‘Like Happiness’: An Interview with Ursula Villarreal-Moura
Photo by Levi Travieso
In Math for the Self-Crippling, a collection of flash fiction stories, San Antonian Ursula Villarreal-Moura mines the Chicana imaginary for histories and memories of wounding that accumulate and shape one’s consciousness. In that same vein, her debut novel, Like Happiness, depicts Tatum, a Chicana in her 30s, living abroad in Chile, who has to confront her own wounded past when a reporter for The New York Times calls her for an interview about her former acquaintance Mateo Domínguez, a famous Puerto Rican writer dealing with sex abuse allegations.
Through her emails to Mateo, Tatum explores how her passion for art and literature converged with the larger forces of social marginalization and the state of Latinx publishing, conditioning her susceptibility to exploitation.
I recently spoke to Villarreal-Moura to discuss how these themes emerge in her work.
Intervenxions edited the following interview for concision and clarity.
Nicholas Duron: Could you walk me through the writing of this book? What sparked the idea for this novel?
Urusula Villarreal-Moura: I began working on this project during my second year of graduate school when I was grappling with questions I had about power dynamics and self-actualization. Like Happiness started off as a short story. Everything I was writing during my MFA studies was relatively brief, so I assumed once I finished the story, I could include it in my thesis. But this story refused to be done. It kept growing and growing until it became a novella and then many years later, I had a full-fledged novel on my hands.
ND: What did it take to get it to publication?
UVM: The road to publication was quite long. Basically, I learned that you think a book is finished about 15 times before it actually is. I’ve also had two agents represent Like Happiness. The first was unsuccessful and the second, well, we’re here now discussing it, so it worked out.
ND: Something I think many readers can empathize with Tatum on is her love of literature and the arts. And there’s a kind of erotic quality to her love of books that mediates her attraction to Mateo. How do you think the erotics of reading draws her to Mateo?
UVM: Tatum is definitely aroused by the intellectual pursuits of writing and reading. She’s in love with language and her outsized love of books finds her romanticizing writers, too. Ultimately, she finds people she considers intelligent more alluring than physically “beautiful” people. This is an important revelation for her. What she deems sexy relates to the mind.
“For decades, Latinx writers had “to prove” themselves—first through indie publishing—before they were offered Big Five contracts. ”
ND: I read your novel as partly a critique of celebrity culture and parasocial relationships with popular figures, but I also read into it a critique of the state of Latinx publishing. Part of the reason Tatum becomes so enamored with Mateo is that his was one of the only books in which she saw herself represented. How would you say Tatum’s vulnerability, and the vulnerability of all Mateo’s victims, speaks to the lack of representation of Latinx stories?
UVM: This novel is definitely a critique of the publishing industry—first the erasure, then the tokenization that happened to many marginalized writers. For decades, Latinx writers had “to prove” themselves—first through indie publishing—before they were offered Big Five contracts.
Courtesy of Celadon Books
Since indie press titles tended to have more limited distribution, it was challenging for the average reader to see themselves represented in books they could readily find at their libraries or local bookstores. Never seeing yourself in literature, in films, media—which was the reality for many marginalized groups in the 1980s, 1990s—has psychological repercussions. This type of intentional erasure can leave people like Tatum vulnerable and in search of a reflection of themselves. It’s possible she wasn’t even aware she was searching for representation, which made her all the more open to being taken advantage of.
Thankfully, we’re in the midst of what will one day perhaps be labeled a Latinx literary renaissance. Now we’re seeing many more Latine writers being published every month. Around the same time Like Happiness was released, so were novels by Cristina Henriquez, Jennine Capó Crucet, Xochitl Gonzalez, and others.
ND: Would you say this novel is also a criticism of Latinidad? While reflecting back, Tatum sits in the audience of one of Mateo’s readings, she looks around at the mostly Black and brown women in the crowd and thinks, “I wonder how many of these women you mistreated or abused. Did you leverage your culture against them? Reel them in with talk about how you were family?” Is the identificatory power of Latinidad a resource for our political empowerment or can it also be a site of struggle for you?
UVM: The novel isn’t a critique of Latinidad so much as it is an exploration of the fact that Latine culture is incredibly varied. Growing up in San Antonio, Tatum assumes she knows what in the ‘90s would have been labeled Latino culture. Once she meets Mateo, she realizes what she assumed was Latino culture was, in fact, Chicano or, more specifically, Tejano culture.
