Advance praise
A brilliant debut and a beautiful tale of personal discovery, with traveler’s insights and natural history tidbits that made me laugh out loud. But be warned: This book may change forever how you think about family and belonging.
—Pat Murphy, Nebula Award winner and author of The Adventures of Mary Darling
About the book
Lucy—single, childless, in her thirties—studies insects and ecosystems to try to make sense of human behavior. But she is mystified by a series of events that shatter her idea of who she is and where she belongs. Her mother dies prematurely, her sister claims the Northern California family home, and Lucy learns that her biological father is apparently a Costa Rican they knew when the family spent summers in the coastal village of Palmita.
Reeling, disinherited, and recently demoted at work, Lucy heads south in search of this phantom father and the land he may have bequeathed her. But he is nowhere to be found, and none of the locals seem to remember her. The dreamy, off-grid paradise she recalls from childhood has become a hard-edged town leery of hotel-building, forest-razing outsiders. Is Lucy an interloper, too? Or can she rise to the challenge: rethink her place in the world, open her heart, and expand her notion of kinship and home?
Why I wrote the book
It’s funny how sometimes an arrangement of hills or the curve of a coastline can echo your own internal landscape. You’re not sure if the geography is imposing itself on you or if you’re seeing the place through a filter of your own feelings.
That’s how it was when I first saw Cabuya Island, on Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula. It’s not a true island, which is good because it functions as the local cemetery. It’s a tidal island, sometimes one thing—an island—and sometimes another—a peninsula. At low tide you can walk out to visit the graves, along a rocky spit that is swallowed back up by the sea at high tide.
The place’s neither-here-nor-thereness echoed my own displacement. I wasn’t young. I wasn’t old. I wasn’t home in California, and I hadn’t yet made a home for myself in Costa Rica. Recently divorced, I had thrown myself into researching a relocation guide, which took me to every corner of my newly adopted country. But as satisfying as that project was, it didn’t ease my loneliness or scratch the fiction itch that has plagued me since childhood.
I heard stories of the people buried on Cabuya Island, and I started to spin some of my own. I dreamed or channeled or invented a town-wide funeral for a man who had washed out to sea and then been flung back in with the tide. A man who had fathered a girl who hardly knew him, a girl who later in life would come looking for him.
As I worked on other projects, the world of You Could Be Happy Here began to reveal itself. It was a slow accrual of characters and situations, with my own preoccupations filtering in: Is blood really thicker than water? Where do I belong? Why do so many families implode when a parent dies, especially if there’s an inheritance involved?
You Could Be Happy Here is also grounded in my love for Latin America as a whole. Though I was born in Portland, Oregon, and schooled in New York City and Santa Cruz, California, my passion for place really blossomed in the southern reaches of the Americas.
I learned basic Spanish as a child near Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, where our family lived for several months, my father working as a doctor and my mother cooking on a hotplate and sweeping the scorpions out of the house. After college, I took off for South America, eventually landing in Quito, Ecuador, a more-than-mile-high city that was once the northernmost outpost of the Inca Empire. For two years I bumped around Quito on an old Vespa, read Thomas Pynchon novels, and taught Jane Fonda-style aerobics to the music of the Pixies and the Violent Femmes. Later, as a mid-career teacher in San Francisco, I took a sabbatical and moved to Oaxaca, Mexico, where the quality of light left me asombrada (flabbergasted) each day and where from my apartment in a converted convent I could hear workmen chip new paving stones for a 450-year-old Spanish colonial church. While in Oaxaca I wrote a book that was never published and tried and failed to master the Spanish subjective (a verb “mood” rather than tense, which may explain why it’s so high maintenance). Still later, post-divorce, I moved to Costa Rica, looking for adventure and a fresh start. I found both, along with so many shades of green, I’m still counting. I fell hard for this small country with a big heart, basing myself in San José but traveling solo to research what became a 435-page relocation guide, Living Abroad in Costa Rica, and a bilingual children’s book, The Manatee’s Big Day.
Most of all, I wrote this book for YOU. Writers are nothing without readers. Thank you in advance for completing the circuit.