A Review of Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund

There is a moment early in Are You Happy?, the title story from Lori Ostlund’s new collection, where Phil, the story’s protagonist, reflects on his decision not to bring his partner, Kelvin, with him to visit his dying mother. Because he has not explicitly told his family about Kelvin’s existence and not talked to them about being a gay man, he is forced to confront a hard reality. As Phil imagines Kelvin, a stranger, at his mother’s deathbed, he contemplates the reflective question: “But wasn’t he a stranger also?” The answer is clear to Phil as it is clear to many of the characters in this remarkable collection. They are strangers to their families, neighbors, coworkers, and even their partners, and know it. The genius of Ostlund’s writing is that her characters are often also strangers to themselves, unsure of the arcs of their own lives. Few writers navigate this terrain as confidently or with as much verve as Ostlund, and the result is a collection of remarkable depth and energy.

The eight stories and one novella in Are You Happy? highlight characters grappling with the past as frequently as they grapple with their present circumstances. We see many returning home after long absences, only to find the struggles they faced earlier in their lives have metastasized in the intervening years. Ostlund’s protagonists know with certainty why they’ve left the places where they grew up. They come from small, rural places where it is not easy to be gay or liberal or a woman. They return for a range of reasons. A dying or dead parent. A visit with family that brings them back into contact with childhood friends. In returning, Ostlund’s characters find themselves in situations that force confrontation. The confrontation can be with those in their lives who they’ve left behind, but just as often for these characters, it is a confrontation with themselves.

In the collection’s opening story, “The Bus Driver,” the majority of the narrative is told through flashback, with the protagonist, Clare, debating with herself as to why she acted the way she did many years ago when she tried and failed to protect her best friend from a predatory teacher. Those scenes in the present are often exchanges between Clare and her partner, Miriam, who serves as a sounding board for her. They debate her actions (or lack thereof), and the tension of the story comes from the juxtaposition of those reflective scenes and the flashbacks where we see Clare make the decisions she will eventually question. This ping-ponging structure is one Ostlund uses several times in the collection, always to intriguing effect. She situates us with characters who we care about not just because of some “what will happen next?” momentum in the here-and-now but because of the access we get to their interior lives, to their questioning of the past.

Ostlund is a writer unafraid to show violence and its aftereffects, but more meaningfully, she’s unafraid to show the subtler tendrils of that violence. In “The Stalker,” a disturbed and disturbing student stalks his community college instructor. The threat of violence from him is palpable and creates a real sense of menace in the story. However, the fascinating depth of the story comes from all the ways the community college bureaucracy not only enables these threats of violence but also amplifies them, escalating the looming sense of dread both within the narrator and reader. Ostlund shows us what we should already know: that violence can be systematic, that it can be embedded in and supported by the very structure that should protect us.

If all of this seems grim, well, it can be, but that’s one of the pleasures of the collection because Ostlund is a writer who knows how to expertly layer emotion. She navigates harsh terrain throughout the collection and doesn’t shy away from the realities of that subject matter, but her most remarkable gift is her ability to turn this material slightly, shift it into the light, so a moment that may deeply sadden us can also make us laugh. It’s difficult to find space for humor in stories that also grapple with weighty subjects like childhood abuse, but Ostlund balances it perfectly, and the stories are richer for it. That humor, along with the genuine love and joy that exist in some of the characters’ relationships, undercuts what may feel like a compounding darkness in these pieces. The result is a collection that challenges us with the very real dangers we face in the world. It forces us to confront those dangers but also leavens that material.

