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A college dropout with a talent for terrible decisions falls obsessively in love with a spiritual influencer, only to find the line between devotion, desire, and delusion growing dangerously thin, in this tender and funny literary debut.
If Holden Caulfield changed adult diapers for a living and dreamed of touching the face of God, he might look something like Lovage, a caretaker at a group home in Toronto. Like many young men on the brink, Lovage is primed for the holy and the obsessive. Enter Octavia, a spiritual influencer in cowboy boots with gorgeous breasts, who draws him into her cultish orbit, one podcast at a time. Soon enough, Lovage and Octavia are exchanging horny emails about God, and Lovage dares to dream of a shimmering, sublime life, free of diapers and fungal toenail cream.
After months of correspondence, they meet up at Soul Summit 2.0, where Lovage’s high-minded notions of transcendence are tempered by clout-chasing and bad sex. Idolatry is a sin, perhaps because it’s always disappointing—and when Lovage and Octavia fall from their heavenly pedestal, he has nowhere left to hide, and no one to hide himself from.
Hilarious, poignant, and delightfully profane, I Was Happy is a stunning literary debut about our innermost human longings for love, God, and transcendence.
“I Was Happy is a blistering satire of contemporary sex, spirituality, and digital anomie. But Alec Gewirtz isn’t just kidding around. His narrator’s addled schemes and secret shames (and shameful secrets) are all forms of genuine seeking and yearning, albeit for the wrong things in the wrong places in the wrong ways. The result is a smart, searching, propulsive comic novel that, indeed, made me happy.” —Justin Taylor, author of Reboot
“I Was Happy is dark, subversive, and completely hilarious. Alec Gewirtz is a major talent, and his sentences are so sly and clever I kept going back to reread them. I haven’t had this much fun with a novel in years.” —Kimberly King Parsons, National Book Award-nominated author of Black Light