The Sad Truth About Happiness
Page 26
The book lovingly describes Vancouver in all its colors and seasons. Why is it so special? Could you ever imagine living—or have you ever lived—anywhere else?
I’ve lived and been happy in many other places, including England, France, Italy, and other cities and towns in Canada. Vancouver was wonderful to write about, however, because it is still a young city, is not terribly well known, and has so many interesting neighborhoods and moods. My next novel is set in an Italian Canadian working-class suburb in Ontario, and I’m having fun capturing a very different community. I think the place where I’ve been happiest is Rome. I would love to live there again. Maggie’s sister, Lucy, lives in Rome before she returns to Vancouver, and I’ve bestowed upon her some of my love for that city.
“I have a fairly rare combination of careers, but I am not surprised at all that so many lawyers I meet write or want to write fiction. The law is all about stories.”
“A happy life feels longer because it is richer.”
In your novel you write, “Something to love, something to do, something to hope for . . . these are the essentials of happiness.” What, if anything, is for you the essential “sad truth” about happiness?
The sad truth about happiness, of course, is that it is entrancing, desirable, and maddeningly elusive. The moment you say the words “I am happy” some of it leaks out.You can’t aim directly for happiness or, once you attain it, hold on to it for long. Happiness is replete with paradox; hard work can make you more genuinely happy than rest and difficulty can provide fertile ground for the seeds of future joy.
Do you believe that happiness is the key to longevity?
A happy life feels longer because it is richer. Happiness is a prism through which a moment’s joy is reflected and shines and expands into infinity. I understand that scientists have discerned many more dimensions than the four with which we are familiar; perhaps it will be determined that happiness is yet another dimension, with its own laws of time-bending relativity.
The chapter headings all refer to parts of a house. For Maggie, a house must have a heart to be a home. What or who makes you feel at home?
I have used home as the central metaphor in the book because it is the location of our deepest joys and conflicts. I wanted my protagonist Maggie to describe the events of the months just past in the way that someone in a new home takes a visitor on a tour through the house. This impulse to give guided tours fades. I have come to believe that showing someone through one’s home is really a means of getting to know it for oneself by seeing it through different eyes and from different angles. This must lead to a deeper knowledge and understanding of where one is—in all senses. Our homes enfold us; they are a refuge, a place for the routines and nourishment that steady and ready us for creative work. I don’t think a home needs to be complex to serve. While in university I lived in a succession of well-designed rooms that held all that I needed: a bed; a chair; a shelf for books; a place for my cup and spoon; room, ideally, for a visitor. I now have a larger space in which to live, but I share it with a husband, two teenage sons, my daughter, and their nanny. Sometimes I catch myself longing for a simple room with chair and board. Maybe this return to simplicity is what people are striving for when they seek out a cottage retreat.
You lost your mother to cancer. Was anyone you met during her treatment the particular inspiration for Maggie?
What a wonderful question. This is not something I have ever actually considered, but I think you are right. My mother’s cancer brought me into contact with many people whose focused intelligence and understanding and warmth reaffirmed my belief in the essential goodness of humanity. I think of Maggie as someone who makes mistakes and is cautious by nature, but who, like her eccentric parents, is driven by an instinct for goodness.
“My mother’s cancer brought me into contact with many people whose focused intelligence and understanding and warmth reaffirmed my belief in the essential goodness of humanity.”
Was it difficult or therapeutic to write about an illness that affected you so closely?
My mother’s lengthy illness and death were devastating for me, as they were for so many of her family and friends. Even today, two years after her death, I am still struggling to understand her loss. It doesn’t quite seem possible. I miss her constantly.
But I also found this process through pain and loss to be fascinating. I was deeply interested in how my appetite dulled or quickened in sympathy with my mother’s; in how sorrow differs so profoundly from depression—although sorrow can lead there and sometimes leave you stranded; in the etiology of cancer and its spread and treatments; in the physicians and caregivers and hospice workers; in other patients and their families; in the intense bursts of laughter and wild jolts of joy in a chemo treatment wing, beside a hospital bed, and at a memorial gathering. I felt and still feel strongly that none of us is immune to life’s most profound sorrows. But we can go through them unthinkingly or we can proceed fully conscious that all of life is brimming over with many different experiences. We can experience them narrowly or fully at our will.
I was determined to find interest and passion and joy in my mother’s illness and death, in part because she was determined to find them too. In her last few days she was reading and thinking about apples and beekeeping and sonnets—she compared them to cutlery drawers, the words lined up in rows—and Iceland and the Swedish neighborhood of the Chicago of her childhood. And she was sick! How could I do less? Writing provided me with the opportunity and privilege of working through some of this and was, in the end, the best kind of therapy for my sorrow.
