Happily: A Personal History, with Fairy Tales

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD - A beautifully written memoir-in-essays on fairy tales and their surprising relevance to modern life, from a Jewish woman raising Black children in the American South--based on her acclaimed Paris Review column ＂Happily＂

＂One of the most inventive, phenomenally executed books I’ve read in decades.＂--Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

FINALIST FOR THE SOUTHERN BOOK PRIZE

The literary tradition of the fairy tale has long endured as the vehicle by which we interrogate the laws of reality. These fantastical stories, populated with wolves, kings, and wicked witches, have throughout history served as a template for understanding culture, society, and that muddy terrain we call our collective human psyche. In Happily, Sabrina Orah Mark reimagines the modern fairy tale, turning it inside out and searching it for the wisdom to better understand our contemporary moment in what Mark so incisively calls ＂this strange American weather.＂

Set against the backdrop of political upheaval, viral plague, social protest, and climate change, Mark locates the magic in the mundane and illuminates the surreality of life as we know it today. She grapples with a loss of innocence in ＂Sorry, Peter Pan, We’re Over You,＂ when her son decides he would rather dress up as Martin Luther King, Jr., than Peter Pan for Halloween. In ＂The Evil Stepmother,＂ Mark finds unlikely communion with wicked wives and examines the roots of their bad reputation. And in ＂Rapunzel, Draft One Thousand,＂ the hunt for a wigmaker in a time of unprecedented civil unrest forces Mark to finally confront her sister’s cancer diagnosis and the stories we tell ourselves to get by.

Revelatory, whimsical, and utterly inspired, Happily is a testament to the singularity of Sabrina Orah Mark’s voice and the power of the fantastical to reveal essential truths about life, love, and the meaning of family.

Sabrina Orah Mark is an award-winning fiction writer and poet, who has written the column ＂Happily＂ for The Paris Review since 2018. Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Mark earned a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University. She also earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in English from the University of Georgia. She is the author of the poetry collections Tsim Tsum, and The Babies (winner of the Saturnalia Book Prize). Her collection of stories, Wild Milk, won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Short Story and was a finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. Mark’s accomplishments include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center, and a Creative Capital Award. She lives in Athens, Georgia, with her husband, Reginald McKnight, and their two sons.