What Could Have Been: Review of Danila Botha’s Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness

At the back of Danila Botha’s collection of short fiction, Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness, is a lengthy acknowledgements section, where Botha thanks all the literary magazine editors who had published the stories she wrote and eventually gathered in this book. There are 32 pieces here, an appreciable number. This book is the product of serious work, in other words — that of crafting numerous narratives in a form that comes with its own set of strict specs. I mention the many acknowledgements only to underscore that the parts of a project, as with this collection, can have unique stories of their own. We might also refer to them as success stories, since they were selected/accepted for publication in respected literary venues. That always bodes well for a collection that gathers such works in one volume, and indeed, on this score, the book delivers. Yet the diversity of visions this implies (a reasonable assumption, I think, given the large number of publishers/editors thanked) also underscores a characteristic of the book that can’t be overlooked: some stories don’t settle inside this collection easily, or without forcing this reader to wonder about the author’s more rarefied aims for the whole.

The book is undoubtedly a highly creative assortment, with its multiplicity of female protagonists, of different ages, from different cultural/ethnic backgrounds, each going about their lives. Often, these lives, which Botha artfully relates in just a handful of pages, have enough ordinary sadness to grant readers a peak at themselves — our efforts to assimilate loss, personal or familial, regret over missed opportunities, or the personal foibles and hang-ups that undermine self-confidence (go ahead, point out one person who is entirely angst-free!). 

In “Rats in Disguise,” for instance, Botha is merciless about the fact that women obsess about their weight, or are shamed by others into fretting about their appearance. This includes mothers; some double as their daughters’ frenemies in these stories, as in real life. Every teen is exposed to bad role models, Botha is suggesting, and gives us a young protagonist’s first-person account of her unhappily married aunt “always doing squats while she talked, teaching me all her diet tricks including avoiding oils and dressings on salads, always drinking tons of water and pouring vinegar on her food so she wouldn’t want to actually eat it” (82). Most readers will know that this is only a slight exaggeration of our collective fixations.

Sadly, teenaged girls don’t need adult encouragement to engage in restrictive eating. Several of Botha’s young protagonists have an unhealthy relationship with food, particularly Lindi, whose adolescence is marked by a feeling of inferiority and exclusion, and whose development the author tracks in a series of stories that function as a short story cycle. Lindi observes a fear of eating also among the more popular girls, whose appearance and behaviour she tries to emulate for the sake of fitting in. Botha negotiates this fraught (because all too realistic) terrain with care and only the lightest touch of humour. At a movie theatre, in “Would You Rather?,” Lindi’s friend Sam (short for Samantha) orders a variety of snacks, but [takes] “the tiniest bites of everything.” Sam tells Lindi, “The trick…is to taste everything, without actually eating much.” 

Such moments, and, more generally, the stories that deal with the awkwardness, loneliness, and sexual awakenings of adolescent girls and young women are reminiscent of Judy Blume books and the genre of fiction for young adults she inspired (with its open though relatively innocent depictions of teen girls’ sexual maturation). Yet there are stories here that approach the other end of the girls-to-women spectrum. Some bring to mind the funny and jarring television series,Girls. 

This six-season series, which premiered in 2012 and ended in 2017, is about women in their 20s negotiating life in New York City. Considered ground-breaking by many TV critics, it strikes me as a useful comparison for two principal reasons. First, as Jessica Ford writes in her essay, “The ‘smart’ body politics of Lena Dunham’s Girls” (which, by the way, is a fine example of scholarship on post-feminism, female subjectivity and self-representation in digital and televisual spheres), this show for network and cable TV is a “girl cycle,” not unlike Broad City, Don’t Trust the B — in Apartment 23, Inside Amy Schumer, New Girl, The Mindy Project, etc. However, unlike these other series, Girls became a lightning rod for cultural critique and analysis, indeed “central to discussions of contemporary American television and popular feminisms” (Ford 1030). While the other shows “operate firmly within the established situation comedy format,” Ford explains, Girls does not. Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness doesn’t operate within easily identifiable parameters either — or it does, until it doesn’t. Moreover, it’s not the mix of drama, humour, or quirkiness of some of the characters that makes Botha’s collection hard to classify. It’s the persistent contravention of generic boundaries, including those of realism.

