All Our Happy Days Are Stupid

Two couples, each with a twelve-year-old child, travel to Paris; within a few moments of discovering each other in a crowd, one of their children disappears. A day later, one of the mothers disappears, too. The story that follows is a wonderfully strange, beautifully composed examination of happiness & desperation, complete with a man in a bear suit, a teen pop star, & eight really excellent songs. 

Sheila Heti’s debut play was first commissioned in 2001, for a feminist theater company that never ended up staging it. Its turbulent creation became the backdrop of Heti’s last novel, How Should a Person Be?, which was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times & the New Yorker—and now the play itself can be revealed at last. 

With new introductions by Sheila Heti & director Jordan Tannahill, All Our Happy Days Are Stupid offers a novel’s worth of wisdom & humor, of wild hope & dreamlike confrontations, & page after page of unforgettable lines. Seen until now only by a lucky few, its publication is a cause for celebration.

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Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood, & How Should a Person Be?, which New York deemed one of the "New Classics" of the twenty-first century. She was named one of the "New Vanguard" by the New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines & newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into 24 languages.