On Writing a Character Who Doesn't Know They're Suffering

The central craft problem of Happiness Unintentional was this: how do you write a character who is suffering without letting him know he is suffering?

Not a character who is in denial. Not a character who is suppressing something he knows is there. A character who genuinely, sincerely, with no performance of wellness, believes he is fine — and is wrong.

That is a different problem. And it took a long time to figure out how to solve it.

The obvious approach is dramatic irony. The reader knows something the character does not. The character says I am fine and the reader sees the evidence that he is not, and the gap between those two things generates tension.

This works. It is a legitimate technique. But it has a cost: it positions the reader above the character. You are watching someone be wrong about themselves, and that watching has a quality of distance — sometimes even condescension — that I did not want.

Elias is not stupid. He is not oblivious in a comic sense. He is a person who has developed a very sophisticated system for not knowing what he feels, and that system is internally coherent. It makes sense from the inside. If the reader is simply watching him be wrong, the novel becomes a kind of superior observation, and that is not the experience I wanted to create.

I wanted the reader to be inside the wrongness with him.

The condition that shaped Elias most directly is alexithymia — a difficulty identifying and naming one's own emotional states. It is common in autistic people and in people with certain trauma histories, and it is not the same as not feeling things. People with alexithymia often feel intensely. They simply cannot access the feeling as information. They cannot name it, locate it, or use it to understand what they need.

What they can access is behavior. Thought. Function. The observable outputs of an emotional system they cannot read directly.

Elias knows what he does. He does not know what he feels. And because he has always been this way, he does not experience this as a deficit. It is simply how interiority works, as far as he knows.

Writing from inside that required a particular kind of narrative discipline: the prose could not name what Elias could not name. It could describe his behavior, his observations, his reasoning. It could not say he felt grief or he was afraid — because he would not have access to those words for his own experience.

What it could do was show the reader the shape of what was happening through everything except direct emotional statement.

One of the solutions was the body.

Alexithymia does not prevent physical sensation. It prevents the translation of physical sensation into emotional information. Elias notices that his chest is tight. He notices that he has not eaten. He notices that he has been standing at the window for forty minutes without knowing why. He does not know what these things mean.

The reader does.

This created a kind of double narration: Elias's account of his experience, which is accurate but incomplete, and the physical evidence that accumulates beneath it, which the reader can interpret even when he cannot.

The challenge was calibration. Too much physical evidence and the reader feels manipulated — the author is pointing at the subtext with a flashlight. Too little and the reader misses it entirely. The right amount is the amount that makes the reader feel they are discovering something, not being told it.

There is a related problem: a character who does not know he is suffering is also, by definition, a character who does not ask for help, does not reach out, does not perform distress in any of the ways that typically generate reader sympathy.

Elias is not likable in the conventional sense. He is competent, controlled, and largely unaware of the effect he has on the people around him. He does not suffer visibly. He does not invite the reader's care.

The question was whether the reader would care anyway — not because Elias performed suffering, but because the reader could see it.

I think the answer depends on whether the reader has ever been inside a similar state. For readers who have experienced alexithymia, dissociation, or the particular exhaustion of long-term masking, Elias is recognizable in a way that generates its own kind of sympathy — not pity, but something more like solidarity. I know what that is. I know what it costs. I know he does not know.

For readers who have not had that experience, the novel asks them to extend care to someone who cannot ask for it. That is a harder ask. But I think it is a worthwhile one.

At its core, Happiness Unintentional is about the gap between function and wellbeing — the way a person can be performing all the right outputs while something essential is quietly collapsing underneath.

Elias is not broken in any way that shows. He is successful, organized, and apparently content. The novel is about what it costs to maintain that appearance when the interior that should be generating it is not there — or is there, but inaccessible.

Writing that required staying inside his perspective without flinching from it, without correcting it, without letting the narrative voice know more than he does.

It also required trusting the reader to feel what Elias cannot feel on his behalf.

That trust is, I think, what literary fiction asks of its readers more than anything else: not to be told what to feel, but to feel it themselves, from evidence, in the dark.

Further reading from the Journal:

• The Performance of Identity: When the Self Is a Strategy
• Alexithymia: When You Can't Name What You Feel
• What Is Psychological Noir?