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

We didn't see the crazy lady again, but at the beginning of the next class Marvin showed us what she had left in his mailbox: a manila envelope with our stories for the week, chopped into strips with a paper cutter. You see, she really was crazy. But also, she'd had enough of us I think, enough of us telling her stuff about her writing. Three weeks earlier, she'd submitted a story about a woman whose vagina hurt all the time, except when she was having sex. As a result, her husband, who was a farmer, got very tired of having sex all the time and told her that she needed to go to the doctor to have her vagina checked. "I'm putting my foot down" is what he said, which made me laugh, though I didn't say so because I didn't think the story was supposed to be funny.

When the woman and her husband spoke, it seemed like they were from Ireland, but when they drove into town to see the doctor, they drove to Bemidji, which is in Minnesota. I raised my hand and said they sounded Irish, pointing to things like "lassie" and "thar" because Marvin had told us to back up our comments with examples from the text, but the crazy lady looked pleased when I said they sounded Irish. "Yes," she said. "They're from Ireland. They moved to Minnesota when they were young in order to have an adventure and be farmers and also because something tragic happened to them in Ireland and they needed a fresh start."

"I guess I missed that," I said and began shuffling back through the story.

"No," she said. "It doesn't say it. It's just something I know. I was creating a life for my characters off the page, the way that Marvin said we should."

"That's a lot to have off the page," pointed out Thomas in what I thought was a very nice voice. Thomas was also one of the older students in the class. The first salient feature about Thomas was that his parents met at a nudist colony, where they were not nudists because they worked in the kitchen, chopping vegetables and frying meat. The other salient feature about Thomas was that he was a minister. I knew these things because he sometimes wrote his sermons at Ralph's, the bar that I hung out at, and one night we drank a pitcher of beer together and talked, but when we saw each other in class the next week, we both felt awkward.

"But the story isn't about them leaving Ireland," said the crazy lady triumphantly. "It's about"—she paused because I guess even a crazy lady feels strange saying "vagina" to a minister—"the pain in her female parts."

None of us knew what to say, so we looked down at the story, at the scene in which the woman and her husband, who was tired from having sex all the time, visited the doctor. When she was in the doctor's office, lying on the table with her feet in the stirrups, the doctor, who was an elderly man, positioned himself between her legs and called out, "Three fingers going."

This was supposed to be a minor detail I think, but Tabatha, who was a feminist, got mad. "That's ridiculous," she yelled at the crazy lady. "What kind of a doctor would say, 'Three fingers going'?"

"Doctors are just regular people," the crazy lady yelled back. "They get tired of saying the same things over and over, day after day. This doctor is like that. He's old, and he's tired. I am showing that he's a regular person who is exhausted and wants to retire. I am developing his character."

"That's not development," Tabatha said. "Then the story becomes about him, about how he's a misogynist and is going to get sued one of these days for saying things like 'three fingers going' to women when they're in a vulnerable position."

Tabatha was not someone I wanted to be friends with, but I liked having her in class because she never disappointed me. Her first story, called "Cardboard Jesus," was about this guy Bart who spends all day watching television, and then one day a cardboard man jumps out of the TV and starts going on and on about how Bart needs to change his life, so Bart names the little man Cardboard Jesus. Finally, Bart gets tired of Cardboard Jesus making him feel bad about his life, so he puts Cardboard Jesus in the garbage disposal. The story ends with Cardboard Jesus getting chewed up, and the last line is him calling out from inside the disposal, "Why hast thou forsaken me?"

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.