The work of Ursula Villarreal-Moura abounds with appealing qualities, from formal innovation to a penchant for reckoning with big ethical questions. Her debut novel Like Happiness tells the story of Tatum, a young woman who forms a connection with a writer she’s long admired — and later comes to question certain things she’d long taken for granted about that relationship. I talked with Villarreal-Moura about the genesis of that novel, writing about feeling at home, and finding the right structure to tell this story.

In the last few years you’ve had both a collection of short stories and now the novel Like Happiness come out. Were the two books written roughly at the same time? Did they feed into each other at all or was it more that you finished one and then moved on to the next one more definitively?

I went to grad school thinking that I was going to be a little bit like Raymond Carver and just write short stories. I didn’t think I was capable of writing a novel and so I was intrigued and wanted to do it, but also intimidated. I wrote a short story, which was Like Happiness, but then it became a novella. I just kept expanding it and was kind of tricking myself into writing a novel.

There were times where I would have this cognitive moment where I thought, “I’m actually writing a novel.” And then I would not want to write. So I gave myself these little writing assignments to just have fun. I ended up writing up a bunch of flash fiction that then finally came together as a book before my novel did.

Like Happiness has a structure that moves around in time, and there are a few places where you leave what has happened in your protagonist’s life unsaid and let the reader fill in the blanks. You talked before about the novel being daunting to write; was more that more the size of it or the structure?

It was definitely the structure. I knew that Tatum was going to be talking to someone, but I didn’t know at first who she was going to be recounting this to. I didn’t know if it was going to be a best friend, or who it would be. And because my protagonist is somewhat… I don’t want to say friendless. She does have friends within the book, but she’s kind of her own little island at times. I think that’s what kind of makes her the perfect person for M. Domínguez, because she’s somewhat apart from a network of people, right? She has people, but it’s not the most secure friend group in the world.

I really struggled with who she was going to address this to. When I realized, “Oh, she’s addressing it to him,” then it all clicked for me and the structure came a lot more easily with that. But with the dual timeline, I actually didn’t have that until much, much later. Around the time that the book went on submission, my agent and I had just started talking about that. We had already submitted the novel to some places and hadn’t for others. We decided to see what happened. When Celadon bought it, they definitely were on board with the dual timeline.

All of the places that this novel is set feel very, feel very lived-in. Was there anything that you did in particular to kind of make sure that those places felt like a realistic, lived-in version of the the particular cities and towns where they’re where they’re set?

I’m glad you got that impression, because that was really important to me. I wanted the reader to feel a distinct mood in each of the places. I think a lot of that can be conveyed, at least in the San Antonio part, with some of the vernacular that people use, the locations where she’s going. The types of conversations that people are having and the things that interest them versus the things that interest people in New York are really different.

For better or worse, I have been someone who loved my hometown, but I also felt like there was a little bit of a timer on it. Similarly, as much as I love New York City — and I lived there for quite a while — the last few years of my life in New York, I did like wake up in a panic sometimes because my to-do list was so long and I had to go to work. After work, I’d have to do something like see this person and then I’d have to pick up this thing. And then I said I was going to meet someone for dinner and then pick up whatever dry cleaning if it was still open. It was just so nonstop.

It’s really easy because if you want to unwind at nine o’clock somewhere, you can and you can stay there or go somewhere else, meet someone else at like 10:30, 11 and then go. There’s no end to it. Whereas in a lot of other towns, I feel like things close down. So it felt very like a spool that just kept unspooling further and further. It brought me a lot of anxiety living in New York at that point because if you want to unspool, the city allows that. And with that comes the expense of living that way.

I really was trying to kind of transmit that sense of knowing that you have to leave a city, which Tatum does right before she leaves New York. She just knows there is no way that she can continue living there based on everything that’s just happened to her, based on where her life is right now. And she does leave, thankfully.

I don’t know that I would call this book a MeToo novel, but it certainly feels like it’s in dialogue with some of the conversations that surrounded that. Had you begun writing it when various cultural scandals were breaking? Or was it more coincidental that you were starting work on this at the same time that a lot of really unpleasant stuff was coming to the surface?