Many of Botha’s stories feature aspiring female artists — photographers, painters, musicians, writers — hardly new types in literature. What is new or unexpected is the layer of subversiveness, a dark and satirical edge in certain narratives that goes beyond descriptions of young creatives consciously balking at conventional careers or familial expectations. In part, this quality stems from the ambivalence Botha highlights in her characters’ pursuit of careers, relationships, and other ‘life goals.’ A number of the stories cause us to re-examine what we thought we knew about GenZ/Zoomers, Millennials, and women in general.

Importantly, there’s a larger cultural (perhaps even countercultural) discursive context to which Botha is attuned, and that needs invoking to take proper stock of Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness. Girls helped shape this context, and there are dimensions to the series that audiences should be aware of and understand. According to Jessica Ford, the show “transcended the girl cycle and shifted popular [and current] discussions about feminism, post-feminism, and body politics in film and television” (Ford 1030). To make this clearer, Ford quotes gender studies scholars, Meredith Nash and Ruby Grant, who state that “Girls is conscious of post-feminist discourses and themes but demonstrates an ability to irreverently satirize itself, actively taking both post-feminism and second wave feminism into account” (Nash and Grant 977). This means that Girls doesn’t let new or old feminist credos off the proverbial hook — that is, not without trading on their numerous inconsistencies. 

This is relevant because if complexity and satire lacing constructions of current-day feminism, as represented by the series’ protagonists, make Girls valuable as entertainment and cultural commentary, then we need to recognize that a number of stories in Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness offer something similar: an awareness of, and resolve, to portray young women enjoying bodily autonomy and sexual subjecthood, among other things, but also their confusion and blundering in the face of supposedly unfettered freedoms, and the more strident dictums of older feminisms. The dark humour draws from this confusion, which leads either to romantic missteps or a more profound breakdown in rational decision-making.

“All Good Things Take Time,” one of the longest and darkest stories in the book, is a particularly apt illustration of post-feminist parody. It’s no coincidence that the protagonist is a talented young musician and songwriter, acclimating to New York City’s competitive music business, one that’s highly commercialized and onerous for anyone working in it. Indeed, cultural theorists and critics have laboured for decades to expose the myths that neoliberalism promotes to justify the inordinate demands made on people in the creative industries. A core part of these myths, and the cluster of concepts that critics of neoliberalism use to address it, relate to self-commodification. This is the idea that heightened competition obliges people to market/sell themselves at all times. The upshot is undue value placed on outward appearances (beauty and style), as well as other aspects of self-fashioning thought to enhance appeal in what is experienced as (and is de facto) a ubiquitous marketplace. Botha is certainly conscious of this, and of the fact that women become complicit in the various forms of self-regulation associated with the business of entertainment. She captures the tell-tale features of this regime’s incessant hustling and self-policing when describing what happens to Miriam, her protagonist, during a pregnancy she has faked. The pregnancy is a respite, an excuse to slow down and quit abstaining from food. Adam, Miriam’s sensible medical student boyfriend, “would come home at night and find her digging into Nutella straight from the jar,…with feverish glee. He’d always gotten on her case before about how strict her diet was, and he told her how relieved he was to see her enjoying food” (175).

Botha’s satire goes much deeper, however. She takes aim at, among other things, the creative industry’s superficiality with Miriam’s rather innocuous observations of NYC’s art scene: “She met actors and musicians, writers for TV and stage, critics, essay writers, and novelists, and they all wore their creativity and style casually, as if the ideas in themselves were not enough somehow….To be successful in pop, she reasoned, you didn’t need to be the best, or the most innovative. You just needed to work hard and be really charming” (170). The consequence of such a ‘culture,’ Botha implies, is the primacy of form over substance.