The collection’s thematic threads coalesce in its most powerful piece, the closing novella, “Just Another Family.” Here, Ostlund again brings a character home, this time in the form of Sybil, who comes back to her small Minnesota town after her father’s death. Immediately upon returning, she finds herself in conflict with her mother, initially over her use of the word “soda” instead of “pop,” an indicator of just how far she’s strayed from the culture of her childhood. That minor language quibble swiftly escalates, though, when her mother implies Sybil and her partner, Rachel, are not a family. “She meant that I didn’t have children, but mainly she meant that two women together was not a family.” These definitional disagreements intensify as the novella moves on, and it becomes clear Sybil, despite wanting to believe she’s always been different from her family, is also very much of this place and of these people. The struggle for her is not whether or not she has changed; it is whether or not the two versions of herself–the one she imagines and the one she quietly knows to be true–can coexist. Ostlund’s magic trick in the novella and in the collection itself is to show us we can be strangers to ourselves while also knowing ourselves deeply, that perhaps knowing even comes from confronting our own pasts as though we were strangers, as though our lives are some mystery we can unfold. With exquisite prose and an unerring eye for details that speak beyond the surface level, Ostlund writes about the past, the present, and the ways we let the two bleed into one another in ways that are richly rewarding.

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A Conversation with Lori Ostlund

Lori Ostlund is the author of Are You Happy? (Astra House, May 2025). Her novel After the Parade (Scribner, 2015) was a B&N Discover pick, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and a NYTimes Editors’ Choice. Her first book, The Bigness of the World (UGA, 2009); Scribner, 2016), received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. Her stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, ZYZZYA, STORY, and New England Review, among other places. Lori has received a Rona Jaffee Foundation Award and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She has served as the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award since 2022 and is on the board of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She lives in San Francisco with her wife, the writer Anne Raeff. www.loriostlund.com.

Fiction Editor Christopher Lowe and Lori Ostlund conversed with one another via email to discuss the craft and inspiration behind the stories included in Are You Happy?

 

INTERVIEWER

Quite a few of the stories in Are You Happy? utilize a reflective structure, with characters who have shifted into new phases of their lives looking back on earlier experiences. In the collection’s opening story, “The Bus Driver,” that takes the form of a narrator who is dealing with some pretty fraught memories of her childhood best friend from across the years. The action of the story, largely, takes place in the past, but we see its impact on her in the here-and-now. What draws you to this kind of structure and to characters who are attempting to make sense of their earlier lives?

LORI OSTLUND

I am a fan of the novelistic short story, which covers large swaths of time, often regarded as a no-no in the world of short stories; traditional stories often take place over the course of a few hours or, at most, weeks. My use of reflective narrators is an offshoot of that, I suppose, and both of these go hand in hand with my love of backstory. I like knowing who people are, what has shaped them. I like it in life and in fiction.

The reflective narrator intrigues me because it comes with built-in challenges, including the one you allude to in your question: how to keep the present story implicated and moving forward, toward something, in the midst of so much backstory. The past, after all, is already determined. The outcome is known, and that can result in less tension and urgency. That is, the more removed a narrator—and therefore the reader—is in time from the events of the story, the less urgency there is on the page. The tradeoff, however, is that the reflective narrator has had the benefit of time to change and reflect, so they can offer guidance, insight, knowledge. In a sense, what makes things more difficult for plot and tension can help deepen voice and character.

When I think about reflective narrators and novelistic short stories, I imagine time as vertical, stacked. If you think of it as horizontal, the tendency is toward excessive summary. In the case of “The Bus Driver,” the ratio of backstory to present story is heavily skewed toward backstory, but I tried to create a vertical silo of key scenes that track their friendship, using the narrator’s parents as a way to keep her tethered to her friend and to make the leaps in time work. In this case, what she is trying to make sense of is her own guilt over being unable to stop the awful thing that was done to her friend, and because I am covering swaths of time, the narrator’s perspective reflects the limitations of her age and knowledge at various points. For example, when she meets her friend for the first time after she leaves home for college, she is around twenty-one years old, so her interaction with her friend reflects not just guilt but a certain immaturity that translates into a superiority and smugness about the fact that she has escaped their town and—as she incorrectly believes—the past. She is not yet able to understand how this traumatic event affected both of them. That reckoning happens years later, in the final scene of the story. The reflective narrator allows me, among other things, to track her changing perspective.

