Angie Kim

When a father goes missing, his family’s desperate search leads them to question everything they know about him and one another—both a riveting page-turner and a deeply moving portrait of a family in crisis from the award-winning author of Miracle Creek. “Brilliant, immersive, and deeply moving, Happiness Falls is more than just a fantastic story well told. It’s a book that will change the way you think—a book that will change your life.”—Julia Phillips, bestselling author of Disappearing Earth, finalist for the National Book Award “We didn’t call the police right away.” Those are the electric first words of this extraordinary novel about a biracial Korean American family in Virginia whose lives are upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing. Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything—which is why she isn’t initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don’t return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone. Or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia’s brother runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in this tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak. What follows is both a ticking-clock investigation into the whereabouts of a father and an emotionally rich portrait of a family whose most personal secrets just may be at the heart of his disappearance. Full of shocking twists and fascinating questions of love, language, and human connection, Happiness Falls is a mystery, a family drama, and a novel of profound philosophical inquiry. With all the powerful storytelling she brought to her award-winning debut, Miracle Creek, Angie Kim turns the missing-person story into something wholly original, creating an indelible tale of a family who must go to remarkable lengths to truly understand one another.

A Novel

Happiness Falls

Lindsay

I don't believe in optimism. I believe there's a fine line (if any_ between optimism and willful idiocy, so I try to avoid optimism altogether, lest I fall over the line mistakenly.

saying we couldn't have known something was wrong because it was such a typical morning, which is an asinine thing to say because why would you assume things can't go wrong simply because they haven't yet? Life isn't geometry; terrible, life-changing moments don't happen predictably, at the bottom of a linear slope. Tragedies and accidents are tragic and accidental precisely because of their unexpectedness.

There's a concept in heuristics called selective perception, a type of confirmation bias that describes the powerful human tendency to make assumptions and even perceive things differently based on how they align with our expectations.

Once you make that first assumption, another cognitive bias takes over: the anchoring bias, people's tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information we get on any given topic.

It's always irked me that the gender mismatch in our looks has girls swooning over John's "pretty-boy" face, whereas people call me "handsome," which I've learned is not a compliment. Whenever men have features deemed "feminine," that makes them more attractive to women (thus, the sensitive male who isn't afraid to cry and the pretty-boy thing girls love), whereas women with "masculine" features (like my strong jaw and nose, and my no-nonsense get-stuff-done attitude) seem to repel men. Proof that women are less rigid about gender conformity and heteronormativity than men? Discuss.

Research shows your genetic optimism makeup accounts for 40% of your happiness.

It's a common mistake, saying verbal to refer to oral speech. It's a pet peeve of mine when people say "verbal, not written," because written is verbal. So why do we call nonspeakers "nonverbal," use the label "nonverbal autism"? It leads to the unwarranted assumption that those people are wholly without words. I've brought this up to people, and they dismiss it as "just semantics." But sometimes semantics matter. Words matter. They influence our thinking.

In music, the longer a dissonant chord is sustained, the greater the emotional satisfaction when it resolves.

At what point would the listener get frustrated and give up on the promise of resolution?

sina (she/her) 

I don't believe in optimism. I believe there's a fine line (if any) between optimism and willful idiocy, so l try to avoid optimism altogether, lest I fall over the line mistakenly. 

Remmi Ahmed

It's funny with siblings, how you think of them as just there, but then something great or awful happens that unearths and makes visible what Koreans call jeong. It's hard to explain in English; it's not any particular emno- tion-not affection or even love--but a complex bond defined by its depth and history: that sense of belonging to the same whole, your fates intertwined, impossible to sever no matter how much you may want to. 

A rare upside of the pandemic: the prohibition of uninvited, unwelcome bombardments of physical affection from parental acquaintances you barely know and can't quite place.

Happiness Falls quotes

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