I started working on this when I was in grad school at Sarah Lawrence around 2011. MeToo, I think, came around around 2017, but there were definitely things happening prior to 2017. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in those stories. I was just hyper-fixated on the idea of power dynamics, even within an ethnic group that’s marginalized and how people can get further marginalized within those small communities. 

That was more the driving force for me. How can I explore this? How can I take this under a microscope and see what’s happening on an almost cellular level? And then when MeToo happened, I still hadn’t finished the book. When it did sell, people were talking about MeToo and it felt strange to have this label — because the label one hadn’t existed and it wasn’t the primary interest that I had originally. It does feel a little weird sometimes when people label it a MeToo book. I understand why and I do think there are a lot of similarities.

There’s a moment early in the book where Tatum talks about the idea of loving another person’s imagination. I found that incredibly evocative, but also something that as a reader, I could certainly relate to. Where did that insight into why someone would become such a voracious reader or such an enthusiast for literature come from?

The last couple of years that I was living in New York, I really wanted to write. I had gone to New York City with the intention to become a writer and it just didn’t happen. I became a teacher and I enjoyed all the arts in New York, but there was this wall that was there. I wrote some poetry for a girlfriend I had. Other than that, I wrote emails and there was nothing else to that.

In order to not feel completely devastated by my own failure, what I started to do was when I would get out of work, I would go to MoMA and watch a foreign movie. A lot of times there were Q&A sessions afterwards with the directors. Once or twice there was even Spanish TV interviewing people coming out of the theater, asking what they thought of it.  I was young and ignorant and didn’t even know how to answer the reporters, even though I spoke Spanish, because they were asking questions about the historical context of the film and all these things that were just beyond me.

I was just there to absorb the art. I didn’t necessarily have the tools to analyze it and to tell you why it was fantastic or what it was a commentary on historically. I felt very humbled and also very excited that there were these people who were creating these things that were fueling these conversations that were so interesting and important to me. I just felt incapable of that.

I grew to really admire a lot of the people that were making these films and producing the art at MoMA as well. It was really easy for me to know what that feels like, to feel really impressed with someone’s ability and to be in awe of them. And on the other side of that is sometimes feeling limited and feeling like maybe I’m not capable of that, or maybe the person is somehow better than me in a sense, because they have self-actualized and they are doing these things, and I’m still in a phase where I don’t know what I want to say.

In this novel, you’re reckoning with big ethical and moral questions. Did your own feelings on some of that end up shifting over the course of writing it and editing it and revising it?

There are a lot of people who read this and thought, this happened to Ursula . It didn’t, and this isn’t me.  But having lived in this world for so long I do see a lot of the nuance, and hopefully that comes across on the page as well. Was Tatum groomed? Some people would say, absolutely. And there’s the question of, can you be groomed as an adult? I personally think someone can be groomed as an adult, especially in certain power dynamics. I think a priest can groom a 50-year-old man or a 60-year-old woman or a child.

I think these positions of power lead to unusual circumstances and dynamics within interactions with people. I really wanted to show the nuance and, and my understanding of what Tatum is responsible for. How does this dynamic perpetuate itself or get broken? And if these are two grown adults, where does it break? How does this end? How does it not just continue forever?  Those were all questions I was thinking about.

What are you, what are you working on these days?

I have worked on so many things since March 2024 when this came out. If you had asked me then, I’d tell you that I was working on a novel. And then if you asked me before then, I would have told you I was working on a memoir. For now, I am working on essays, an essay collection. I’ve got a lot of momentum, things are really firing. And it’s one of those things where I finish for the day and then I’m falling asleep and I get ideas as I’m falling asleep and then I’ve got to write them down and then I can’t fall asleep necessarily. It’s an exciting place to be. It’s also kind of exhausting because if you have too many of those days in a row, then I’m exhausted.

Photo: Levi Travieso

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