INTERVIEWER

At times, these stories feel very interested in the ways that characters view situations in black and white versus in shades of gray. I’m thinking here, for example, of the scenes in “The Bus Driver” between the narrator and her partner, Miriam. The narrator is grappling with the paradox of her own actions, what she did and what she chose not to do, but Miriam insists that there is always a correct approach, that right and wrong are essentially consistent. In the closing moments of the story, the narrator reflects on Miriam’s belief in a world where “right things existed.” How do you navigate writing about these gray areas and the gaps that exist between two characters’ views of the world?

OSTLUND

To quote (imperfectly) something Chekhov once wrote to his editor: the job of the writer is not to answer questions but to ask them well. For me, a well-asked question always means exploring the gray areas. In “The Bus Driver,” this meant exploring how two people who live together and love each other and both want the world to be a good place can nonetheless view justice differently. Miriam, the narrator’s partner, fights for justice by wedding herself to a structure (the law in her case) that she believes is synonymous with justice, while the narrator remains skeptical because she has seen a structure fail—a school system that did not protect her friend. Their discussions and differing views are meant to reveal the gray.

My wife’s family on her mother’s side—with the exception of her grandparents, mother, and uncle—all died in the Holocaust. I’ve heard so many people claim with confidence that they know what they would do if confronted by a moral dilemma of this sort: they would speak up, take action, hide the Jews (or today’s equivalent). The statistics regarding Germans who hid or helped Germans escape suggest something different. The story, in part, came out of my fear that I wouldn’t recognize the moment or know how to respond, combined with my wife’s insistence that I absolutely would do the right thing. Like the couple in the story, my wife and I are quite different. She charges into the fray, while I grew up in a small Midwestern town where the expectation is to mind your own business. I spend a lot of time thinking about this.

INTERVIEWER

I’m fascinated with the way your characters engage with the unsaid. So often, they have an understanding of their own experience that they won’t verbalize to their families, their partners, or their friends. How do you think characters holding onto the unsaid impacts your fiction?

OSTLUND

In fiction, there is the kind of withholding that annoys the reader. This sort, I think, often ends up feeling like a power move because the writer is one-upping the reader by not telling them what they need to know. I’m interested in the kind of withholding that happens between characters—things left unsaid, secrets kept. Often, the reader is allowed access to these unsaid thoughts, so the tension comes from understanding that the character is saying one thing out loud but thinking something else. I grew up in my parents’ hardware store in a Minnesotan town of 400 people. These were stoic people—farmers mainly, people of Northern European descent, schooled in restraint. Nearly everything I have learned about writing dialogue came from my childhood, and what I learned was that silence, the thing not said, was where the story lies.

On a personal level, the world I live in now is much different from the one I grew up in, and I am also a different person, so, of course, I have spent a lot of time navigating between these worlds, reflecting on these iterations of myself. A constant, though, is the fact that people, both friends and strangers, have always talked openly to me. I am a good listener, nonjudgmental, interested in others, but in my teens and twenties, I was not comfortable talking about myself, sometimes because keeping things from others gave me a sense of control and sometimes because I did not know how to be comfortable with such intimacy. My characters withhold for the same reasons—a desire for power or control, a need not to be vulnerable, a fear that others will not understand the peculiarities of their stories. Like me, they are learning—with various levels of success—to stop withholding.

INTERVIEWER

A few of these stories exist in the world of higher education, with characters who work as adjuncts and others who mark their college experience as a pivot point from the small, cloistered worlds of their youth. I’ve always been a bit leery in my own writing about delving into college as a backdrop for my fiction because I worry that I’ll bore readers who aren’t actively tapped into that world, but in your stories it feels deeply meaningful, and you lead us to the tensions that exist in these places in stories like “The Stalker.” How do you approach writing about higher education?

