In an essay for Lit Hub, Sarah McCoy says we need happily ever after endings. “Our communal obsession with fairytale endings transcends generations, geography, languages, and the rise and fall of romantic cynicism,” she says. We call these endings different names: Heaven, Avalon, Valhalla, Shangri-La. These places don’t exist in the real world, and McCoy says that all the more reason we need them in fiction.
One of our oldest and most loved HEAs, Beauty and the Beast was published in 1740 and has been remade and retold again and again. But not ever HEA closes the same way, with a couple dancing off into the horizon. “There are as many variations of the HEA story as there are definitions for their fundamental descriptors: happy, ever, and after,” McCoy says. “The meaning is dependent on the interpretation and what we each want to believe those words signify.”
HEAs are attractive because we can’t control events in real life. Reading books with happy endings might even be a form of self-care. It’s even cathartic.”It’s psychologically restorative to feel catharsis through the (yes, yes, unrealistic) extreme happiness of literary characters,” McCoy writes. While working through four drafts of her latest novel, McCoy ended the story tragically twice, and eventually landed on a happier ending for her main characters.
“Allowing them to have those satisfactory conclusions didn’t just feel right on the page, it carried over into my reality,” she says. “It gave me hope that maybe I too am worthy beyond my beastly attributes. Maybe my own HEA is attainable.”
