tales not to escape, but to go deeper into a terrain we’ve inherited, the vast and muddy terrain of the human psyche. Fairy tales, like glass, coffins, like magic mirrors, give transparency to the reflection of the human gaze. Fairy tales are homemade stories turned inside out. You can see the threads, the stitching line, the seams. Sometimes a needle is still attached to a loose thread, hanging.”

16: “‘There is a big difference between deceit,’ she explained, ‘and using what is unreal to get to something even realer.’”

43: The reason fairy tales last is that they allow us to gaze at ourselves through a glass that is at one’s transparent and reflective. They give us a double gaze to see ourselves from the inside out in the outside in, and the exaggerator rules just enough to bring into focus, the little pieces of monster that grow on our hearts.“

46: I think a lot about boys. About raising mine to be sensitive, and effective, and tender hearted, and lovely, and kind, and funny, and brave. I want them to be boys who keep their shadows on, and who belong to a future. boys who understand the difference between a thimble and a kiss. Worry picks at me like Hook’s metal claw. I want their boyness to bloom. I want to keep them safe.”

54: “I mean to write about home, but I keep confusing it with hunger. I mean to write about hunger, but I keep confusing it with home”

55: “The father’s branch returns later as the little bone Hansel sticks through the bar door to trick the witch into believing he is not yet plumb enough to eat. By showing him how a father can turn into the wind, Hansel‘s father teaches him how to be a bone instead of a boy. It’s the lesson of a lifetime. It’s what keeps him alive“

72: “Even at seven, I knew the only thing more traumatic than the Messiah, never coming with the Messiah, actually showing up. I had a hunch, the coming of the messiah would mean losing something. But I couldn’t imagine what.“


90: “The thing about not existing is that sometimes it’s a lot like being a mother.”

118: "I didn't know then, as I know now, the difference between worship and love."

119: "There's no place like home when there's nowhere else to go."

126: "This is the problem with metaphor and ritual and fairy tales. Sometimes they start leaking into reality, and no one knows how to sew up the tear. And even if we did know how to sew it up, all the stores are out of needle and thread."

147: "Every mother has the exact same single greatest fear. It's the boulder we push while praying for no crest."

153: "I wonder if prophets, like animals, must unname the present to see visions of the future."

164: "To know your history is to carry all your pieces, whole and shattered, through the wilderness. And feel their weight."

179: "The five-minute drive feels too short. Shouldn't my hope and the fulfillment of my hope be farther apart? Shouldn't it take my whole life to drive to Project Safe?"

[Chani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird. Weird in the weirdest way. Weird in the most beautiful way. Weird in a way that gives my weirdness a place to call home for a little while, a treehouse of weird that is a castle of weird in a dimension we haven’t yet fully explored. I have read this twice over now. I will continue to re-read it. I will carry it with me and search its pages for all the particles of fog it unfolds. It recounts stories that make me feel not so alone in my own weirdness. This is a writer who knows how to read the runes of Gertrude Stein and give you a prophecy. Or maybe a fairy tale. Everyday objects glow white, like bioluminescent mushrooms or pebbles in the moonlight. Animals wander in and out. They want to speak, but their words are the stories and the memories. Sometimes they speak and sometimes they don't. Sometimes all they can give us is silence, and that, too, weirdly, is a gift. She brings attention to the broken things no tailor can mend, no cobbler can recraft, no repair shop can fix. In fairytales, tears, keys, bones, silence, are talismans that break the spell, but nothing in the real world breaks the spell. All the blues are not the right blue, and the plague doctor is lost. What she leaves us with isn’t hope, but a way to search for hope. She leaves us with a seed, which might also be a pebble, or a spot of ink. You will have to find your own way home. Under a blue moon, maybe you can, because that blue could be the right blue, inside the angel's flame.

[Emily Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Random House Book Club and Goodreads Giveaways for the review copy of Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales by Sabrina Orah Mark, which I received in exchange for a fair and honest review.

In Happily, Mark uses fairytales to discuss personal experiences and public concerns. She considers characters and retellings, gender roles, and the lessons the stories are meant to teach.

While Mark uses fairytales to discuss many different topics, the subject she returns to the most often is family. Her mother enters as a voice on the telephone, her children have the wisdom of youth, her husband as the intonation of support and affection. However, Mark also discusses her struggles as a third wife and stepmother. Knowing that your beloved has had lives before you is always a haint in the background, but ex partners and children make for much noisier ghosts, especially when their history is more complicated than your own.

Happily, for all the difficult and weighty topics it discusses, is not overly heavy, in part because the book chapters are so short. Each chapter is an essay that’s scarcely a breath.