OSTLUND

When my wife and I got together nearly thirty-four years ago, I had just finished my master’s in literature and planned to get a Ph.D., but we moved to Spain for two years. It was there, while reading my way—unfettered by a syllabus—through the library attached to the British Council, that I decided a Ph.D. was not for me. I was out in the world for the very first time, and what I realized was that the education I needed for myself and my writing would come from travel, not from school. That said, I needed to earn a living, so I became a teacher.

I think it was Grace Paley who commented that writers don’t lean into their character’s jobs enough, but I am always interested in my characters’ jobs and in the settings, secondary characters, and conflicts that writing about these jobs provides. I tend toward what I know best, the jobs that I have had. The novel I am currently working on, for example, is set in the Asian furniture store my wife and I started and ran for seven years, and as you have noted, adjunct instructors factor in several of these stories. In addition to being a world I know well, adjunct teaching allows me to write about issues of class and sexism. In my nearly thirty years of teaching, I have never had health insurance or the luxury of having just one job. Adjunct teaching is unstable work—you live paycheck to paycheck, semester to semester.

I am also interested in the implied hierarchies within the world of higher education. It is assumed the professor has more power than the student within a classroom, but there are other power dynamics at play. Years ago, when I was in my twenties, I had a stalker. What does it mean to be a young woman teaching a man who is older and bigger than she is? How does being in the closet as a teacher, as so many of us were back in the day, affect these hierarchies? These are some of the questions I wanted to think about in this story.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a line in your story “Are You Happy” that’s been knocking around my head since I read it: “For his father, even tragedy could be multitasked.” One thing that struck me in this story that’s also present in others in the collection, is how differently characters can view and contextualize the same experience. Here, it’s the narrator’s father treating a crash that is life-changing for the narrator as just another agenda item in his day. Especially given the reflective nature of so many of the stories, what draws you to these kinds of discrepancies between characters?

OSTLUND

Some of these stories involve tragic events—the death of a child, for example—and I am interested in the way a tragic event breaks a person’s life into ‘before and after.’ My novel After the Parade was this kind of story—the main character’s father falls off a parade float and dies when the narrator is a child, and he lives the rest of his life in the changed world of that tragedy. I am equally interested, though, in the way someone else’s tragedy serves as a backdrop. Of course, a story is about one thing when the person experiencing the tragedy and the main character do not have a connection and something quite different in the example you refer to in your question. These are not strangers; rather, this is a son who almost dies in a plane crash and a father who treats the situation as a nonevent because the day did not end tragically, not as far as he is concerned. I am also interested in another version of this theme, one in which the potential for violence lurks—the peeping Tom, the stalker, the loaded gun, these specters of violence.

INTERVIEWER

Minnesota and New Mexico both feature prominently in these stories. I found myself struck in particular with the ways that the two places are rendered with characters who have lived in both. What is it that leads you to return to these two places in your writing?

OSTLUND

I spent the first twenty-three years of my life in Minnesota, so when I was ready for the next step, I knew I needed a place quite different—geographically, aesthetically, culturally—from what I knew. I decided to move to New Mexico for graduate school, a decision based 100% on what I, personally, needed. I had a laundry list of needs—to be less shy, to come out of the closet, to embrace the intimacy of friendship more fully—and so I chose a place where I knew no one. Re-invention is always easier when there is no one to point out these changes. Both of these places shaped me deeply, and I am interested in characters who are shaped by a strong sense of place, so writing about Minnesota and New Mexico felt natural, even necessary.

INTERVIEWER

I love the way you use characters’ word selection to drive tension in your stories. It’s such an unexpected source of contention between characters, but it feels completely real when, for example, the use of “soda” instead of “pop” can create a gulf between two characters. How do you think of language as a catalyst for conflict in your stories?

