Talk Fiction: Adelaide Faith on Turning an Obsession with Her Therapist into a Novel

Adelaide Faith’s Happiness Forever (out May 13 from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) is a book I first encountered in one of my online Zoom workshops years ago, where Adelaide was Zooming in late at night from London. I was immediately fascinated by the idea of Adelaide’s main character, Sylvie, who was obsessed with her therapist.

Although I learned the book started with Adelaide’s obsession with her own therapist, Happiness Forever is a work of fiction; it’s a book that leaves a strange, wonderful impact on its reader. I talked to Adelaide about finding her identity as a writer after working as a vet tech, pushing through the disparity between taste and talent, and more.

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Chelsea Hodson: I read something recently about your book that I didn’t know—that your therapist urged you to take your writing seriously after reading different versions of testimonials you wrote about her services. Can you tell me more about that?

Adelaide Faith: I really, really liked my therapist, and she asked me to do a review for her website. I found the process of writing the review really painful because I hadn’t written for a long time. I spent all weekend on it….I did a silly version where I was like, “Why is she sitting in this room? Someone should be carrying her around ancient lands and fanning her.”

I wrote several different versions and I gave her all of them. I think she must have been like, “Oh my god….” But after she read them she encouraged me to go to a writing class. And I was thinking, “I don’t want to go to a beginner’s class when I’m so old, in my late forties,” but she told me she started training to be a therapist when she was older, and it was fine.

She encouraged me in that way. The book really did start because I was obsessed with her, and I was telling her about it, and she was like, “Why don’t you go write about it?”

CH: I met you after that in one of my workshops, and I’ve seen you publish many short stories since then, and now this fantastic novel. Can you speak more about finding your identity as a writer after that point of thinking, “Maybe this is something I actually want to do.”

AF: Well, when I was in school, I wanted to be a vet, and I was into science. But then when I was seventeen, I met this amazing boy who introduced me to certain writers. He was reading, like, William Burroughs and so I tried, or pretended, to read William Burroughs too.

And he showed me, you know, all The Beats, Herman Hesse, Hunter S. Thompson, and Cormac McCarthy. At that point, I thought, I don’t want to be a vet, I want to be a writer.

But then, on and off throughout my life, I just couldn’t get through that first barrier of writing something and thinking it was terrible. I did manage to write little zines.

When I worked in an office, I got kind of depressed, and had CBT therapy, and that therapist gave me homework which was writing zines and trying to sell them in London. I found one of the zines to show to a friend recently and the writing is really similar to the novel: it’s these two girls who love Pierrot. I’ve always felt slightly depressed unless I’m making something.

CH: So the class helped you take your writing more seriously and made you think, “Maybe I can actually do this”?

AF: Yeah, I liked the teacher, which is so important for me, and she was really encouraging. And then I took that workshop with you and you helped me through the really hard middle part of the novel, when I was saying, “I hate this, it’s not going to be anything.” And I remember you telling me to look at the books on my shelves and remember that those aren’t necessarily the most talented people in the world, they’re just the people who didn’t stop when it got hard.

But I wasn’t confident about my writing. I remember saying to a friend from a writing class, “I almost feels if a baby has written this, it just feels so immature.” But maybe that’s how writing always feels to the person who has written it.

CH: How long did it take for you to finish this book, from its inception to publication?

AF: Seven years.

CH: And what did the process look like to revise Happiness Forever? I know that I first read it with a different title, for instance. 

AF: When I finished the book, I thought, “Oh, that wasn’t really that hard. I didn’t really spend that long on it.” But then I looked back at my notebooks, and I realized I had an insane number of versions of the book. One version was an eight-page essay called “The Pierrot Cure” about a girl who dressed up as Pierrot.

Later I followed the ten-step revision technique you taught in your workshop, which involved reading the manuscript all the way through, and retyping as I edited. I think I was editing one short chapter per day at one point.

But I continued revising. Then, Sheila Heti read the book and gave me advice about the ending, and Mitzi Angel, my editor at FSG, felt the same way about it, so I rewrote the ending, after the book had sold.

CH: How did you find that kind of pressure? You’d sold the book, and then you’re rewriting the entire ending—was that difficult?

AF: Basically, if someone asks me to do a change like that, I can’t think about anything else, so I may as well do it right away. I can’t remember if it was hard or not. I remember I took the manuscript to the beach, but I honestly can’t remember a lot of the process.

I tried not to overthink it, I tried to go into a trance and just do it. I feel like a lot of the time, you just have to sit down and start and then you almost don’t know what you’re doing.

CH: I totally agree with the power of the trance state for creativity. Now that you’ve worked through so many elements of figuring out your own process, do you have advice for writers in the early stages of a book?

AF: When my book sold, I really wanted to help my friends write for some reason. It reminds me of when I gave birth to my daughter, I was immediately like, “Oh my god, this is amazing, I have to train to be a midwife,” but that urge wore off after like three days.

And I remember a friend I had that worked in a bookshop was thinking about writing a book. I bought him a stack of index cards and told him, “Just write one index card per day while you’re working in the bookshop.” I told him to listen to the Morning Writing Club Q&A you did with Bud Smith a couple years ago where he talked about that approach—one index card per day.

I saw him the other day and he said, “I wrote five pages but then I read it through, and I just threw it away because it was so bad.” And I was like, “No, don’t throw it away. At least get a few sentences from it, or cut it up and move it around.” So, that was my advice to him.

CH: Were there certain books that were important to you as you wrote Happiness Forever?

AF: Yes, and that’s my other advice to people beginning to write—to read tons. When I was trying to encourage my tattooist to write, I bought him what I thought was a nice starter pack of novels for writers: King of Joy by Richard Chiem, Someone Who Isn’t Me by Geoff Rickly, Fuccboi by Sean Thor Conroe, and How Should a Person Be? By Sheila Heti. Those books meant a lot to me.

CH: How does it feel to think about people holding your book and reading your work and engaging with it? I know in my own life, I try to think about the things I write as living their own lives without me after publication.

AF: Yeah, now I almost feel an affection for it. As if I didn’t write it.