Joey – girl, 23, barista – meets Chuck – man, 35, copywriter – at a bar. She’s an aspiring poet struggling to write, stalled in her career path, placid in the precipice of adulthood. He’s recently out of a years-long relationship, which had graduated to an engagement, which he broke off. He also has a drinking problem.
Against all odds, the two form the spark of a connection, and find in each other exactly what they were looking for: for Chuck, that’s the freedom and brazen carelessness of youth; for Joey, she gains the signposts of adult responsibility. Together, they discover an impetus to finally write. But Jem Calder’s debut novel I Want You To Be Happy is less a love story and more the kind of disastrous situationship that turns into friend-group mythology – the sort of thing retold over glasses of wine like a game of telephone.
Calder alternates the perspectives of his protagonists in each chapter. What this conceit does most successfully is reveal how little these characters know about each other, and how entangled our perceptions of other people are in our own insecurities.
Reading about Chuck and Joey from the other person’s perspective is almost like being introduced to two wholly different characters. But the real phantom presence that threads itself through the novel is that of our contemporary times – just glance at Faber’s excellent cover to get an idea of what I’m referring to. “Book shop tote. WFH. Small Plates, QR Code Menu.” It’s right out of a @socks_house_meeting meme. It’s the perfect East-London backdrop for situationship-maxxing.
I met Calder on my very own WFH day, and we chatted about romance, writing about writers and the terrible sensation of relating to Chuck (only on occasion!) while reading.
Cold Magazine (CM): Tell me about the inception of the novel. I’m especially interested in the dual perspectives – how did those two voices and characters emerge for you?
Jem Calder (JC): It really started with the characters. I thought it would be interesting to place them in a romantic relationship that doesn’t really go anywhere. I also liked putting the reader in a position where they’re not entirely sure whether to root for them or not. Relationships are complicated in real life… maybe not as extreme as this, but people’s intentions and identities are never completely clear.
I liked that tension, and I knew it gave me a strong plot engine – almost like a romantic comedy, except the darkness gradually becomes very real. These are difficult things people actually deal with in their lives.
The voices took a long time to find. I spent about a year trying to start the first chapter and getting it wrong. But once it clicked, everything flowed much more easily. For me, writing is a process of elimination. I’ll try something for a month, realise it isn’t right, then try something else. Looking back, I can clearly see why those earlier versions wouldn’t have worked for this book.
Sheila Heti has a metaphor I really like. He says writing a novel is like throwing handfuls of sand onto an invisible castle. I relate to that completely. I almost feel the novel already exists, and I’m just working my way toward it. If I didn’t believe that, I don’t think I’d have the confidence to continue.
Once you get about a third of the way through, you can finally see the shape of the book. But the beginning is painstaking. You have to go through that slog to discover who the characters are and what drives them. By then, you’re completely dialled into them. There’s about 50% of me in each character, and 50% that’s entirely themselves. I feel equally invested in both of them – there isn’t one I’m rooting for more.
CM: Both of your characters are writers themselves, and they complement each other in a way where their insecurities are constantly being reflected back at one another, even though their approaches to writing are very different. What was it like writing that dynamic?
JC: That was actually quite a big hurdle for me at the start, because I didn’t really want to make them writers. But I stopped worrying about that once I realised people who read novels are probably fairly interested in writing and publishing anyway.
Writing is such a huge part of my life – it’s so much of what I think about – that I knew I wanted to share that with these characters and explore different perspectives on it.
CM: The two characters have very different relationships to writing. Chuck works as a copywriter and sees writing as something he’s naturally talented at. There’s a line where he feels he should be so intrinsically gifted that he shouldn’t even have to sit down and work. There’s definitely a lazy part of me that relates to that.
JC: Joey is almost the opposite. She doesn’t have that entitlement. She sees herself as low down the ladder and feels she constantly has to improve. I think the novel touches on how those approaches lead to very different outcomes. Joey has a much more flexible relationship to her work – she’s willing to learn from it – whereas Chuck is trying to impose himself on it. He’s almost trying to get revenge through his writing.
Part of the tension in the novel is also: how good actually is he? He works as a copywriter, and I’ve spent time around copywriters before. The corporate creative is a really interesting type of person to me. There can be this superiority complex about earning money through creativity, but often the reality is much narrower than that. At the same time, I sympathise with Chuck, because I think he knows it isn’t the artistic expression he hoped for.
I wasn’t necessarily trying to make a statement through their different approaches to writing. It was more about putting these contrasting people together and seeing what happened. It also leads to an important moment later in the novel when Joey finally reads his work.
