Her Own Happiness, page 1
PRAISE FOR THE BENNET WOMEN
“Rich with hope and romance, and readers will love it.”
—Shondaland
“Funny, poignant, and wickedly clever—I’ll be hunting for everything Eden Appiah-Kubi writes from here on out.”
—Courtney Milan, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author
“Appiah-Kubi’s unique retelling of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice gives it a modern spin with surprising twists and empowering storylines.”
—Library Journal
“The cast of characters is diverse—EJ is Black, Jamie is a recently out trans woman, Tessa is Filipina, and Will has both Chinese and Korean heritage—and hearing EJ, Jamie, Tessa, and the other women who populate Longbourn discuss ambitious career goals, healthy sex lives, and more with unabashed frankness is refreshing.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An inclusive reimagining of Pride and Prejudice that Jane Austen fans are sure to fall in love with.”
—POPSUGAR
“It’s really wonderful to read a book filled with a diverse cast of women characters, and have them have dreams and ambitions outside of getting married or falling in love. There is romance within these pages, don’t be mistaken, but for the most part, you get to follow along as EJ, Jamie, and Tessa discover what they desire out of life.”
—Real Simple
“Eden Appiah-Kubi’s debut transports you into the laughter, love, chaos, and found family of emerging adulthood. The inclusive cast of characters wrestling with modern concerns is a delightful take on Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The Bennet Women left me laughing, crying, and rooting for everyone. Eden Appiah-Kubi is an author to watch!”
—Denise Williams, author of How to Fail at Flirting
“The Bennet Women takes a spin on the classic tale of Pride and Prejudice and brings it to life in a modern-day way, which kept me flipping the pages. From the witty dialogue to the fast-paced plot, I was hooked from beginning to end. I highly recommend this story! What a ride!”
—Brittainy Cherry, author of The Mixtape
“Appiah-Kubi captures the best of Pride and Prejudice, and renovates it for relevance in the twenty-first century.”
—Brooke Burroughs, author of The Marriage Code
ALSO BY EDEN APPIAH-KUBI
The Bennet Women
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2023 by Salima Appiah-Duffell
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542030472 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781542030489 (digital)
Cover design by Faceout Studio, Spencer Fuller
Cover illustration by Taylor McManus
To my fat, Black, and different women/femmes: you are enough, you are never too much, and the world needs your light, even though it doesn’t often deserve it.
CONTENTS
START READING
AUTHOR’S NOTE
SPRING 2021
3/20/21
Maya
Ant
Maya
In or Out with Emme Vivant
Texts from Maya to Ant, April 25, 2021
5/1/21
Ant
Texts from Ant to Maya, May 7, 2021
Texts from Maya to Ant, May 23, 2021
SUMMER 2021
5/30/21
Maya
6/16/21
Ant
7/12/21
Maya
Emme Vivant slides into Maya’s DMs, July 17, 2021
Black Girls Love Paramore Chat, July 20, 2021
(Unsent)
Ant
Texts from Maya to Ant, August 19, 2021
Ant
Maya
Ant
Texts from Cousin Gigi to Maya, August 24, 2021
Maya
Texts from Ella to Maya, August 25, 2021
Ant
God
Maya
FALL 2021
9/3/21
Maya
Texts from Ella to Maya, September 8, 2021
An email from Emme to Maya, September 10, 2021
Maya
Ant
Facebook Messenger chat from Maya to her mom, September 14, 2021
Ant
Maya
Ant
Maya
Ant
Maya
Texts from Ella to Maya, September 18, 2021
9/27/21
Ant
Texts from Emme to Maya, October 3, 2021
Maya
Maya
Maya
Texts from Maya to Ella, October 16, 2021
An email from Taylor to Maya, October 20, 2021
Black Girls Love Paramore Chat, October 26, 2021
Email from Maya to Nico Vasiliou, November 2, 2021
Maya
ENTER OMICRON
Maya
Texts from Maya to her parents, December 8, 2021
Maya
Ant
Maya
Ant
12/11/21
Texts from Maya to her parents, December 13, 2021
Maya
Ant
First Day of Spring, 2022
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
You must be the best judge of your own happiness.
—Jane Austen, Emma
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Dearest Reader,
This novel is not about the pandemic; however, the events of this story take place in the spring and fall of 2021 and do not ignore the big and small ways lives changed during this time. While there are no on-page descriptions of death or illness, this may be a hard time to revisit. So I encourage you, if something in this book is stressful or triggering, please pause, take a breath, or skip pages / skim until you feel like your feet are on solid ground.
This story contains discussions of sizeism/fatphobia, sexism, racism, depression, and suicidal ideation. If you can’t engage, for any reason, please don’t make yourself try. Be gentle with yourself where you can.