At a record exec’s “fancy” Brooklyn brownstone tea party, Miriam notes uncritically that “[i]nstead of cucumber sandwiches, every guest was served several grams of soft, crumbly cocaine that was spooned, like powdered sugar on a crepe, onto their dainty porcelain tea plates from a fancy silver tray in the middle of the table” (170). This, too, needs deciphering. Extreme self-surveillance is essential to the various “disciplinary” regimes that are symptomatic of hyper-capitalism, and drugs, in addition to their commodity status, simulate a brief escape from the constant pressure to perform, maintain control over oneself and keep it together, as it were. Furthermore, if one reflects for just a moment on, say, Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), or Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967) — both seminal texts, each making the case that consumer capitalism substitutes real creativity, experience, and meaningful relationships with mass-market images, performance, and other aestheticized constructs — then it’s only logical to depict hallucinogenic drugs consumed in place of real food and companionship, and show users gladly disconnecting from a reality that already largely consists of affectation.

What follows in “All Good Things Take Time” is a series of strange events, demonstrating both mastery of elliptical storytelling and Botha’s own brand of satire. Miriam is working overtime to write and record her own music. At night, she parties and occasionally sleeps around with other writer-musicians (sometimes the sex is rough, but hey, isn’t that what every post?feminist female subject desires?). Miriam is in charge of her life and career, yet the consequence of this much independence is that she and her partner Adam have grown apart. Perhaps due to this, though perhaps also because her life in the fast lane has induced a high degree of detachment, Miriam nonchalantly (and for no apparent reason) ingests some of the poisonous boric acid she purchased to rid her apartment of cockroaches. After treatment in a hospital emergency room, Miriam and Adam attend Shabbat dinner at Adam’s relatives’ home, where his aunt notices Miriam’s bloated stomach and assumes she’s pregnant. Miriam doesn’t tell her the truth (exactly how would she explain poisoning herself to Adam’s conservative Jewish aunt?). Instead, she convinces Adam she’s pregnant and maintains the charade until it becomes imperative for her to feign a miscarriage. 

Next, Botha presents a harrowing account of the steps Miriam takes to ensure that her faked miscarriage is convincing. It begins with this: “She had researched everything online, from self-induced abortions, to ending nonexistent pregnancies like hers, and she’d found that women often used kitchen utensils to make themselves bleed” (177). If everything is a “Smoke Show,” to borrow the name of another striking story in this collection, one that likewise plays on the theme of inauthenticity and the blurring of lines between private and public lives, then everything truly is. This, and the description of Miriam inflicting injuries on herself, an act that would strike most readers as a violation of propriety on multiple levels, is brutal stuff. One admires the writing, the tension Botha effects, and one winces at the same time.

After recovering, Miriam realizes that the pretend pregnancy has left her longing for a real one. The deception had the desired effect of bringing her and Adam closer. Sure enough, when an actual pregnancy is confirmed several months later, Adam begins to demonstrate a level of care and devotion he had never previously shown. 

Miriam’s ambivalence, due in part to the exhaustion caused by her career, are easy enough to recognize in “All Good Things Take Time.” It’s Botha’s layered critique of expectations based on older and newer versions of women’s liberation movements that require additional parsing. A scholar of gender and sexuality would likely say that the self-directing subject (in this case, Miriam), which postfeminist culture foregrounds — coincidentally, in line with neoliberalism’s overt preference for young, toned, beautiful and sexually available female bodies in its media-based goods — is not, under her attractive de rigueur surface, a psychologically healthy person. One might also ask whether feminisms’ injunctions to pursue a meaningful life actually provide practicable roadmaps for doing so. The double irony in “All Good Things Take Time,” especially given the collection’s focus on creatively driven women, is that like Miriam, most continue to struggle to understand what a “meaningful” life entails.

Not all of the stories in Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness are enigmatic to this extent. “Looking at Him,” for example, is straightforwardly poignant. The unnamed female narrator in this story is rendezvousing with a man she once loved, but whose feelings for her were never clarified (bien sûr, you know his type!). When they part, she grasps, surprising herself perhaps, that the heartache he caused years ago persists: “…but maybe as much as it hurt at the time, maybe none of the reasons [it didn’t work out] matter. Maybe that’s what makes it easier now…to turn away when I feel tears coming, to give him one last hug, to feel his eyes on my back as I walk away even though I’ve been too afraid to turn around and look at him” (132). This is familiar emotional ground for readers. Yet in “Looking at Him,” even conventional heartbreak, the clarity and sorrow involved, aren’t prosaic. Any ordinary moment, Botha shows, can yet be mined for its knife-like plaintiveness, its essential lyricism.