Writing becomes another thing they have in common, another way they bond. I don’t think you have to be a writer to relate to that. A shared experience of art can accelerate intimacy very quickly. At the beginning of a relationship, you’re looking for clues about who the other person is, and if you like them, you tend to give the most generous interpretation possible. They both see this thwarted artist in each other, and that becomes deeply bonding
CM: I found the novel to be a very honest portrayal of how selfish and narcissistic people can be in relationships. It made me think of the scene where Joey reads her poem to Chuck and he’s almost in tears – partly because he likes the poem, and partly because he’s sleeping with a poet.
JC: I think it’s the same for her too. She’s getting approval from someone older and, in her eyes, established. He makes a living through writing, he has this big apartment – all those outward markers of success are appealing to her.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about books about writers, but I became more interested once I realised this was about people on the outskirts trying to become writers.
Neither of them really has any reason to believe they’ll succeed. Chuck just assumes he will despite very little evidence, whereas Joey feels she has to somehow maneuver herself into a position where success might become possible. They’re two very contrasting viewpoints.
CM: Another through-line in the novel, beyond the relationship itself, is the depressive cycle of everyday life. I was also thinking about the cover, and those pages in the middle where Joey is spiralling – lines like “the whole largeness of your life comes down to screens.” How did you go about threading that feeling throughout the book?
JC: What I’m always trying to achieve on a sentence level is something instantly recognisable but not cliché. That’s the ideal spot for me. It might only be two words, but it’s this feeling of recognising something from real life that you haven’t seen rendered that way on the page before.
I’m very hard on myself in the writing process. I want almost every sentence to contain something tangible that reminds someone of their own life. If I can express something I haven’t seen in another novel before, that’s perfect for me.
I think everyday life itself becomes an antagonist in the novel. Especially if you’re young and living in London, where the cost of living is so high and you probably don’t earn much, things can become bleak very quickly. The characters almost have to steel themselves just to connect with each other. But I didn’t want the novel to simply punish the reader. I wanted it to be funny too – just hard-won funny. To me, that depressive realism feels honest, but it also makes moments of joy or connection much more profound.
A big part of being 23 is developing the mental armour to deal with life. Joey slowly realises not only that the world is difficult, but that even the things she thought would save her are difficult too. That doesn’t mean there’s no reward. I just wanted to give an honest account of that.
CM: I wanted to briefly follow up on the “little treats” in the novel – the scrolling, vaping, drinking – all these small reward systems the characters rely on.
JC: I think they’re these cold comforts people use to try and rebalance the suffering-to-reward ratio of life. But increasingly those little treats extract as much from you as they give back. You have to keep doing them more and more just to get the same feeling. The scientific term is probably the hedonic treadmill. I think both characters are trapped in that. It feels very contemporary to me.
There’s also an attempt to wrest back some control. The characters feel alienated and disconnected from their own lives, so even something like vaping for five minutes becomes a way of asserting agency. It’s not necessarily pleasurable anymore – it just feels controllable.
And the novel starts to ask whether they’re using each other in the same way. There are things they each get from the other person that become addictive. Joey likes the stability and apparent success Chuck represents. Chuck likes Joey’s newness and vulnerability. They become these substances for one another. As the novel goes on, the more time they spend together, the harder things seem to get. It’s like slowly flooding a room with water – there’s less and less air.
CM: I thought the dual perspectives worked brilliantly in that regard as well. Which brings me to the ending, which really cristallises that idea that they never understood one another.
Joey sees Chuck through the glass and imagines what he’s up to, which is the same position the reader is in, even if we get a better guess at where Chuck ends up. What led you to leave the characters at that distance from each other, and from the reader?
JC: The ending actually came to me very suddenly and very specifically, which almost never happens for me. Usually writing is incremental – one sentence gradually reveals the next – but the ending arrived almost fully formed. I think if your subconscious gives you one of those moments, you kind of have to follow it. It’s rare.
I’m really happy with the ending because there’s so much left unsaid. It becomes almost a Rorschach test for the reader: is it sad, hopeful, devastating? Do these people get what they want? You don’t really know.
Chuck changes as much as he’s capable of changing. He hits the limit of what he’s willing to confront about himself. Maybe that’s because he’s older, maybe because he’s more self-aggrandising, he’s less willing to let the world change him. With Joey, I do think there’s optimism there. I didn’t want to write a novel about a 23-year-old trying to survive the world and then simply crush her. But at the same time, you’d have to be naive to read the ending as purely happy. The world she lives in is still punishing.
That final image, her seeing him through the glass, felt very profound to me. Sometimes in life you suddenly realise you never really knew someone at all, or never truly got through to them. She has this very disorienting moment of recognising that. And I didn’t want to betray the realism of the novel with a false ending. I’d spent so much time trying to make the relationship and the world feel believable that the ending had to feel equally real.Jem Calder’s I Want You to Be Happy was published by Faber & Faber on 21 May 2026