You Could Be Happy Here

Sink Into the Dream

Wanderlust. Search for identity. Are they mutually exclusive? In Erin Van Rheenen’s debut novel, You Could Be Happy Here, the two impulses are braided alongside the main character’s quest for meaning.

Lucy, our plucky MC, is a thirty-something middle-school science teacher with a passion for insects and ecosystems and their connections to human behavior. Hit with grief after the sudden death of her mother, she travels to Palmita, Costa Rica in search of her father—a man she remembers from childhood, even though she didn’t know of their biological connection until finding evidence in unopened letters at her childhood home—a home now willed to her sister, Faith.

Throughout the novel, the lush descriptions of Costa Rica, alongside the granular details of insects and birds, are replete with authority, as Van Rheenen draws from her personal experience with the area’s fauna, and firsthand cultural knowledge of the Southern reaches of the Americas.

I am so pleased to share more about this book (OUT TODAY!) and its author in today’s post. To find out more about the book, and Erin’s event schedule, click here.

1. The quest for identity seems to be the central yearning for your main character, Lucy. She’s at odds with her only sibling, Faith, and saddened that her mother, now dead, was emotionally unavailable to her, and seemed to favor Faith. Had Lucy’s mother left her house to Lucy instead of Faith, would Lucy still have gone on the quest to find her father in Costa Rica?

Even if their mother had left the house to both girls, Lucy still would have headed to Costa Rica to find her father—just not so quickly or impulsively. Lucy is propelled by grief at her mother’s death and outrage that Faith got the house and their mother never told Lucy about her father. She also feels wounded by what she thinks of as her mother’s long-standing favoring of her sister.

For the sake of drama and higher stakes, I wanted Lucy’s journey to feel off-kilter, rushed (she only has eight days!), and with her not entirely in her right mind. So many people launch themselves into new lives and worlds when they’re at their most vulnerable. I know I did.

2. Each chapter begins with Lucy’s “bug notes.” Did you use them as a prompt while drafting the novel, or did you arrive at the notes afterward? Were the notes curated specifically for each chapter's content?

I wrote the bug notes alongside the story; the one informed the other. Lucy is a science teacher, she’s obsessed with insects, and she looks to the natural world to make sense of human behavior. It would have been odd NOT to feature bugs in the story, especially since Lucy has just landed in a place with such incredible biodiversity. One square mile of Costa Rican rainforest has approximately as many insects as there are people on the planet.

So many of my fun bug facts didn’t make it into the book because I didn’t see an obvious parallel between them and the storyline. Like did you know that the world’s insects weigh more than all the people and land animals combined? The bug notes are meant to be in dialogue with the chapters where they serve as epigraphs. For example, Chapter 10 begins with a description of bromeliad plants, which cling to trees and live off nutrients in the air. Pools of water accumulate at the center of the plant, and protozoa, frogs, and other life forms live in these impromptu ecosystems. At that point in the story, Lucy is trying hard to make sense of the town of Palmita, asking, “How long before I figure out the creatures in the pool than is Palmita?” And towards the end, when there’s a town funeral, the bug notes concentrate on social insects like bees and ants, comparing how insects and human beings deal with their dead.

A note for the entomologists out there; I know that all true bugs (of the Hemiptera order, and having rigid, piercing mouth parts, like aphids and cicadas) are insects, but not all insects are bugs. Then there are the outliers, like spiders (arthropods, not insects or bugs) and lovebugs, which are in fact flies, not bugs. In my book I use “bug” colloquially, to refer to any smallish flying and crawling exoskeletal life form.

3. Authority of place is a definite attribute of You Could Be Happy Here. Your firsthand knowledge of Costa Rica comes through in the details and observations throughout the novel. When you lived there, did you feel—similar to Lucy—like an outsider? Or did you feel like Costa Rica was home?

At a book event for Living Abroad in Costa Rica, my move-abroad guide, someone asked whether I felt more at home in Costa Rica or California. I said I felt more at home in California, but better in Costa Rica. My experience there helped me when I was floundering—I was reeling from a bad breakup, and I had lost faith in myself and to some extent the world. Traveling solo in an unfamiliar place, with a purpose—researching a book—helped me regain my confidence and sense of adventure, and it reminded me that the world is a big and mostly beautiful place.

But like Lucy, I felt like an outsider in Costa Rica, even after several years, and even having traveled to every nook and cranny of the country and having spoken with hundreds of people. Because of my other live-abroad experiences (in Mexico, Nigeria, Ecuador, and Ireland), feeling like an outsider wasn’t unfamiliar to me. I might even say that being an outsider—even in my own country and to some extent, my family—is what feels the most familiar to me. It isn’t necessarily all negative. Lucy longs for a sense of belonging, and so do I. But for me, I’m on the fence about which I value more: a sense of belonging, or a sense of freedom. And being an outsider has its perks. For one, you can see a culture more clearly than someone enmeshed in it. And it puts into high relief the culture you grew up in, the culture that you take for granted as the norm unless you actively seek out other cultures and value systems.

Erin Van Rheenen

4. You’ve written a lot of nonfiction—specifically, travel essays and even a relocation guide for people interested in moving to Costa Rica. How was writing a novel different? Were there some similarities?

Fiction has always been my first love. I have a BA and an MA in creative writing, and I’ve always written fiction alongside my nonfiction. Fiction was harder to perfect and to publish, at least for me, and I needed to make a living. But my mind just naturally defaults to fiction. That genre seems more flexible and profound. And fun!

5. What’s next for you? More fiction? More nonfiction?

Recently I retraced my great-grandmother’s 1941 train journey from Portland, Oregon, to Chicago. She’d just lost her daughter (my mother’s mother, who died at 29) and was visiting her sister and friends in the Midwest to try to assuage the grief. I took the same trip on Amtrak recently, with my great-grandmother’s 1941 train journal to keep me company. She really brought her fellow passengers to life! My own train trip was surprisingly awful for many reasons that may or may not make it into the story. But I don’t even know yet what genre this story calls out for – a humorous travel essay, a reported memoir, a speculative historical novel set on a train, or something else entirely.

Here are a few photos from Erin’s time in Costa Rica. They’ve certainly piqued my interest! Here is the bookshop link to order your very own copy.