Jem Calder’s writing career had a fairytale start when Sally Rooney emailed him after reading a short story he submitted to a literary magazine she was editing. It was the first story he’d ever completed. Calder, already a huge fan of Rooney, described the experience as surreal. ‘I can’t really imagine what could top that, to be honest,’ he says.
That story appeared in Calder’s 2022 collection, Reward System, which was hailed as a book of the year. His debut novel, I Want You to Be Happy, picks up similar themes: modern love, millennial ennui, consumer culture, technology and ecological doom. The novel opens with 23-year-old Joey meeting 35-year-old Chuck at a bar. They begin a situationship in which Joey falls hard while Chuck remains hung up on his ex-fiancée.
Calder links Chuck’s commitmentphobia to the economic precarity faced by his generation. ‘You can’t afford to own a house, it’s very difficult to have a family,’ he says, noting that these constraints express themselves emotionally as avoidance. He adds that because there is ‘realistically no actual hope for the future, the younger generation has to content themselves with fucking around’, but this ends up being a shallow way to live.
Calder grew up in Cambridge and studied English at Leeds. He has worked various jobs alongside writing, including as a barista and copywriter – professions mirrored by his protagonists. He says he cannot relate to authors who complain of writer’s block, as his day job gives him motivation to write. The novel took three years to complete and alternates between Joey and Chuck’s perspectives, both of whom write on the side.
The book is partly about two literary types falling in love, swapping poems by Louise Glück and Frank O’Hara. Calder began writing the novel while dating his girlfriend, allowing him to transcribe his own thoughts. He describes being ‘haunted’ by Chuck types – men in their 30s or 40s who have aged out of being cool and face creative or professional disappointment. ‘I’m always aware that I’m only one bad draft of a novel away from being in that place,’ he says.
