Podcast Summary:

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Gina Stam
Guest: Dr. Kathryn Robson
Episode: "Beyond the Happy Ending: Imagining Happiness in Contemporary French Women's Writing and Film" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
Date: October 22, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode features Dr. Kathryn Robson discussing her new book Beyond the Happy Ending: Imagining Happiness in Contemporary French Women's Writing and Film. The conversation delves into how "happiness" is theorized, represented, and interrogated in French women’s literature and film, focusing on how narratives of happiness challenge, reproduce, or rethink dominant cultural norms. The discussion traverses theories of happiness, its slippery definitions, gendered frameworks, family, queerness, migration, aging, and the thorny relationship between happiness and social convenience.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Rationale for the Study

• Tackling Happiness Reluctantly:
  • Robson came to happiness "very reluctantly," having previously focused on trauma and empathy.
  • She observed the prevalence and complexity of happiness, seeing it as an underlying theme even in works where it seems unlikely.
  • "It's important, I think, to think about happiness in places where nobody looks for it..." (04:32-04:35)
• Necessity of Gendered Lens:
  • Argues that happiness is deeply gendered in French culture; can’t be thought about in a gender-blind way, as it intersects with sexuality, motherhood, race, and aging.
  • The book aims to reveal how French women writers and filmmakers "highlight how limited and coercive its dominant discourses are, but they're also offering different ways to think about what it might mean." (05:52)

2. Challenges of Defining Happiness

• Multiplicity of Meaning:
  • No consensus: emotion vs. state, pleasure vs. morality, overlaps with wellbeing and even unhappiness.
  • "I argue it is more productive to understand happiness in its intersecting and sometimes contradictory narratives instead of settling for one singular definition." (07:39)
• Methodological Approach:
  • Robson avoids rigid definitions, instead mapping how happiness manifests within and against various sociocultural narratives.

3. Theoretical Frameworks

• Primarily Sara Ahmed & Lauren Berlant:
  • Sara Ahmed: The promise of happiness as sticky and coercive, often tied to normative life choices (e.g., marriage, heteronormativity). Her theory sometimes centers unhappiness, which Robson both appreciates and seeks to move beyond.
    • Quote: "Her book on happiness is also very much about unhappiness." (08:54)
  • Lauren Berlant:
    • Cruel optimism—how people are attached to life choices that may harm them.
    • Crisis ordinariness—stuck in trauma or the present, unable to imagine a better future.
    • These frameworks reveal both constraints and points of resistance in narratives of happiness.

4. Chapter 1: Authenticity, Performance, and Consumer Culture

• Authentic vs. Inauthentic Happiness:

  • The binary persists everywhere, from advertising to academia.
  • Happiness as a performance—nothing lies beneath masks but more masking.
  • Example in Yasmina Reza’s Heureux les heureux:
    • "These characters can find happiness or believe they can find happiness only through fantasy and through faking it." (14:49)
    • Relates to Berlant’s bearable misrecognition: "You'll never authentically be recognized, because every recognition is effectively a misrecognition. But sometimes we can fantasize that as a bearable, acceptable recognition." (15:55)

• Social Media's Role:

  • Examined mostly through Delphine de Vigan's Les enfants sont rois and Camille Laurens’ Celle que vous croyez.
  • Social media layers fantasy and performance:
    • "Nobody is who they seem, but there's no peeling off the social media masks to reveal the real person underneath. There's just layer upon layer of masking in this text." (17:30)
  • Both novels show how seeking happiness through online performance creates “bearable misrecognition”—sometimes with violent consequences.

5. Chapter 2: Intimacy and the Family Home

• Home as Fantasized Space of Happiness:
  • Many texts juxtapose the fantasy of happy intimacy against the reality of domestic violence or dysfunction.
  • Example: Leïla Slimani’s Chanson douce, where the nanny’s destructive quest for intimacy is born from societal fantasies of the happy family.
  • "Violence in the home or in the family is shown to be generated by very entrenched fantasies about happy families and intimate family units." (21:11)
• Destabilizing Norms:
  • Draws on Berlant’s question of what happens if sexuality/intimacy stops serving as a stabilizing narrative. Robson calls for "different stories about intimacies."

6. Chapter 3: Queering Happiness

• Queerness and Structural Unhappiness:
  • Queer figures have long been seen as excluded from "happy endings."
  • Robson identifies fleeting yet real happiness in queer lives, especially as alternatives to heteronormativity.
  • Example: Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy and Portrait de la jeune fille en feu—happiness is a fleeting interlude, but:**
    • "These films also disrupt that script as they queer the temporal frames...offering alternative narratives of happiness that are flickering and fleeting, but not completely extinguished or contained." (27:12)
  • Queer happiness emerges in moments of movement, disruption, and embodied experience.

