Possible Happiness

by David Ebenbach

(Fitzroy Books/Regal House, September 10, 2024)

Interview by Ellen Birkett Morris

In his tenth book, writer David Ebenbach turns his attention within in a very personal but fictionalized account of Eleventh-grader Jacob Wasserman, a shy, funny kid who struggles with his mother’s depression and his own dark moods. When he finally gets noticed, he is drawn into a full-time social life, complete with a circle of friends, parties, and even a girlfriend. But Jacob discovers acceptance doesn’t change the need to understand himself and find a new approach to life.

Authorlink: Tell me about your apprenticeship as a creative writer. Did you have a mentor who offered advice that you can share with us?

Ebenbach: I’m glad you asked! I actually dedicated my new novel, Possible Happiness, to Carole Nehez, the first creative writing teacher I ever had. That class, back in high school, was a door-of-no-return—after that, I wasn’t going to stop writing. Instead of a piece of advice, I’ll offer you this: one day, it was raining, and a few of us wanted to go run around in it for a couple of minutes during class, and Ms. Nehez let us, knowing that the impulse came from us being open to the world and to experience. She encouraged that at every turn, which mattered enormously.

Authorlink: James Dickey said the idea for Deliverance came to him as a vision of a man standing alone on top of a mountain. His job was to get the man off the mountain. Where did the idea for Possible Happiness come from?

Ebenbach The idea started with the fact that I often found myself feeling sad when I heard music from my youth; I wanted to investigate that. I started with a loose version of the method that Robert Olen Butler calls “dreamstorming.” I sat quietly, remembering things that happened to me in high school, going in no particular order, and paying attention to sensory aspects of the memories. With each memory, I jotted down a one-line summary along with an image. After I had done that for a few weeks, I rearranged the summaries into an approximate time order, and then got started writing the actual book. I haven’t used dreamstorming as a method before or since, but it was a huge help to this particular book.

Authorlink: Readers follow Jacob as he struggles with the pressure of high school, family divorce, a parent’s alcoholism and depression. Tell me about your choice to use third person and not first to chronicle his journey. How does that choice impact the telling?

Ebenbach: Using third person allowed me to get a little bit of distance from Jacob, and to see things that he couldn’t. That was particularly important because Jacob’s a teenager who’s still confused about a lot of things. There’s plenty that he doesn’t know. I used a very close third, so it really is his perspective, but being an outside narrator allowed me to drop hints here and there of some of the larger things affecting Jacob, even when he couldn’t articulate them himself.

Authorlink: The book deals with mental health struggles, but since it is set in the past there is not explicit discussion of the issues at hand (nothing named or labeled). Talk about the process of embodying those conditions?

Ebenbach: That’s exactly it. One of the reasons I wanted to write about the experience of depression in the late 1980s is that people just weren’t talking much about mental health back then—nowhere nearly as much as now. When I look back at my journals from high school—which happened in the late 80s—I see a kid who was dealing with depression but had no framework or vocabulary for thinking about it, and no opportunity to talk about it. As a result, I didn’t really know what was going on with me, and I had trouble making things better. I wanted to capture that in Possible Happiness, and explore the consequences. And so, just like me, Jacob has no vocabulary for what he’s experiencing, which I think makes it harder for him to deal with what he’s experiencing.

Authorlink: You’ve written ten books in fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Why did you choose to write a young adult novel?

Ebenbach The truth is that I didn’t know I was writing a YA novel! I’m not in the habit of thinking about genre when I write; I just write my way into whatever story I’m interested in. When I’ve got a final draft, I just think, Well, that’s a story. No genre. So when my editor Jaynie Royal at Regal House suggested that they release it through Fitzroy, their YA imprint, it was a surprise. But it was a happy one—young adult literature is a really vibrant world, particularly these days. I’m excited to be a part of it.

Authorlink: What was your greatest challenge in developing Possible Happiness?

Ebenbach: Possible Happiness is probably the most autobiographical book of fiction I’ve ever written, and yet not one character from the book is exactly like anyone I knew back then, and not one event from the book happened exactly the same way in real life. In fact, most of the substance of the book has been heavily reshaped, and lots of characters and events in the novel were completely made up. You have to do that in order to make the fiction work. But it was often a challenge to figure out what to keep from my own life and what to remake.

One funny result of this kind of writing is that I think it has affected the way I remember my own adolescence; some of the things that happened in the novel are now more real to me than what actually happened!

Authorlink: I’m wondering what advice you offer to apprentice writers about either craft, or staying encouraged in the face of rejection, or both.

Ebenbach: My advice on both fronts is to stay with it.

Great writing happens, I’m convinced, through revision. And I honestly hate revision. Revision makes me want to cry. But I do it because early drafts need a lot of work, and because I’m more committed to helping my writing than I am to feeling content all the time.

As for rejection, well, there’s A LOT of it in the publishing world. A LOT. But most of it is no commentary whatsoever on your work; it just didn’t suit that one editor’s taste, or they recently published something like it, or they were tired and grumpy on the day that they read it. And so you have to know that rejection means nothing. As in: nothing. So just shrug and send your work to the next person on your list. Stay with it.

Authorlink: Discuss what you are working on now.

Ebenbach My son is heading off to college this year, so it’s an emotional time, and that’s got me writing a book about parenthood. What a mystery parenthood is! Your child starts out so dependent, practically stitched to your side, and step by step you help them learn how to take care of themselves—but success means that they leave. These wonderful people leave! The new novel explores that journey through a speculative lens. Let’s just say that the child in the novel is no ordinary child—and there turns out to be others like her out there.

About the Author:

David Ebenbach is a U.S. writer of fiction and poetry, a teacher, and an editor. He is the author of ten books, and he is the recipient of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Juniper Prize and the Patricia Bibby Award.