What?! You’re Not Happy?

Some years ago, I was walking down the street with my mom. It was a Friday night, and we had just seen a comedy show to try to cheer ourselves up. We were sad because my father had recently died, very suddenly, very unexpectedly, and (in our opinion) too soon.

A group of bikers zipped past us—not competitive cyclists or triathletes, just people out for a fun, evening ride, meandering around the city. One of them circled back to us and slowed down.

“Are you happy?” he asked. There was no greeting. No “Hello” or “Good evening.” Just the question.

Caught off guard, and wanting simply for him to go away, I lied. “Yeah,” I said. “You?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“Great.”

And he rode on. I don’t know if he was actually trying to spread some happiness, but it didn’t feel that way, because he didn’t actually do anything that might make a stranger happy. He seemed smug to me, and his question seemed an accusation or a test, as if “yes” were the only right answer. As if there were something wrong with being sad. I started to imagine what I would say if another biker ever felt the need to slow down and question me as I walked sadly down the street. Sort of a pacifist revenge fantasy. Listen, pal, I would say, if you want to buy me an ice cream, or give me a hug, or tell me a joke, then go for it. And, thank you, in advance. But don’t just ask me if I’m happy. Because, shit, buddy, I’ve been happy, lots. But I’ve also been sad, lots. Sometimes I don’t even need a reason. This (American?) obsession with incessant gratification is exhausting. And if you can’t let people be sad once in a while without hassling them, well, then I think you know what you can go do. (And, scene!)

I realize, now, that one of the reasons the biker’s challenge made me angry was because I’d been doing something similar to myself for a long time—asking myself if I was happy and, if not, then demanding to know why. Was it true that I sometimes didn’t even need a reason? How could that be? I mean, there was always something to which I could attribute whatever sadness or emptiness I was feeling—a dream broken, a love lost—but was it really the reason? Or was there something else going on deep within me, or even within life itself?

These ruminations eventually crystallized into three questions that inspired Before You Go. Namely, why does life sometimes feel so hard, even when it seems like it shouldn’t? And, is there anything we can do about it? And, if not, then what? (Do we quit? Keep going? Why?) Okay, maybe six questions. Maybe more.

It’s easy to dismiss these questions outright, to believe we are not allowed to ask them about our own life, especially when even a cursory review of the headlines quickly feels like doomscrolling. Surely, says the voice in your head, you are lucky, more than most people alive, more than most who have ever lived. Surely, you have no reason not to be perfectly blissful. What is wrong with you? Yet, as Sasha points out in the novel, “Reason’s got nothing to do with it.” We feel how we feel, and something in me kept asking those three (or more) questions. First, as a human. Then, as a writer.

The answers, at first, felt narrow and overly self-assured: Life is good. You should be happy. Quitting is wrong. True or not, these dogmatic responses not only left little room for art but didn’t even feel very responsive, at least not to me. I became determined (read, compelled) to ponder more deeply and let my imagination run more freely, until the stark, limited, simplistic answers grew fuzzier, dappled, more numerous, and more interesting.

They also grew more fanciful, so that the novel’s vignettes, though ultimately interstitial, were the first parts of the book to come into being. Here is the story of the Before and After, featuring Merriam and Jollis, those “two well-intentioned if somewhat bumbling sprites.” And here are predictions of the far future, which I think of now as “Bannor’s Tales,” though Bannor himself didn’t emerge until later. I love these vignettes, and the level of abstraction at which they exist is critical, yet I also knew there was a more rooted, human story to be told. Enter Elliot Chance, along with Sasha and Bannor, all of whom grapple with the novel’s three fundamental questions in their own ways, and arrive at their own answers.

Some of these answers surprised me. At least one of them was different at the end of the novel than what I had presumed at the beginning. Among the many revelations, discoveries, and aha moments I experienced during the writing of the book, this evolved answer was perhaps the most profound for me. I can’t describe it here without spoiling some of the fun, but suffice to say that, over the course of the writing, I think I grew up a little more. For this, as well as for a great many other things, I am grateful.

Happy, even.