A college dropout with a talent for terrible decisions falls obsessively in love with a spiritual influencer, only to find the line between devotion, desire, and delusion growing dangerously thin, in this tender and funny literary debut.
If Holden Caulfield changed adult diapers for a living and dreamed of touching the face of God, he might look something like Lovage, a caretaker at a group home in Toronto. Like many young men on the brink, Lovage is primed for the holy and the obsessive. Enter Octavia, a spiritual influencer in cowboy boots with gorgeous breasts, who draws him into her cultish orbit, one podcast at a time. Soon enough, Lovage and Octavia are exchanging horny emails about God, and Lovage dares to dream of a shimmering, sublime life, free of diapers and fungal toenail cream.
After months of correspondence, they meet up at Soul Summit 2.0, where Lovage's high-minded notions of transcendence are tempered by clout-chasing and bad sex. Idolatry is a sin, perhaps because it's always disappointing--and when Lovage and Octavia fall from their heavenly pedestal, he has nowhere left to hide, and no one to hide himself from.
Hilarious, poignant, and delightfully profane, I Was Happy is a stunning literary debut about our innermost human longings for love, God, and transcendence.