About the Book
A searing debut about the complexities of gender, power, and fame, told through the story of a young woman’s destructive relationship with a legendary writer.
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. More than anything else, she loves this new life for helping her forget the decade she spent in New York City orbiting the brilliant and famous author M. Domínguez.
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, and the reporter is looking for corroboration.
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?
Told in a dual narrative alternating between her present day and a letter from Tatum to Domínguez, recounting and reclaiming the totality of their relationship, Like Happiness explores the nuances of a complicated and imbalanced relationship, catalyzing a reckoning with gender, celebrity, memory, Latinx identity, and power dynamics.
About the Author.
Ursula Villarreal-Moura is the author of Math for the Self-Crippling (2022), selected by Zinzi Clemmons as the Gold Line Press fiction contest winner, and Like Happiness (Celadon Books, 2024). A graduate of Middlebury College, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was a VONA/Voices fellow. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including Tin House, Catapult, Prairie Schooner, Midnight Breakfast,Washington Square, Story, Bennington Review, Wigleaf Top 50, and Gulf Coast. She contributed to Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction, a flash anthology by writers of color, and in 2012, she won the CutBank Big Fish Flash Fiction/Prose Poetry Contest. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, a Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Best American Short Stories 2015.
About the Moderator.
Alejandro Varela (he/him) is a writer based in New York. His debut novel, The Town of Babylon (2022), was published by Astra House and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in The Point Magazine, Georgia Review, Boston Review, Harper’s, and The Offing, among others outlets. Varela is an editor-at-large of Apogee Journal. He has a Master’s Degree in Public Health.