Happiness Falls

American author Angie Kim’s second novel, Happiness Falls (2023), follows her debut, Miracle Creek (2019), which won the Edgar Award for First Novel.

A philosophical thriller that centers on a family, Happiness Falls blends elements of literary fiction with suspenseful elements of mystery. Kim subverts tropes of the missing-person narrative through her treatment of complex subjects including the Korean American experience, COVID-19, raising children with disabilities, racism, and immigration. Kim has also suggested that one of her primary aims with Happiness Falls is dismantling the bias of oral fluency as representative of cognitive ability. The novel also features complex family dynamics, as well as the possibility of uncanny connections among family members. Kim has noted that her inspiration for Happiness Falls was her experience as a Korean American, including the frustrations with not being understood as a new immigrant, as well as a story she heard at a medical conference about a nonverbal autistic teenager using his younger sister’s spelling toy to relay pain associated with ulcerative colitis.

Happiness Falls was listed as a Good Morning America Book Club pick, Barnes & Noble Book Club pick, Belletrist Book Club pick, and a finalist for the New American Voices Award.

This guide refers to the 2023 US edition published by Hogarth.

Content Warning: The novel includes depictions of bullying, rape, and racism.

Plot Summary

When narrator Mia Parkson’s father Adam disappears, the first person who notices is Mia’s 14-year-old brother, Eugene. Eugene, who does not speak and has a dual diagnosis of autism and Angelman Syndrome, performs rhythmic jumping that indicates his high level of distress. Mia is not overly concerned until her mother Hannah and twin brother John begin a search. Unable to find Adam, they call the police, and Detective Morgan Janus arrives to question the family.

The next morning, Mia texts her father, and receives a reply. When Mia and John hurry to the phone’s last known location, they learn that the text messages were sent by Detective Janus, who has recovered Adam’s phone. Janus has also found a notebook of Adam’s that may be significant. This document, titled Happiness Quotient, includes data on how expectations versus baselines affect relative happiness levels, including case studies and experiments related to John and Mia.

Detective Janus reveals that Adam transferred $20,000 out of his retirement account, and had been corresponding frequently with a woman named Anjeli Rapari. While the police and the family initially suspect an affair, Anjeli is actually a therapist who has been helping Eugene learn to communicate via letterboard. This intervention is controversial: Mia recalls a previous horrible experience with a physically assisted writing therapist—a since debunked technique for nonverbal people on the autism spectrum—who Adam revealed to be answering for Eugene.

When a CPS therapist produces a letterboard, Hannah takes it from Eugene, and he stabs a pencil toward her face. Detective Janus grabs his hand to prevent what she sees as an attempted stabbing, and he scratches her in retaliation. She handcuffs Eugene, and says she’ll need to take him to headquarters.

John and Mia go to Eugene’s therapy center to find lawyer Shannon Haug. There, Adam’s friends insinuate that he may have had prostate cancer. A friend of John’s texts him a screenshot from a video his neighbor filmed of Adam attempting to calm a distraught Eugene. The neighbor, a “mommy blogger,” was going to post the video to shame Adam for supposedly subpar parenting. In the police station, in an intake hearing for Eugene, Detective Janus plays the video. The presiding officer orders a secure placement in a detention facility, but because of a COVID outbreak, Eugene will be placed under house arrest instead.

Shannon emphasizes that they need to focus on exonerating Eugene rather than finding out what happened to Adam, and gives them a list of therapists to attempt to communicate with Eugene. When they arrive at the home office of one of the therapists on the list, Eugene is clearly familiar with the place; he finds a hidden key, and enters. Inside, a file on Eugene records eight months of lessons in text-based communication therapy based on spelling via letterboard. They log into a patient portal, and watch a session in which Eugene uses the letterboard to answer a question about alternative energy sources.

The police recover Adam’s wallet; its condition and location decrease the possibility of finding him alive. Meanwhile, Vic, Mia’s ex-boyfriend, drives in from Ohio to help with the search. He shows the family a video he obtained from a birdwatcher, which features Adam yelling “Eugene nooooo” (282), and birds flying up from the cliff face.

Shannon again emphasizes the need to find a narrative that exonerates Eugene. While Eugene sleeps between them, John and Mia discuss what they think happened, building on each other’s thoughts. John and Mia consider a possible scenario: an attempted theft of Adam’s wallet, which results in Eugene trying to retrieve it from the edge of the cliff, and Adam falling over the edge while saving Eugene.

Anjeli agrees to a virtual interview with Eugene. She tells the family that Eugene and Adam had a conflict about Adam’s choice to delay telling the rest of the family Eugene can communicate to attain more proof that the practice is genuine. However, Eugene uses the letterboard to tell the rest of the family that he and his father made up. Eugene communicates that he and his father discussed Adam’s happiness theories, which Eugene is proud to have been trusted with. Eugene says that his father didn’t record the session, but did take two pages of notes, which he photographed on his phone. Eugene then relays his narrative of Adam’s death: Three boys stole Adam’s wallet, and then threw it away; Eugene tried to retrieve it close to the cliff’s edge, and Adam fell after pulling Eugene back.

Unable to take much time to grieve their new certainty that Adam is dead, the family attends a hearing to determine the next steps for Eugene. While Detective Janus casts doubt on Eugene’s testimony, saying that the police haven’t been able to corroborate Eugene’s story, John goes upstairs to retrieve the two missing pages of notes about Adam’s conversation with Eugene. The presiding officer nullifies the hearing order.

Later, Mia finds a page from Adam’s notes on the copier and wonders whether they are the real pages or whether either Hannah or John fabricated them. She is tempted to look for the photo of Adam’s notes on the conversation with Eugene in his phone, but when she finally figures out Adam’s phone password, she instead chooses to enter a wrong digit, and the phone deletes its data.

The family prepares for a ceremony at the waterfall to mark 100 days since Adam’s disappearance. Mia arrives early to burn a narrative she has written about everything that happened since—which starts with the novel’s first line, “We didn’t call the police right away”—as a symbolic way to let Adam know that they and Eugene are okay.