Love and hugs,
Eden
SPRING 2021
3/20/21
Dear God,
Today sucks, please make it suck less. Thanks.
Also, Amen.
Maya
Maya
The prayer was today’s entry in her Just One Line journal, a gift from her sister. Maya had made the mistake of telling her she was thinking of getting into journaling (which is a thing you say when you’re going through a crappy time but don’t want to talk about it anymore). This led to her mom, her sister, and her cousin all sending her some kind of journal for Christmas. She wondered where this enthusiasm had been when she wanted to try out burlesque—pasties could get expensive.
The journals had been sitting in a pile collecting dust until the sudden loss of her group house was followed by the sudden loss of . . . well, everything she’d been working toward for the past seven years. She was packing her life into her two beat-up suitcases when she uncovered the journals beneath a layer of debris on her desk. With a shrug, she shoved all three into her faithful FUCK THE PATRIARCHY tote bag and promptly forgot about them. For weeks, she hadn’t spared them a thought, but now, sitting at her departure gate, she was in desperate need of something to do.
She’d already wrung all the thrills she could out of Gate 13 of the Honolulu airport: perusing the Hudson News; securing a seat where she could neither hear nor see the constant stream of bad news pouring from the television; staring in blank confusion at a vending machine full of notebooks and beach towels. Maya’s phone had lost its appeal when her cousin “Gigi the JD” sent her a link. She was one of several lawyers on Maya’s dad’s alarmingly accomplished side of the family, and was constantly on the hunt for inspirational speeches and aspirational figures. So Maya wasn’t surprised to see that her cuz’s link led to a TED Talk (ugh) called “Girlbossing for Good” (boooo!)—she was just disappointed.
“Hard pass,” she groaned, shoving her phone into her tote bag with some force. She briefly fantasized about throwing her phone across the room. But of course, she couldn’t afford a new phone—or an old phone, or even one last poke bowl in the main terminal.
Okay. She was starting to wallow. Time to do anything else. Maya felt around her tote bag again and pulled out the journals.
I am definitely bored enough to try this, she thought, picking up the most colorful journal of the bunch. It was the one from Momma: Flourish! A Black Woman’s Guided Journal of Reflection and Prayer. Maya had tried to stay connected to her church and her faith for the last two years, but prayer had stopped being a source of comfort and started to be one of frustration—it would have been more comforting to believe in nothing.
She couldn’t say that she’d lost her faith entirely, but it was distinctly uninteresting at the moment. These days, she rarely experienced awe or wonder; she felt salty.
Maya thumbed through th
“Blech,” Maya said, running a hand through her shoulder-length microlocs. “I’m a Christian, but I’m not ‘prayer-journal Christian.’ That’s . . .” She gestured vaguely. “Another level.”
She selected the journal from Gigi. The journal itself was spiral bound and covered with daisies. The words Yes She Can screamed from the cover in an exuberant yellow font.
“This gives me MLM,” she said, tossing it in her bag without opening it. All its “seize the day” / “you go girl” energy did was remind her how little she had going on in her life.
Finally, there was her sister’s Just One Line journal. It was navy blue with shimmering foil stars. Maya opened the front cover and found a note.
Hey Mai,
If you want to start a new habit, start small. Got one of these for college graduation and it’s the only journal I’ve ever kept up. Hot tip: journals are a good place to be angry or sad. I was angry and sad a lot last year. This helped.
Love,
Ella
“This wins,” Maya said. She turned to the first page, then paused and sighed heavily, steaming her pride flag–printed face mask.
I don’t want to write anything about today—this day sucks. Suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, Maya got the idea to write a snarky little prayer as entry number one. It at least reflected her true feelings of the day. She went to fill in the day’s date.
Wait. It was her birthday! In the middle of everything, she had forgotten.
Birthdays were a big deal to Maya, especially her own. She was a queer, fat, Black woman who had been an openly queer, fat, Black, artistic teenager. She’d learned earlier than most not to accept other people’s ideas about her body or her success. That’s why making it another year was always something to celebrate. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever get married or have kids. Like most millennials, she didn’t expect to be able to retire—ever. There was no sense in saving her joy for big milestone events. Sometimes that meant throwing a rager or going all night at booth karaoke; other times it was a game night or a classy dinner party. She contained multitudes.
“I’m thirty-one today,” she said thoughtfully, leaning back in the squeaky plastic chair. “Huh.”
Maya didn’t drink much and didn’t smoke, and she always thought drugs were more expensive and less fun than advertised. Her belief and trust in herself were her great rebellion. That’s why she didn’t care that it had taken her six years to get her BA. It’s why, generally speaking, aging into her thirties wasn’t a source of panic . . . until now, after things had fallen apart so spectacularly. She ran her finger up and down the tattoo on her left wrist, the way she always did when she was trying to calm herself down. The fact that she had forgotten her birthday meant that things were truly bad in a way she couldn’t quite deal with.
