The work of Ursula Villarreal-Moura abounds with appealing qualities, from formal innovation to a penchant for reckoning with big ethical questions. Her debut novel Like Happiness tells the story of Tatum, a young woman who forms a connection with a writer she’s long admired — and later comes to question certain things she’d long taken for granted about that relationship. I talked with Villarreal-Moura about the genesis of that novel, writing about feeling at home, and finding the right structure to tell this story.