Memorable and often hilarious: These are the queer and queer-adjacent people in Lori Ostlund’s second short story collection, Are You Happy?. The nine stories—set in what uncharitable coastal folks refer to as “flyover country”—are dripping with dark humor and feature a cast of Peeping Toms, stalkers, and grief-stricken women with access to guns. Ostlund herself is a daughter of the heartland (Minnesota). Are You Happy? reflects her familiarity with and affection for sensitive souls balancing vulnerability with stoicism in the face of good-weird/bad-weird situations.
Are You Happy? is rich with recurrences from previous work as well as across the stories. Those familiar with Ostlund’s novel After the Parade (2015) will recognize that book’s protagonist in “Aaron Englund and the Great Great.” The collection includes other repeat characters—or at least recycled names—such as a “bureau cat” named Gertrude and a romantic partner called Miriam. Is naming languor to blame for the name reuse? Unlikely. Gertrude and Miriam might be Ostlund’s Platonic ideals of a cat and a girlfriend. Given the collection’s themes of death, loss, violence, and danger, Gertrude and Miriam offer cozy comfort.
Lori Ostlund’s stories demonstrate a sensibility attuned to the everyday strangeness of things. A student wonders where to look when her cross-eyed professor is speaking; it is impossible ever to directly meet his gaze. A rich, lonely lesbian picks up a woman at a restaurant and invites her to leg wrestle. Take note: Ostlund is much too much of a Midwesterner for leg wrestling to be a euphemism.
Are You Happy? is also distinctive for its strong queer sensibilities. In particular, the author is fond of exploring emotions where the tragic and the humorous intersect, a notably universal experience that is also an important facet of American queer life.
Somehow, even enveloped in wry humor, the collection is sweet. The stories are tender, honest, and earnest—not the sort of adjectives given to hanging out and smoking cigarettes with dark humor. Therein lies the brilliance of this collection. In the namesake story, “Are You Happy?,” a dying, intolerant, and unkind mother continues to judge her adult gay son even as she makes a deathbed request. In “A Little Customer Service,” a group of friends are slyly referred to as “professional lesbians”—double meaning intended.
Nowadays, cancel culture is an expedient way to shut out unwanted perspectives, which Are You Happy? resists doing. Here, family, strangers, and acquaintances coexist, behaving in ways that unsettle, disturb, and frighten one another. In “The Stalker,” a creepy student in the habit of intimidating the faculty at his community college is not especially sympathetic. Yet as seen through the eyes of his lesbian instructor, the peculiar, enigmatic veteran retains his humanity. Still, we are left wondering if his enthusiasm for porn and guns do not portend something more sinister simmering in his spite sauce.
The homophobic mother of a queer adult child shows up in more than one story. She is not entirely unlovable and yet her disapproval is palpable. Many readers will relate to the adult child who struggles to maintain family ties while having a fundamental aspect of one’s identity—in this case, queerness—delegitimized. What happens to a person’s sense of self-worth as they navigate a difficult, passive-aggressive mother who neither fully accepts nor rejects the adult child she torments?Lori Ostlund is a literary late bloomer who did not publish her first novel until age 50, yet she has—by her own account—always been a writer. The experience of being in adjunct professorial hell burbles up in more than one story and is a lifestyle with which Ostlund is well-acquainted. Adjunct instruction in colleges and universities is unstable, poorly-paid work that has become increasingly common over the past 20 years while the corporatization of higher education has meant money infusions to support administrative bloat. The grim reality for so many talented and educated people who remain in academia as adjuncts is that they get burnt out from piecemeal teaching, a lack of support, and low pay. (No small number live in poverty and have been forced to live in their cars.) Inspiration to create under such circumstances does not come easily. Readers will be grateful that Ostlund never abandoned her own creative work even while toiling as an adjunct writing instructor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, struggling writers appear in more than one of these beautifully-crafted stories. One suspects the author’s persistence and eventual flourishing—winner of the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction is just one of her accolades—are due to qualities she shares in common with her characters: the ability to connect with other humans and to find humor in one’s darkest hour.
FICTION
Are You Happy?
By Lori Ostlund
Astra House
Published May 6, 2025
