Excerpt from Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
Are You Happy?

Marvin Helgarson smoked a pipe. When he listened to us, he nipped at the pipe—pah, pah, pah—the way that people who smoke pipes do, and when he told us things about our writing, he jabbed the pipe in the air for emphasis. I liked Marvin Helgarson. He was tall, not just everyday tall but tall even by Minnesota standards, though that's not why I liked him. I'm just trying to give details, what Marvin Helgarson called "salient features."

The class met Tuesday evenings in the Humanities Building library, sixteen of us wedged in around two long wooden tables that came together in a T with Marvin Helgarson at the head. It felt like Thanksgiving the first night, all of us too close together and filled with dread, though later, after Marvin Helgarson explained about perspective, I could see that maybe that was just my perspective.

"Liars and thieves," said Marvin Helgarson to get things going. "That's what you get with a room full of writers." He rose and swept out his arms like Jesus to include us all.

He meant it as an icebreaker, and most of us chuckled, but the woman across from me said, "Oh dear. I didn't know anything about that"—meaning, I guess, that she had a dif¬ferent idea about writers and writing, a dif¬ferent idea about what she had signed up for. Her name was Wanda, and she had large warts on her chin and cheeks, 78 Lori Ostlund and later these warts would appear on the characters in her stories. We were always nervous about discussing them, worrying, I suppose, that we might read something into the warts that Wanda had not intended and that she would know then what it was that people saw when they looked at her.

"Wanda," said Marvin Helgarson, "I don't mean writers are really thieves." He paused, picked up his pipe, and sucked on it. "It's more like when someone lends you a pen to use, and then you just don't give it back." About lying, he said nothing.

"You're going to be working together intimately," Marvin Helgarson said, "so you need to know who you're dealing with." He asked for a volunteer to begin the introductions, and Fred Erickson, who was wearing a tie with a treble clef on it, jumped right in, describing his family and hobbies and years as the director of a choir in Idaho, a position from which he was now retired. Idaho seemed far away to me, and I wondered how he had ended up in Moorhead, Minnesota, but I didn't ask because I was intimidated by my classmates, most of whom came to campus once a week for this class but were adults with jobs and families the rest of the time.

I took a lot of notes that semester, tips that Marvin Helgarson shared to help us with our writing, like when he told us that sometimes the things that seemed most compelling to write about should not really be written about at all. They were just anecdotes, he said, odd things that had happened to us that were interesting to discuss in a bar but were not literary, by which he meant that they could not "transcend the page." He explained this the first night of class, jabbing the air with his pipe so that we understood it was important, and then he said it again several months later when we discussed the nutty lady's story about a woman who cleaned rest stops along I-94. In the story, the woman and her cleaning partner were finishing the rest area near Fergus Falls when they discovered a body inside one of the trash cans. The story, which was just two pages long, mainly a lot of boring details about cleaning that established authenticity, ended like this: "The woman was dead and she was also naked. We were shocked and scared, and after the police came, we finished the bathrooms and went home."

When Marvin explained to the nutty lady that it wasn't really a short story, that it was more of an anecdote, she stood up. "Anecdote?" she said. "This really happened, you know. It happened to me, right after my asswipe husband left and I had to be at that job every morning at six." She snorted. "Anecdote." Then, she walked out. It was late, nearly nine o'clock, and we could hear her footsteps echoing, not only because the building was empty but because she was wearing ski boots.

Excerpted from Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund. Copyright © 2025 by Lori Ostlund. Excerpted by permission of Astra House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.