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Marissa Higgins's Sweetener Is Proof That the Sapphic Novel Has Never Been Messier—Or More Compelling
Despite the looming threat of book bans and government-sanctioned discrimination, there has possibly never been a better time in history for queer literature. Books about lesbians and bisexuals in particular are getting especially wild, weird, and wonderful lately, from Jen Beagin's Big Swiss to Ruth Madievsky's All-Night Pharmacy and Marissa Higgins's alternately thrilling and depressing 2024 novel A Good Happy Girl.
The author
Photo: Marissa Higgins
Now Higgins is out with her sophomore novel, Sweetener, centered on a love triangle involving two separated wives named Rebecca and the beguiling young artist, Charlotte, they discover they're both dating—and it's as delightfully freaky as her previous effort, if not more so.
Here, Vogue speaks to Higgins about writing her Sweetener protagonists while making edits on her first book, discovering Louise Bourgeois in college, vampiric origin stories, and her crush on a Daphne du Maurier character.
Vogue: How did the process of writing Sweetener differ from your first novel?
Marissa Higgins: When I first started drafting Sweetener, it was only from Rebecca's point of view, but it was written in the third person, and that didn't work; that felt off to me. Then it was Rebecca in the first-person present, and my agent read that and felt like it was just too similar to A Good Happy Girl, but in a bad way for me. It was too gross, I think; not even what she was doing, but the words I was using were too depressing and too gross. Then I opened up Charlotte's world and I wrote Charlotte and started alternating the chapters, which was a decision I made after writing it the wrong way a few times. The inclusion of Charlotte, and Charlotte alternating with Rebecca, was the best opening to the book I could find, but it took me many tries. It's weird, Sweetener sold a lot faster [than A Good Happy Girl], but it took me a lot more drafts to get to it. I feel like my early drafts of the book were probably worse than my early drafts of A Good Happy Girl. I think I was finally writing Charlotte into Sweetener around the time that my first book sold, which is kind of crazy. There were points where I thought A Good Happy Girl wouldn't sell, and I was nervous and I wanted to send something else to my agent in case it didn't.
