This is What Happy Looks Like

Jennifer E. Smith’s young adult romance novel This is What Happy Looks Like chronicles the budding relationship between teen heartthrob Graham Larkin and small-town Ellie O'Neill after a typo sparks an ongoing email correspondence. The book looks at issues of love, vulnerability, and family secrets, exploring the complicated nature of love between people from widely different backgrounds.

A typo causes Graham Larkin to accidentally send an email to Ellie O'Neill, a teenaged girl living in the small coastal town of Henley, Maine. When Ellie receives the email, she isn't sure who the sender is, but she's curious – she responds, finding herself communicating with seventeen-year-old Graham, who lives in California with his pet pig, Wilbur. Lonely, Graham is happy to find companionship in Ellie, and for the next three months, they start an online friendship, exchanging information about their daily lives, thoughts, and feelings.

Unbeknownst to Ellie, her new email companion, Graham, is a movie star – Ellie never finds out his last name and Graham never mentions his fame, so the secret remains hidden. Graham is relieved to have a relationship with someone that doesn't revolve around his success or his money. He is lonely; in Ellie, he finds someone down to earth and honest, and he feels he can confide his real emotions to her. The more they talk, the more Graham begins to fall for Ellie.



Eventually, Graham convinces his producer to stage his new film in Henley, Maine, so he can meet Ellie in person. He and his crew arrive, along with a horde of paparazzi, which Ellie and her friend Quinn mock while they work together at a local shop, Sprinkles. One afternoon, Ellie leaves Sprinkles just before Graham walks in. Quinn is wearing Ellie's shirt, and Graham mistakes her for Ellie – he asks her out to dinner, and Quinn immediately says yes. At dinner, Graham, realizing his mistake, tracks Ellie down through Quinn in order to tell her the truth about his identity and his presence in Henley.

However, everything doesn't go to plan when Graham shows up at Ellie's house to tell her the truth about her email friend. Ellie is shy, and she is embarrassed that she has been revealing so much about herself to someone so famous. She is also overwhelmed by the idea of drawing attention to herself, because she is hiding a family secret – Ellie, it turns out, is the illegitimate daughter of a prominent politician who is now running for the presidency. After Ellie was born, her mother moved to Maine to live a reclusive life away from the spotlight. Ellie feels that dating a famous movie star would ruin everything for which both her father and her mother have worked.

Despite this, Graham is dedicated to Ellie. He wants to be with her, and he wants to help her achieve her dreams – Ellie, a good student, was accepted into a Harvard poetry workshop that she couldn't afford. Graham is convinced that he can help her overcome her financial woes in order to make her dreams come true. Ellie finally agrees to date Graham, but under very stringent and hard to meet conditions. She demands that they date without any photographs or publicity. Graham tries to give her what she wants, though the nature of his life makes that incredibly difficult, putting a strain on their relationship.



Graham and Ellie keep their relationship almost entirely concealed until Ellie feels pressure to tell her mother the truth about the man she has been dating. When her mother finds out, she is mortified and convinces Ellie to break it off for the sole reason that his fame will cause him to leave her in the end, exactly the way Ellie's father abandoned her years ago when she found herself pregnant. Ellie finds her mother's cynicism persuasive and breaks it off with Graham.

The novel ends with a sweet summer romance between two dramatically different people that is troubled by the complexities of daily life, expectations, and family history.

Jennifer E. Smith is the author of a number of young adult novels, primarily about teenage romance. Her other books include The Statistical Probability of Love and First Sight and The Comeback Season, among others. Her books have been translated into thirty-three languages and she works as an editor in New York City. She received her master’s degree in creative writing from the University of St. Andrew's in Scotland.