7. Chapter 4: Migration, Exile, and the Banlieue

• Movement (Literal and Metaphorical):
  • Texts about migrants, exiles, and banlieue life rarely resolve into integrative happiness, instead offering momentary, relational happiness through openness to difference and embodied encounters.
  • Dance and movement are often associated with such happiness.
• Case Study:
  • Marie NDiaye’s La Divine:
    • "Despite the relentless dystopian misery...this novel includes a very surprising number of references to happiness which I think are worth exploring, even if they have rarely received any critical attention." (31:02)
  • Robson sees these fleeting references as evidence that happiness lingers even in dystopian contexts.

8. Chapter 5: Happiness and Aging

• Aging as Limiting (But Not Ruinous) to Happiness:
  • Cultural narratives push old age outside of happy stories.
  • Robson challenges this through close readings, e.g., Hélène Cixous' accounts of her mother, which blend humor and intimacy.
    • "These representations of happiness in old age don't only challenge assumptions about old age, but also about happiness itself." (33:52)
• Props as Characters:
  • Walking aids, hearing aids become part of intimate and often comic narratives about happiness and old age.
• Agnes Varda’s films:
  • Offer joyful images of aging but are not uncritical of privilege, and blend "playful, joyful" representations with acknowledgment of loss (39:32-39:51).

9. Coda: Happiness & Inconvenience

• Inconvenience as Productive for Happiness:
  • Personal anecdote: Robson’s shift to happiness studies felt "awkward" and "inconvenient."
  • Across texts, inconvenience disrupts normative scripts, creates friction, and ends up enabling intimacy and happiness.
  • "Inconvenience can enable an unscripted and often surprising happiness, actually through the friction with others..." (41:25)
  • Calls for rethinking the happiness-intimacy relationship via the lens of inconvenience.

10. Upcoming Project

• Robson’s next research: “Speaking Out and Feminism in Contemporary French Culture”—feminist protest, literature, activism, and emotion in French culture and how it shifts over time.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On approach:

  "My aim was to take happiness seriously and to assume that it does matter, even though it is obviously problematic." — Kathryn Robson (05:12)

• On definitions:

  "There's no agreement over whether it should be tracked by what one philosopher, Julia Annes, calls the number of episodes of smiley face feeling or a more holistic overall state." — Kathryn Robson (06:32)

• On social media masks:

  "There's no peeling off the social media masks to reveal the real person underneath. There's just layer upon layer of masking…" — Kathryn Robson (17:34)

• On queer happiness:

  "These films go beyond presenting queer happiness as a sort of spatial and temporal parenthesis...they queer temporalities and narratives offering alternative narratives of happiness that are flickering and fleeting, but not completely extinguished or contained." — Kathryn Robson (27:07)

• On aging and happiness:

  "These representations of happiness in old age don't only challenge assumptions about old age, but also about happiness itself." — Kathryn Robson (33:52)

• On inconvenience:

  "Most surprisingly, the text I analyze suggests that inconvenience can enable an unscripted and often surprising happiness, actually through the friction with others..." — Kathryn Robson (41:25)

Timestamps for Major Segments

• 01:32 — Introduction to Dr. Robson and her book
• 02:27 — Why study happiness, and why through a gendered lens
• 05:56 — Challenges in defining happiness
• 08:50 — Theoretical frameworks: Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant
• 13:01 — Chapter 1: Authenticity, faking, and consumer culture
• 16:59 — Social media and happiness
• 21:01 — Chapter 2: Intimacy, family, and violence
• 25:30 — Chapter 3: Queering happiness
• 29:32 — Chapter 4: Migration, movement, and marginality
• 33:07 — Chapter 5: Aging and happiness
• 38:26 — Agnes Varda’s films and happiness
• 40:22 — Coda: Happiness and inconvenience
• 43:03 — Upcoming projects on feminism and “speaking out” in France

Conclusion

Dr. Kathryn Robson's Beyond the Happy Ending is a rigorous yet empathetic exploration of how happiness, often elusive and conflicted, is theorized, represented, and sometimes radically reimagined in contemporary French women’s writing and film. The episode is filled with perceptive analysis and offers a broad, nuanced perspective on a deceptively simple, frequently overlooked emotional and cultural phenomenon.