This Week’s Story: “Rate Your Happiness,” by Catherine Lacey
When we meet Louise, the protagonist of Catherine Lacey’s latest story, she believes that she’s dying, “that a valve or vein in her body had gotten clogged or burst,” and that she will expire midair, during a flight from New York to Northern California. Lucky for her, there’s a nurse on the plane. Unlucky for her, he just so happens to be an “erstwhile acquaintance” of her father’s, from whom she’s estranged. Louise’s “near-death” experience, and her encounter with the nurse, sets off an avalanche of ambivalence. Does she want to break up with her girlfriend? Does she want to reach out to her father? Does she abhor or covet the life style of her well-to-do Bay Area friends? Louise, walking aimlessly around San Francisco—a city “absolutely full of things she hated,” like ergonomically outfitted men and driverless cars—contemplates whether it’s possible to find a true sense of direction in an “entirely too modern world.”
—Nina Mesfin, assistant fiction editor
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