Even last year during lockdown, in the scariest part of the panini press, she’d still found a way to celebrate by breaking in her brand-new Nintendo Switch and her brand-new vibrator—both courtesy of a generous care package from her younger sister. She’d also made her first pavlova, and it was really good.
It’s my freaking birthday and I don’t even have a cookie! The one thing Maya truly required on her birthday was a delicious dessert, usually one that she made herself. She had always loved baking and delighted in making something new and elaborate every birthday. If she made it for herself, it didn’t matter that it came out “a bit pear-shaped,” as her sister liked to say. (Ella hadn’t gotten just her master’s in the UK—she’d picked up all the idioms.)
“What a stupid day to be without a cookie,” Maya grumbled to herself. She sank a bit in her plastic bucket seat, dangerously on the verge of pouting. “Okay, now I’m whining—and hungry.” Her phone buzzed, a welcome interruption to her thoughts.
Come down to the snack bar!
I’ve got NACHOS!
She smiled. Ant always managed to text her when she needed an escape from her own head. Maya looked at her surroundings and sighed. She could use a change of scene anyway. Airports were depressing once you got past security. The decor was an aggressively bland blue-gray pattern of GATE-GATE-STARBUCKS repeated with such regularity you felt like you were living in a simulation.
She moved quickly down the wide hallway, deftly dodging groups of tourists clumped around kiosks, mailing themselves pineapples or buying themselves forty-dollar leis, trying to hold on to their memories as long as they could. Out the corner of her eye, Maya spotted a middle-aged man in a brand-new aloha shirt, coughing like he was about to hack up a lung—his required mask well below his chin.
Maya sighed a different sigh this time, an angry one. She prayed Mr. Hacking Cough was departing Hawai‘i and not arriving for a fun-filled vacay to infect her friends who had their first or second jobs at Honolulu hotels and restaurants.
Before she could shoot the guy the side-eye he deserved, Maya spotted Ant. It was easy since he was a head taller than most folks and better dressed. At present he was wearing matching “marigold” sweatshirt and joggers, a bright yellow that matched the piping and laces on his sneakers. Just the right shade to complement and not clash with his tawny brown skin. The shoes had a name like a spaceship and truly did “pull the look together,” as he’d insisted they would when he splurged on them a few months back.
Early in their friendship, Ant told Maya he was on a personal mission to show that the big and tall could be stylish. His goal: to look effortlessly cool—which took a lot of work. (Maya could only imagine. It was hard enough finding cool plus-size women’s clothes.)
His wide smile drew her in like a lighthouse in a violent sea. She forgot everything else, quickened her pace, and met him at a café table near a small snack bar.
“Get in on these,” he half sang, turning to proudly display a plastic tray of round tortilla chips, flanked by a small rectangle of watery salsa and a container of nacho cheese.
Maya withheld a scoff. Those weren’t even bowling-alley nachos—they were roller-rink nachos. On another day she would have mocked the snack for its profound basic-ness, but now she didn’t have the energy. She settled on “Thank you,” and put her hoodie and bag on a hook beneath the table.
Ant raised both eyebrows and wiggled his wire-frame glasses. “Oh, she has manners today?”
It was an old joke between them. Knowing someone for seven years offered lots of opportunities for inside jokes. Maya tossed her locs and sniffed. “I’m always polite. I even sent your mom a thank-you card for the plane ticket this morning.” It was literally the least she could do.
Losing her house, then the job she loved was awful. Doing both in the middle of “these unprecedented times” meant that she couldn’t couch-surf or barter her way through this crisis. Maya realized she had no choice but to move back home with her parents—the worst-case scenario. She’d been working up the courage to ask her baby sister for help buying her ticket home (which was all too humiliating, but she was not asking her parents).
Then, like a miracle, Ant revealed that he’d landed an internship with the Smithsonian and could rent a deeply discounted room with his aunt in Takoma Park. Maya’d never been so happy to be from the Maryland suburbs. Yes, her life was awful right now, with no end in sight, but she’d have something to hold on to: her best friend would still be less than half an hour away. Little miracles like that kept her from losing her faith altogether.
So when Ant asked if she could be his “emergency support human” for the flight—a combination of claustrophobia and a general fear of flying made traveling miserable for him—Maya said yes without a second thought. It was her way of saying thank you for the miracle. Then God, the universe, or whatever responded with another miracle: Ant’s navy-doctor mom covered her ticket to DC.
“Okay, Miss Manners, will you please partake of this bounty? I’m tired of holding back.”
She selected a chip and dipped it into the cheese. As it emerged, a small tendril of steam hissed from the yellow goo.
