Living in sunny Chile with her partner, Tatum Vega spends her days surrounded by art at the museum where she works. 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. 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.
Villarreal-Moura has tapped into something as resonant as it is recognizable, and in Like Happiness has given us a beautiful work of fiction that dwells in the gray areas between celebrity and fan, victim and victimizer, absolution and blame.
Like Happiness gives readers a lot to chew on, but questions of race, identity, and sexuality are recurring, and though the book’s present is set two years before #MeToo blew up, the story courses with questions of wrong, right, and the complicated and sometimes intoxicating nature of unhealthy power dynamics.
