A Girl with an Expiration Date: On Heather Harpham’s ‘Happiness’
When you’re living through watch-it-through-your-fingers reality what makes for good escapism? I’d like to make the case for a memoir about life with a mortally ill child. And let me add: I am a new mother. I am still poised halfway between awe and terror every time I look into the face of my eight-month-old—awe that he exists in all his joyous defenselessness, terror about whether I can keep him existing and maybe even preserve some of that boundless baby joy. Watch-it-through-your-fingers reality doesn’t help a mind already teeming with all the many ways a child can die before breakfast. I would have thought the last place I’d want to go to escape was a book about, as author Heather Harpham puts it, “a girl with an expiration date.”
But is not just that. It is also a book about one of the healthiest romances I’ve ever