The essays make use of a lot of tactics that poetry uses: allusions, layering of stories, repetition, and bringing together disparate pieces. Her essays are beautiful collages.

Would I teach Happily? Yes. The essays are excellent instruction of what essays can do and how they can disrupt a typical narrative structure.

[Cynthia Abraham · Rating 3 out of 5]

Orah is incredibly intelligent but she is also human. She is not omniscient and looks to fairy tales for answers to provide solutions/comfort that can assist one in navigating the intricacies of those aspects of life that one may have thought that one was well-equipped to manage but wasn’t.
There are several sterling examples of her extrapolatation of the stories our parents read to us to the conundrums of our daily lives. On realizing her son has decided to dress up as Martin Luther King for Halloweeen, instead of Peter Pan, Orah is jarred by the realization that her son is growing up. But she then appreciates that is what has to happen and that she now must continue to be an amazing mother, the one that Peter Pan always wanted. She must now further insure that her sons don’t become “lost boys.”
There are a fair number of instances though in which Orah overreaches in her quest to use fairy tales as a guide for these cynical times. Nonetheless, this is a charming collection that presents a new purpose of fairy tales over escape: that of being a mirror of our psyches.
Additional highlights are below:
“Bluebeard of Wives”
“Currency of Tears”
“Rapunzel, Draft One Thousand”
“I Am the Mother of This Eggshell”

[Brynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The reason fairy tales last is that they allow us to gaze at ourselves through a glass that is at once transparent and reflective. They give us a double gaze to see ourselves from the inside out and the outside in, and they exaggerate our roles just enough to bring into focus the little pieces of monster that grow on our hearts." (43)

"'The storyteller,' wrote Walter Benjamin, 'is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story.'" (69)

"For whom is a child's childhood? I think it's for all of us. But it's not for when we are children. Our childhoods are for later." (92)

"As I empty the bags and touch the moss, and the leaves, and the twigs, and the berries, and a robin-blue eggshell, I consider how much we depend on useless, arbitrary tasks to prove ourselves. I consider how much we depend on these tasks so we can say, at the very end, we succeeded." (133)

"'Of course not,' he says. 'You would know so much it would be like knowing nothing at all.'" (152)

"I miss stupidly believing history was lived mostly in the past." (172)

"Is the fairytale the very last skin a story sheds, or is the fairy tale its first? Maybe it's both, which could explain why the fairy tale keeps not dying." (185)

"'I think the hardest part of being human,' says Eli, 'is trying to forget what you don't want to remember.'" (186)

[Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

""Of all the fairy tales, Rapunzel gives me the most difficult time. "It's because," says my husband, "you are trying to use her to write about systemic racism, and protest, and cancer, and a global pandemic."
"Should I just take out the racism?" I ask.
"No," he says. "You can't take out the racism."
"I know," I say. "That was a stupid question. Can I take out my mother?"
"Does your mother appear?" he asks. "I don't remember your mother appearing."
"Eventually," I say, "my mother always appears.""

And she does. Her mother is always there. My favorite character in this collection. Giving this book a rating is goofy because it feels like the kind of thing readers would either love or find pointless.

I love it.

""I call my mother. "There's something stuck in Foryst's throat."
"Of course there's something stuck in Foryst's throat," she says. "Why wouldn't there be something stuck in his throat? There's something stuck in all of our throats." She hangs up.""

That perfect voice of derisive chaos just made me smile each time I noticed it.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love these surreal little fairy tale essays. I love their questions, their close attention to language, their openess to—and creation of— wonder. The essays reflect on motherhood and family, Judaism and Blackness, and all the ways our lives are, and aren’t, and maybe should be more, just like fairy tales.

You might have read the essays as they were first published in the Paris Review, but it is such a pleasure to read them all together in this collection, to feel more strongly the arc of the narrative.

Here’s a passage:
A student asks me if I ever wonder if I should just stop writing. “Is it really worth it?” she asks. “All this vulnerability? All this exposure? Possibly hurting everyone you love?”
I tell her language is what I have, and I think without it, I’d grow tentacles, and sharp little teeth would poke through my skull. She laughs. ”I’m serious,” I say, “If I stopped writing, I’d go sea witch.”
“But shouldn’t certain things be left sacred?” she asks. “Like your children?”
The word children floats above my head like a magnificent cloud about to burst. And when it bursts, I will be drenched by them. All day I am drenched by them. A holy water. Why, I wonder, should the secret be unsayable? How can I write about motherhood without writing about my children? Who would play their part? The birds in the trees? A stranger? The shadows?