Are You Happy?
Stories by Lori Ostlund
Astra House
Published May 6, 2025
What are we, as members of modern society, if not daily battling the urge to rage against the monotony and injustices of our existences, to scream the unkind or inappropriate at just the wrong moment? We’re sad and small, we’re in love and conflicted, we’re able to stand up for ourselves, sometimes. We’re writers and antique furniture sales people, friends, mothers, and children.
Across eight stories and one novella, Lori Ostlund explores the problems, large and small, from youth to dying breath, of relationships, family, grief, wanting, and pain. They are small in scope and share loose variations on a handful of characters: listless adult children, usually queer, caught between their childhoods in Minnesota or New Mexico and their chosen lives on the coasts or back in their hometowns, where they never thought they’d be. Their partners are East Coast intellectual Jews and their families are not very understanding of their lifestyles, and they are deeply imperfect in their humanity. Their cats are named Gertrude. Each one deals with the everyday wrongs faced by well, everyday people, and while the content and approach may feel a bit repetitive by the time you’ve finished the collection, Ostlund’s real love and tenderness towards her characters is clear, sustaining the reader’s investment.
As mentioned, the stories—their settings, characters, and themes, even pet cat—mirror and mimic one another, with repeated themes of unmet emotional needs and unfulfilled familial relationships. Sexual assault, parental abuse and neglect, and other themes of violence and abuse surface from the jump and continue steadily throughout, so reader be warned, but Ostlund treats these visceral, realistic scenes with a gentleness that prevents it from crossing into trauma-porn territory.
In stories centered on both youth (The Bus Driver, Aaron Englund and the Great Great), and elders (The Peeping Toms, Aaron Englund and the Great Great, Are You Happy?, Just Another Family), an almost innocent frankness pervades. I read aloud, and faltered, several times, the pain bleeding fiercely through the pages. Horrors, like a young woman alone on a train of drunken soldiers, are considered “not interesting to think about.” (The Peeping Toms, pg. 114), a father’s presence undesirable: “—for the house took on a different shape when he and his anger were part of it—” (Just Another Family, pg. 207).
Ostlund’s consistent voice also carries a good dose of dark humor, too, making for quick and engaging reads in bite-sized portions. Glib —“Rather, she imagined it working something like a frequent-buyer card, ten punches and you were in love,” (The Gap Year, pg. 26)I—but funny. She renders enough detail to engender care for the characters, but so much as to make you too sad to see them go; the window into their lives, at that moment, in reflection, is enough. She reminds us that we can choose to arm ourselves with tenderness and compassion, but we can also choose just how far to extend that understanding.
What is right? What is a resolution? Don’t turn to Ostlund for answers. In her world, as in this one, people keep moving forward, whatever that needs to look like for them, in order to come to terms with reality just enough to go on. Time and again authority figures fail those in need, fail to right wrongs or protect the vulnerable. We come to expect it, as do her characters. The world does not get better, but we learn to hunker down, protect ourselves and our loved ones, and give up on the pursuit of happiness. “Which came first, losses or depression?” (The Peeping Toms, page 118).
I may have enjoyed the collection more with time to digest between stories— reading them back to back in a short window left things feeling a bit one-note for me. That said, Ostlund is no doubt a strong writer with a singular perspective and a humorous hand well suited to help the trauma soup slip down.