Another story’s title, “All the Lives that Could Have Been,” captures the collection’s prevailing wistful mood, and what I view as the project’s through-line. These stories are variations on surviving — the more consequential mistakes made, or the straying off course that cause a woman, at one or another point in her life, to do some soul-searching and wonder about the lives she could have lived: “Would I have felt trapped, or would we have somehow worked it out? Did I spare myself pain, or did I miss out on the best thing that could have happened to me” (p. 58). Several of Botha’s characters have or are in the process of moving on from a failed relationship. What’s piquant about their self-reflections is that Botha leaves readers guessing about the extent to which they can be thought responsible for their own heartache, as in the story “Ellipsis.”

This collection also addresses trauma as a consequence of life-changing events, such as illness, the loss of a child, or entire families due to world-historic catastrophes like the Holocaust. For me, particularly moving are subtle depictions of people who suffered a tragedy, but then quietly go about rebuilding their lives. This is the unassuming fortitude of Aunt Mara in “Don’t Look Back,” and Nagymama in “Dark and Lilac Fairies.” The same can be said of the unnamed older narrator in “From the Belly of the Whale,” whose family survived the Holocaust by hiding in an underground bunker. After arriving in Canada, she suppressed her Jewish identity for many years until she finally found the strength to confront her past: Years later, as she explains, “[i]t wasn’t a question of what I believed, just a statement of who I was, and if I denied it, I realized I was hurting myself” (64). 

Botha is a Jewish author who emigrated from South Africa to Canada as a child (not unlike the young protagonist Lindi, who has a hard time shedding her accent and adjusting to life in Toronto). Her vivid storytelling makes it easy to assume that she wove her personal background and lived experience into many of these narratives, though of course, readers should never assume they know an author by their fiction. Nor is anything predictable or staid about the stories where a character’s Jewish ethnicity breaks the surface. In fact, a number of Botha’s female leads struggle against the encumbrances of a culture that is too conservative for their individual needs.

Also to Botha’s credit is that the Holocaust is a haunting but not lachrymose presence in this collection. In addition to the stories mentioned above, Botha’s “Proteksiye and Mazel” gives us sixteen-year-old Hadasa, who’s trapped with her parents and older siblings in the notorious Kovno ghetto in Lithuania. The ghetto is situated alongside the Vilija river (also known as the Neris), and Hadasa trains herself to swim long distances so that eventually she’s able to cross the river and survive by hiding in a forest on the other side. This story, one unequivocally centred on survival, contains a brilliantly imagined scene in which Hadasa dreams that she’s visiting a museum exhibiting photos of the people who had lived (and were later killed) in the Kovno ghetto. She recognizes her sister and brother among them: “[M]y sister [was] smiling shyly at the camera in one of them, hiding behind her husband as the water pooled around their toes….[Ilya] was sitting on the ground, scribbling something in his notebook, his dark eyebrows furrowed like he was trying to find the right word” (38). When a German-speaking woman turns to the still-dreaming Hadasa, and makes an insipid comment about the “people who used to live here,” Hadasa notices that her earrings are just like the ones the elderly Mrs. Cohen wore before she and her husband were taken away to be murdered. Hadasa  thinks: “I want to rip the earrings out of her tiny, shell pink ears. Why aren’t you more afraid of me” (38). Botha is tapping collective trauma and suppressed anger, but in a way that doesn’t figure Hadasa as a victim. She’s furious, but not passive or helpless. This is borne out by her feat of swimming for hours to reach the other side of the river to save herself. Hadasa’s recollecting of this story is itself an act of resistance.

Early in the review, I mentioned that Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness is hard to categorize due to the fact that its stories don’t adhere to any specific set of form- or genre-related rules. Thus, the realism of the first four stories is supplanted by the fantastical, fabular, or — given the story’s import of literally recovering lives stolen during the Holocaust — magic realism. In “Able to Pass,” Botha appropriates Yudl Rosenberg‘s The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague (first edition published in 1909), a story cycle about Judah Loew, a Rabbi in Renaissance Prague, whose knowledge of esoteric Jewish mysticism and ritual incantations enables him to conjure out of clay a large creature resembling a man, and who ultimately ends up protecting the Jewish communities of Prague’s ghettos from pogroms and other dangers. Artistic teenager Kayla in “Able to Pass” uses clay to bring back her grandmother’s sister Golda; wondrously, this magical/mystical reincarnation of a murdered young woman seamlessly resumes the life the real Golda would have lived. 