She knows nothing about Nuyorican culture or language, much less the food, music, or rituals. Throughout the novel, she has similar realizations that Latindiad is far vaster than she imagined. In having Tatum make these connections, I’m hoping readers might find room to foster this understanding as well if this awakening parallels their own.
ND: How does this exploration of her identity fit with her decision to move to Chile?
UVM: In Chile, Tatum can either reinvent herself or, if we want to view it a different way, she has the chance to be the person she was always meant to be. In Mateo, she was searching for a connection to her Latinidad. In losing that friendship, she gains an entire country, an entire community.
ND: Midway through the novel, Tatum’s own questioning of Mateo’s behavior toward her happens just as she starts developing a queer desire for another woman living down the hall, which also corresponds with her exploring cultures beyond both Euro-American and Latin American heritage. How do you think Tatum’s burgeoning queerness opens her up not only to exploring other cultures but also to questioning her relationship with Mateo?
UVM: Tatum’s realization that she is queer is a subtle awakening to the fact that if her desires aren’t the “normal” heterosexual ones, perhaps the entire script of her life might turn out differently, too. Like most shifts, though, Tatum’s happens gradually. By learning what doesn’t work, she starts to develop a vision of what kind of dynamic might nurture her.
ND: Something I struggled with in this novel is the automatic skepticism I’ve been trained to adopt when reading first-person narration. I think many readers learn to be attentive to the unreliability of the first-person narrator due to their inherently limited perspective. But as a feminist, I’ve also been moved by other feminist activists to always believe the victim. Was this dissonance intentional, and if so, how do you think we reckon with it?
UVM: Every first-person narrator is unreliable. However, I think of unreliability as a spectrum. As the author, I know things about Tatum that she doesn’t yet know about herself, so I aimed to show readers that gap and let them make of it what they will.
ND: But don’t you think it might be problematic for readers to doubt Tatum about her experience with Mateo? Or might there be two levels of doubt your novel is working with: First at the level of the “truth” of what happened, and second at the level of how she understands or experiences what happened?
UVM: I know some reviewers have been upset and blamed Tatum for how things turned out with Mateo. The novel isn’t aiming to entirely lay the blame on either one of them. As the author, I’m more interested in power dynamics. Some readers have said, “She’s 20 and responsible for herself.”
I’m not arguing that she’s not responsible for herself. Mateo and Tatum were engaged in a toxic dynamic that involved grooming. A 22-year-old priest can groom a devout 50-year-old parishioner to turn over her life savings. How Tatum feels about Mateo probably mimics how the 50-year-old parishioner feels after having been swindled. A level of trust was irrevocably shattered in both scenarios. Grooming is about power dynamics, not age. Many people fail to understand that.
“Our stories are already universal. There is nothing we need to aspire to.”
ND: You’ve been on tour promoting the book for a few months and have had opportunities to engage with many of your readers. What question have you wanted people to ask you about this book that has yet to be asked? Or what has surprised you about how people are reading the book?
UVM: I’m surprised how many readers, including some Latinx ones, have assumed that Tatum is the child of immigrants. She is not. In chapter three, she tells Adam her family has been in Texas for hundreds of years. One rather racist notion that many people have is that if a person isn’t squarely middle class, they must be an immigrant working their way up the socio-economic ladder.
Texas is full of American-born Latinx folks who are not squarely middle class. It’s been interesting and disheartening to see how many people assume either all Latinos are immigrants or that all working-class Latinx folks are children of immigrants. That kind of thinking, even among liberals, is poisonous. If people are thought to be newly arrived, then the logic goes that they can go back to where they came from. In Tatum’s case, she is a native Tejana, as were her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and so on.
ND: Part of what initiates Tatum’s restlessness is her experience in her literature classes at a PWI, reading ostensibly “universal” stories by Anglo-European creatives written for their white, middle-class audience. You and I have talked about the category of the universal. Is this something to which Latinx writers should aspire, to write universal works of Literature with a capital “L,” or do we give up on that ideal?
UVM: Our stories are already universal. There is nothing we need to aspire to. I’m not waiting for critics to grant us the “universal” label because frankly, it might never come. I urge all Latine writers to create the books they want to exist, and a readership will follow, regardless of whichever labels are attached to the work.