OSTLUND

Thank you. I stole that directly from an interaction with my mother, who got upset once when I used the word “soda.” Though she didn’t verbalize it this way, I suspect it made me seem unknowable to her on some level. In this place where nobody ever used the word “soda” except in reference to baking soda, I seemed suddenly like an outsider, a willing outsider, and how could that be? Who was I? What was this world I now lived in where people used the word “soda”? Sometimes, my characters view words as conferring power, and sometimes they are ways of demonstrating curiosity, especially with child characters. When I was young, I loved words and having opinions about them—“rotunda” sounded ugly but “expectorate” was beautiful. Ultimately, focusing on word selections allows me to explore characters, relationships, misunderstandings, and conflict.

INTERVIEWER

Your novella, “Just Another Family,” is a stunning portrait of a family. I found myself particularly drawn to your narrator’s examination of what she calls vertical history, which she sums up with, “…your family arrives in a place and stays, and everything gets built on top of itself so that the dump where you take the mattress might also be the dump where your father took the Crock-Pot all those years earlier, which might also be the dump where your partner, watching you with a rifle pressed to your shoulder, thinks that she has had enough.” I found echoes of that idea in many of your other stories, too, with characters returning to the places where they grew up only to feel the weight of that vertical history. What is it about family history that speaks to you when you’re writing about these characters?

OSTLUND

In an earlier question, I addressed the way I view time when I am working on a novelistic short story—as vertical rather than horizontal—and this line in my novella came directly from a realization I had regarding time as a craft consideration. In other words, the way I view my family history is similar to the way I view time when I am writing fiction. I am interested in what Flannery O’Connor calls the “manners” of a character, and often these manners arise out of a place. Because I rarely went more than thirty miles from that town of 400 people when I was growing up, it shaped me in very distinct ways, so, of course, I am interested in writing about characters who were similarly shaped.

Years ago, I received a copy of a relative’s handwritten account of how my maternal grandfather’s family came to be in the place that has been the family farm for generations. I was not raised on that farm, but my cousins were, and I know it well. It interests me that my grandfather’s grandmother, Ragnild, was a strong woman who went with her family to farm above the Arctic Circle in Norway, then came to Minnesota via Canada and Iowa, but future generations did not move from this place. I grew up wanting to leave and did, so I feel a connection to Ragnild.

INTERVIEWER

One of the throughlines in the collection is a sense of looming violence that hangs above the characters, particularly women and queer characters. In “Just Another Family,” this is amplified further, with the narrator existing not just under the cloud of potential violence from her family and neighbors but also as part of that cloud herself, also complicit in it. The end of the novella uses the physical guns in this family’s home to illustrate this, putting a gun in the narrator’s hands while also putting them in the hands of her family. It’s a beautifully complicated and resonate moment. Could you tell us more about how you navigate the violent world that surrounds your characters?

OSTLUND

One of the starting points for this novella was the line in which the narrator thinks about her father keeping a loaded pistol above the stove and his belief that none of his children would be stupid enough to play with it. She says, “It turned out I was stupid enough.” That was a line I jotted down years ago during a colleague’s nonfiction seminar.

Several years later, I stumbled across that line in a stack of papers and began pushing into it. As I wrote, I discovered the narrator grew up in a world of guns—as did I—with guns lined up in the entryway and a neighbor who had shot up the back of her childhood house.

The narrator is complicit in the shades of violence that marked her childhood—she is both perpetrator and victim, as is her sister. They carry this knowledge, about themselves and each other, with them. She believes her partner, who is shocked by the role guns played in the narrator’s childhood, will leave her if she knows these stories. How do you tell the person you love stories about your worst self? But if you don’t tell them, how do you build intimacy and trust, knowing there are secrets?

Chekhov claimed the gun on the wall in Act One must go off by Act Three, but as a friend has pointed out, that doesn’t happen in this story. Still, the guns remain. The ending feels hopeful to me, but the potential for violence remains. I should add there is humor at work in this story and the others, which allows me to take on difficult themes. That humor, which is often dark, feels to me distinctly Midwestern.

Thank you for these questions and the opportunity to talk about my new collection!