The Secret Origin of HappyFruit
Here’s another thing that was included in All the Birds in the Sky until pretty late in the process – the details about HappyFruit, the defunct company whose office Laurence holes up in, along with all the other geeks. Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about HappyFruit!
Originally, in the book, you get this moment where Laurence and the other members of the 10 Percent Project are trying to make a super intense, life-or-death decision. And just when things are at their most emotional and taxing, we suddenly get all the details about HappyFruit, the company that we’ve been hearing about for a while. It’s a weird moment in an already super-weird scene:
Once again, nobody spoke for a
while, as everybody processed this.
HappyFruit
was started by a guy who’d worked at one of the pharma giants, developing the
next generation of antidepressants, and Cyrus was on a fruit kick. Cyrus ate
nothing but fruit, at every meal, and kept an ornate journal of his bowel
movements. He had boxes of organic fruit delivered to his office every day, and
he could go through ten pounds a week, just at work.Cyrus’ wife Mimi also
started eating nothing but fruit because she felt uncomfortable eating other
stuff around him and he had sold her on the health benefits. But Mimi felt
draggy and exhausted on an all-fruit diet, and the more she forced herself to
keep eating apples and fresh berries all day, the more depressed she became. To
her protein-starved brain, life just didn’t seem worthwhile or even livable –
so she tried to kill herself.When she finally got home after a month under
observation at the best hospital Cyrus could buy, Cyrus announced that he’d
figured out the solution to the problem: If the fruit contained chemicals to
make you happier, then Mimi wouldn’t feel so bad about subsisting on it. He
spent months and millions developing genetically modified fruit, with small
doses of SSRIs and NMDA-antagonists in every bite. Good for your mind, good for
your body. Mimi divorced Cyrus a few months after he founded HappyFruit, which
managed to stay in business two whole years.
Top image: Matthew Peoples
