Radical Reads is an online book club focusing on literature that critiques and challenges current feminist topics.
Join us for a vibrant discussion of Ursula Villarreal-Moura's Like Happiness, in which an American expat in Chile reckons with the fraught friendship she had with an older novelist that began when she was in college.
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About the Book:
It's 2015, and Tatum Vega feels that her life is finally falling into place. Living in sunny Chile with her partner Vera, she spends her days surrounded by art at the museum where she works. She loves this new life, but more than anything, she loves it for helping her forget the decade she spent in New York City; the years she spent orbiting the brilliant and famous author M. Domínguez. But when a reporter calls from the US asking for an interview, the careful separation Tatum has constructed between her past and present begins to crumble. Domínguez has been accused of assault by another woman, and the reporter is looking for corroboration. Tatum agrees to tell her story, but she begins with a clarification: while there are similarities, what happened to the other woman is not what happened to her.
As Tatum is forced to reexamine the all-consuming but undefinable relationship that dominated so much of her early adulthood, long-buried questions surface. What did happen between them? And why is she still struggling with the mark the relationship left on her life? Searching for clarity, Tatum decides to tell her story a second way as well: in the form of a letter to Domínguez, recounting and reclaiming the totality of their relationship, from the moment they met to the night the relationship imploded. Told in a dual narrative that alternates between Tatum's present-day and her letter, Like Happiness explores the nuances of a complicated and imbalanced relationship, catalyzing a reckoning with gender, celebrity, memory, Latinx identity, and the unexpected ways power dynamics can manifest.
"As the chronicle barrels toward the moment when the relationship implodes, Tatum realizes there are many different kinds of violation. Though Villarreal-Moura’s writing style is a bit buttoned-up, her emotionally astute novel offers a moving perspective on the different kinds of victims abusers leave in their wake. Memorable and incisive, this debut grapples elegantly with the complexity of betrayal." - Kirkus Reviews