Like Happiness

by Ursula Villarreal-Moura

Why would you want to be with someone if they didn’t change your life?… Life only made sense if you found someone who would change it, who would destroy your life as you knew it. –ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA, BONSAI

In high school, I realized that nearly every writer I admired was from Massachusetts. Sylvia Plath was the first, followed by Emily Dickinson, then Robert Lowell, Susanna Kaysen, and Anne Sexton. In each of their works, I identified with the suffocating sense of malaise, and in the case of Dickinson, with her isolation and misanthropy.

My diet consisted of the Brontës, Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and occasionally Henry James or Oscar Wilde.

For fun, I read Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel, Wasted by Marya Hornbacher, and the somewhat risqué Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson. I lived in Sawyer Library, thumbing through shelves, searching for art books containing work by Basquiat or Leonora Carrington.

It was hardly surprising, then, that I ended up in a D. H. Lawrence spring seminar my junior year. The novella St. Mawr had been a breeze to read, though not terribly pleasurable.

“For next week, read The Rainbow. I think you will all have lots to say about Ursula Brangwen,”

I sat on my bed, admiring a print of Egon Schiele’s Sitting Woman with Legs Drawn Up hanging over my desk. In total, I had prints of two Egon Schieles, two Jean-Michel Basquiats, two Georgia O’Keeffes, an Andy Warhol, and a Franz Kline on my walls.

Sometimes I ventured to the McNay to gaze upon Kirchner’s Portrait of Hans Frisch, which endlessly fascinated me. In the painting, the subject is reclining on a love seat, his face a contemplative mélange of mustard, plant-green, and navy hues. Other times I made my way to the San Antonio Museum of Art, where I scared myself shitless with the Oceania exhibits. All the old vessels contained spiritual echoes of erased tribes. Standing in a room with recovered artifacts—war tools and masks with exaggerated eyes and preserved hair—made me feel vulnerable and haunted, so I preferred being around books.

I knew plenty of writers were alive, like Sandra Cisneros, Amy Bloom, and Susanna Kaysen, whose books I liked,

I’m reading Everything That Rises Must Converge by F. O’Connor. I love her. I’m also rereading Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko.

“Anything by Oscar Wilde, Flannery O’Connor, Sandra Cisneros, or Haruki Murakami.”

Tupac and Nas lyrics sometimes mirrored my parents’ creepy religious talk, yet hip-hop made it sound delectable and deep.

I had begun associating New York City with self-realization. It was, after all, where I’d met you and where you lived. Since your reading in Union Square, I’d come to view the city as a playground where dreams go to actualize. It was no coincidence that many of my favorite books—A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Invisible Man, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Motherless Brooklyn—were set in New York. Living in New York would also situate me closer to the museum scene: the Met, MoMA, Guggenheim, Whitney. And closer to you.

we chatted for two hours about an out-of-print Nikki Giovanni poetry collection, and The Driver’s Seat, an unnerving novella.

we’d been analyzing the many layers of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Blind Assassin,

Sure, Isabel Allende still released novels and Roberto Bolaño was starting to be “discovered” by English-reading audiences, but for at least a decade no US-born Latinos made it,

I was on the first floor of Book Culture, flipping through Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño, when the message arrived.

While in Santiago, we could visit Roberto Bolaño’s birthplace and browse bookstores.

After class, I dropped by the Strand or Three Lives & Co. and continued my sexuality research. I stumbled across Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, which convinced me that life-changing adventures still awaited me.

As a lifetime reader, I’ve learned to cultivate empathy even for villains.