So Happy It Hurts
  • Published: 27 July 2017
  • ISBN: 9781473524613
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336

So Happy It Hurts

Formats & editions
EBook
27 Jul 2017
Paperback
15 Aug 2018
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A hilarious debut about being young and looking for meaning - for fans of Girls and Fleabag

‘This lovely, quirky novel will appeal to fans of Miranda July and Sheila Heti’ Red

Ottila McGregor is thirty years old and has decided it’s time to sort her life out. She’s going to quit drinking, stop cheating and finally find true happiness. Easy, right?

Getting in the way of this plan are:
1. Grace, her best friend, who believes self-improvement is for people in their forties.
2. Mina, her sister, who is mentally ill, and it might be Ottila’s fault.
3. Thales, the Greek guy who works in the hospital cafeteria – probably the best, most dangerous person Ottila’s ever met.

Told through a scrapbook of emails, receipts, therapy transcripts and other ephemera, this is an infectious one-off of a novel that makes you wince and laugh in equal measure.
  • Published: 27 July 2017
  • ISBN: 9781473524613
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336
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About the author

Anneliese Mackintosh

Anneliese Mackintosh’s debut short story collection, Any Other Mouth, was published by Freight Books in 2014 and won the Green Carnation Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize, Saltire Society's First Book Award and the Saboteur Award, and was longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Anneliese's short fiction has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio Scotland, and published in magazines and anthologies including the Scotsman, Edinburgh Review, and the Best British Short Stories 2013.

portrait photo of Anneliese Mackintosh

Praise for So Happy It Hurts

A cleverly constructed story, full of trauma, playfulness and wisdom. When portraying fallible lives, Mackintosh’s writing never flinches.

Jason Donald

Impressive and challenging… This debut novel is every bit as assured, honest and innovative as its predecessor… So Happy It Hurts is something of a high-wire act, laugh-out-loud funny at times but also so emotionally honest that it sometimes feels like a punch to the guts… As sharp a novel about 21st-century living as you’ll find anywhere.

Big Issue

Balances irony and earnestness perfectly, offering both a heartbreakingly sincere quest for happiness and an acerbic intolerance of hollow quick-fixes... Anneliese Mackintosh’s latest work is positively radiant.

The Skinny

[A] raw, funny and untidily generous novel... Ottila belongs to the great sisterhood of the Female Fuck-Up. Not the eroticised trainwrecks male writers love to invent, but the real-deal ones like Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag... As much as you’re rooting for Ottila to get her man, that’s not the point; the point is whether she can gain the moral wisdom to live a better kind of life. She’s an Emma steeped in ethanol.

Sarah Ditum, Guardian

I loved the novel’s strong sense of place and the picture it paints of a sparky, inner-city singleton trying to stay on the straight and narrow. Funny, bleak and heart-warming, sometimes all at the same time.

Wendy Holden, Daily Mail

This lovely, quirky novel will appeal to fans of Miranda July and Sheila Heti.

Sarra Manning, Red

Searing… Mackintosh manages to write a book that no one else could pull off with all the same weird panache, peeling back the surface of her main character to expose all the blood and guts and mess beneath.

Diva

It’s patchwork construction… works really well… a jolly, perky read

William Leith, Evening Standard