Ellie Kemper is about to take the hike of a lifetime in Happiness For Beginners, the new romantic comedy that began streaming on Netflix today.

Written and directed by Vicky Wright, Happiness For Beginners stars Ellie Kemper as a recently divorced woman named Helen, who decides to go soul-searching via an intense hiking trip on the Appalachian Trail. Even though she’s looking to find herself out in the wilderness, she ends up finding love along the way, thanks to a dreamy (albeit irritating) fellow hiker named Jake, played by Yellowstone star Luke Grimes. There’s just one small complication: Jake is the best friend of her annoying younger brother.

Also starring Nico Santos, Ben Cook, and Blythe Danner, Happiness for Beginners promises Netflix subscribers yet another predictable but adorable romantic comedy. But more than that, the setting of the story is so distinct and detailed, you’ll wonder if it’s based on a real-life inspiration story. So is Happiness for Beginners based on a true story? Let’s get into it.

No. Happiness for Beginners is not based on a true story. Helen and Jake are not real people. However, Happiness for Beginners is based on the 2015 novel of the same name, written by Katherine Center. But that is a novel, which means the story is a work of fiction (in other words, it is not based on anything that happened in real life).

But even though Center’s novel doesn’t feature real people, the author was partially inspired by her own experience with a “wilderness survival course” that she took when she was in her 20s. “I signed up for the trip, in part, because I wanted to do something truly impressive,” Center said in a 2015 interview with Bookreporter.com. “I wanted to push myself to my limits. On some deep level, I knew even then that I was hoping to change my personality and become someone different. So that part of Helen comes from me — and yes, looking back, it was completely nutty to think that I could change my entire personality on a hiking trip. But it did change me, even if not in the ways I hoped for or imagined. And it turned out to be one of the grand adventures of my life.”

Lucky for Center, she had a detailed journal from that trip that she referred to when writing her novel. “When I opened up the notebook for the first time in 20 years, pressed flowers from the trip fluttered out of the pages. It brought it all back for me: the scenery, the wildlife, the food, the lessons I was trying to learn, the feeling of being that age and wanting so badly to figure out my life. There’s a lot of my college self in the kids on that trip, and in Helen.”

Center added that, in addition to herself, part of the inspiration for her novel’s main character, Helen (played by Ellie Kemper in the movie) came from a real person on her wilderness trip who “was ten years older than the rest of us. Like Helen, she’d just gotten divorced. She arrived to find all these college kids, and she never fit in with the group—though she never seemed like she wanted to, either. It isolated her, but I think it freed her, too.” Many years later, Center, who turned 40 the year Happiness For Beginners was released, was much better able to see through that woman’s point-of-view.

So there you have it! While Happiness For Beginners isn’t a true story, it was inspired by a real trip—and that’s why it feels so authentic.