Misreading the Past to Chart the Future

The artists are at a dinner party gossiping about a dead woman. They say it was an overdose. Her mother doubts whether it was a suicide, but the unnamed narrator of Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love (2025) never questions it. Rebecca, a failed actress, had been a fixture in the art scene of Dimes Square, the Lower East Side neighborhood where the novel takes place. She acted in small plays, but she never made it onto the big screen like the Old Hollywood actresses she idolized. The last time the narrator had seen Rebecca perform, and they were close once, was a one-woman show in which Rebecca wept in a “faux-vulnerable confessional act about her madness about her troubled past,” already suggesting a panic about precedent. Rebecca confessed that “the entire construction of herself that she had been peddling up to that point was an act.”