Marissa Higgins is a lesbian writer and the author of the novels A Good Happy Girl and Sweetener (Catapult, August 19, 2025), a lesbian screwball comedy that follows two exes who turn to online dating after their dramatic split--only to end up seeing the same woman.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Divorcing wives accidentally date the same woman: an artist who is faking a pregnancy. Only one of the wives knows the baby bump isn't real.
On your nightstand now:
I have a bunch of galleys I'm excited to read, including Brandon Taylor's Minor Black Figures, Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung, and Uncanny Valley Girls by Zefyr Lisowski.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I spent a lot of time reading Choose Your Own Adventure books. I liked being able to change the plot and move things around and read in all directions. I was really fearful as a kid and legitimately worried I would be in trouble if I skipped the order of prompts, like proceeding to a different storyline than the one I'd originally chosen. It eventually felt liberating to read whatever direction I wanted, and I liked seeing how stories change. I read a bunch of Star Wars books like that before I'd ever seen the movies. I read the childhood classics of my grandmother's six kids, the Hardy Boys series, Johanna Spyri's Heidi, and the Nancy Drew series. I loved Goosebumps because my mom liked scary movies, and I wanted her to like me.
Your top five authors:
Edmund White, Sigrid Nunez, Emily Austin, Mia McKenzie, Allegra Hyde.
Book you've faked reading:
Clarissa; or The History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson, for a class I was taking. The instructor was really kind and passionate, but the books were impossibly boring. I think I took it because of the time--Tuesday and Thursday in the afternoon, I think--as did the rest of us disappointments (aka my fellow English majors). We had a lot of discussions about sexual violence and the choices women had (have?) access to within a world run by men.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Grown Women by Sarai Johnson. It's beautiful, about four generations of women who love and hate each other, and the ways they hurt each other and themselves. I'm usually not great about multi-generational stories but this one consumed me, and it changed the way I think about the mothers in my life.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Open Throat by Henry Hoke, which is about a mountain lion. I am so excited to read it because I've heard it's wonderfully experimental and short, but I am saving it for when I can read and watch a bunch of stuff from the POV of animals. I recently watched Flow (2024) and sobbed.
Book you hid from your parents:
No one checked what I was reading, but I was really secretive and private about everything online. I was mortified at the idea of someone reading my AOL chats or searches or essays for school. Any book that was remotely gay was interesting to me, but I'd read (and hide) everything.
Book that changed your life:
It's a cliché answer, but The Stranger by Albert Camus. I read it at the beach the summer after I finished college, before I moved to New York for a job. My lasting impression was one of feeling inspired to live fully, which is kind of a funny takeaway from Camus. I'm pretty sure I picked it because it was short and I vaguely related him to Jean-Luc Godard, whose movies I liked.
Favorite line from a book:
Recently, I think it's "I am always happy to bore the spirits with my thoughts, which I think they can hear" from Sam Heaps's beautiful novella The Living God, out on October 1, 2025. It's about obsession, and reading it feels like living in a poem. I keep starting and stopping it because its brief sentences and strange language move me so much it helps me think and write my own stuff better.
Five books you'll never part with:
The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley
The Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop
A small book that is a special gift
The one I keep in my head
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
American Spirits by Anna Dorn, which I think is so funny and smart. It's about pop culture and music and fandoms, really freaky and endearing, and playful with the reader too. It's out in April 2026 from Simon & Schuster. I want to read all of Anna's books again for the first time, because they feel made just for me. But I feel like they're eventually all going to be movies, and I will live them again that way.
Book you're most excited to read this fall:
Palaver by Bryan Washington and Open Wide by Jessica Gross. I really like all of Bryan's work so I'm going to read everything he puts out, and Gross is new to me, but I love the description of the book as well as the cover.
Book you want to revisit:
I was assigned The Awakening by Kate Chopin in high school and argued vehemently that it was a gay text though I'd only skimmed it and was promptly shut down by my peers (who maybe did read it?) who found it more feminist, less lesbian. I also need to read Maurice by E.M. Forster, which I avoided reading in high school because I thought it was too obviously gay. I ended up reading A Passage to India and having nightmares instead.