In a similar vein, and seemingly in defiance of readerly expectations, is “Like an Alligator Eyeing a Small Fish.” Here Botha gives us a young Jewish woman who overdoses on drugs and has a near-death experience (or, perhaps, a mystical vision as per Jacob and the ladder in the Old Testament). Jamie sojourns in a zone, which resembles her “grandparents’ old apartment building,” and attends an appointment with the adult Anne Frank. The latter, it appears, has had a full and productive afterlife. She married three times, birthed and raised two children, and even authored a shelf-full of books. Determined to guide Jamie, who is convinced she’s failing as a creative writer, this mature Anne Frank assures the young woman that learning to write is a process, and that her own early attempts — her diaries — were unaccomplished in her own estimation: “[I]t wasn’t my idea to publish [them]….after everything I’d seen and felt and experienced, to hear about people getting excited about my naïve, girlish statements about a crush on a boy and the goodness of humanity?” She adds: “trauma and tragedy change us…..What I’ve written here [in the afterworld] is ten times better than anything I ever wrote on earth, believe me” (70-71). Finally, she reveals the precious meaning of life; above all, it’s an opportunity to “grow and change.” 

No review can touch on all the stories in a collection, especially in one as varied as this one. Botha, who has written two other short story collections, as well as a novel, knows how to keep a reader’s attention. She builds on common emotions and situations, and is skilled at delivering unexpected outcomes. At times, she tackles the ineffable — loss that can barely be put into words. As Anne Frank confides: “A lot of survivors couldn’t stay in this world either. It was too bright, full of too much opportunity. My father was one of them. They wanted darkness….They would have done anything to make their thoughts disappear” (71). This is a particularly timely reminder of the grave and indelible consequences of trauma. Not every human being has strength enough to pick up the pieces and begin a new life.

Apart from the embedded cycle of stories about Lindi, no two characters are alike in this galaxy of girls, young or mature women. Moreover, Botha isn’t averse to mixing it up, disregarding the generic conventions she has cued readers to anticipate. In “Happiness in a Single Bite,” we read: “I like the boardwalk first thing in the morning, when the sun is breaking through, like tiger’s eyes on a disappearing grey satin canvas. If you go early enough, you can watch the homeless people sleep curled into themselves like caterpillars, their faces peaceful and angelic. You can see their eyelashes flutter mid dream, their eyebrows expressive and thoughtful” (73 – 4). Sometimes the writing is unadorned, at other times, as in the above-given passage, it’s lyrical. Regardless, Botha’s artistic eye is firmly on her subjects — always perceptive. 

I started this review-essay by pointing out that it may be hard to discern, especially at first glance, how this collection coheres. Where, I wondered, are the points of convergence in a collection whose pieces appear to be startlingly different? Then it became evident that Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness is replete with lives — those that could have been, those that were, and some that might yet be. Most meaningful for me are the stories with characters who are determined to go on living despite the calamity they’ve endured, if only for the sake of those who didn’t get the chance to. 

Works Cited

Botha, Danila. Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness. Guernica Editions, 2024.

— For All the Men, and Some of the Women, I’ve Known. Tightrope Books, 2016.

— Too Much on the Inside. Quattro Books, 2015.

— Got No Secrets : Stories. Tightrope Books, 2010.

Ford, Jessica. “The ‘Smart’ Body Politics of Lena Dunham’s Girls.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 16, no. 6, 2016, pp. 1029–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1162826.

Nash, Meredith, and Ruby Grant. “Twenty-Something Girls v. Thirty-Something Sex And The City Women: Paving the Way for ‘Post? Feminism.’” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 15, no. 6, 2015, pp. 976–91, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2015.1050596.

Gill, Rosalind. “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 2007, pp. 147–66, https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549407075898.