“I was determined to find interest and passion and joy in my mother’s illness and death, in part because she was determined to find them too.”
How did writing this book change you, if at all?
Most obviously, writing this book made me a novelist. I see the world now through a novelist’s eyes. Everything is material; everything is weighed for its narrative possibilities. I think of novels as enormously capacious and am always looking for interesting ideas to appropriate.
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About the book
The Best Kind of Happiness
HAPPINESS HAS MANY ASPECTS and comes in more guises than we may readily recognize. Contentment is a purring, low-maintenance kind of happiness; it is happiness without the energy to aspire to joy. Glee is hopped-up happiness, happiness on a tear. Nostalgia is the craft of discerning happiness in the past, just as hope is all wrapped up in happinesses anticipated in the future. A commonly cited shortcut is to strive only for the powerful experience of present happiness. Thus we are counseled to live in the moment, take the time to stop and smell the roses, or—advice I once heard on the radio—“When you stir the pot, you should stir the pot.” I understand the intent behind this counsel: even in the wake of great sorrow the world is saturated with cause for joy, if we can only fully open ourselves.
Oddly, one of literature’s experts on happiness experienced long periods of deep unhappiness and killed herself in the end by filling her pockets with stones and striding into the River Ouse. Virginia Woolf often wrote of the intense pleasure she and her characters took in all of life’s experiences. In the short story “Happiness” she describes a man with an enviable talent for contentment:
In happiness there is always this terrific exaltation. It is not high spirits; nor rapture; nor praise, fame or health (he could not walk two miles without feeling done up) it is a mystic state, a trance, an ecstasy which, for all that he was atheistical, skeptical, unbaptized, and all the rest of it, had he suspected some affinity with the ecstasy that turned men priests, sent women in the prime of life trudging the streets with starched cyclamen-like frills about their faces, and set lips and stony eyes; but with this difference; them it imprisoned; him it set free. It freed him from all dependence upon anyone upon anything.
“Virginia Woolf often wrote of the i
ntense pleasure she and her characters took in all of life’s experiences.”
Even his happiness is precarious, however, and must be guarded:
Why, some branch might fall; the color might change; green turn blue; or a leaf shake; and that would be enough; yes; that would be enough to shiver, shatter, utterly destroy this amazing thing this miracle, this treasure which was his had been his was his must always be his. . . .
The happiness of Woolf ’s character Mrs. Dalloway is more straightforward, although just as precarious.“What she liked was simply life.” The novel Mrs. Dalloway captures the central irony of happiness: it is as much about death as about life, as much about regret as about joy.
Dr. Tom Stevens of (appropriately enough) California State University, Long Beach, is someone who has considered happiness deeply. His Web site (http://front.csulb .edu/success/) includes links to articles and resources on happiness, as well as quizzes (not unlike the one Maggie takes) to test one’s level of happiness and potential for joy. I completed an online questionnaire at a different site and learned that my five “signature strengths” out of the twenty-four tested in the survey include love of learning, zest, gratitude, creativity, and curiosity—all of which I hope to put to use in writing my second novel, Nicolo Piccolo. As it happens, the new book (much like Stevens’s Web site) is about getting and giving advice.
While it doesn’t yet seem to have been created, I would be interested in a site called www.indirecthappiness.com; I believe that happiness is a by-product of other goals and activities. Deeply happy people are noticers and thinkers. They are attentive. They are aware of and appreciate beauty and goodness and complexity. They find a way to do meaningful work or have the knack of investing the work they do with meaning. They stay connected to the people they enjoy, creating and strengthening bonds that become themselves sources of joy. Happy people believe that the future will be good and these expectations become self-fulfilling. For a happy man or woman a setback is temporary; even terrible events are instructive and can be put to use in the development of wisdom or humility or character or ways to avert similar events in the future.
Life is the crucible for sorrow and for happiness. Throughout our lives we are all in the process of learning how to create, notice, build, act, and lead. We can believe, as happy people do, that the future holds good things; these expectations will not become self-fulfilling on their own, but through conscious application of all that we are to the world as a whole and (more manageably on the day-today level) in our workplaces and homes.
“While it doesn’t yet seem to have been created, I would be interested in a site called www.indirect happiness.com.”
The best kind of happiness is the happiness one creates for oneself, quite incidentally, out of the everyday materials and commonplace beauty of the world immediately at hand.
Read On
If You Loved This, You’ll Like . . .
UNLESS by Carol Shields
Reta Winters is a writer and translator, married with three children and living in Toronto. Her life seems uncomplicated and without drama. But then her teenage daughter leaves college to beg on the street and sleep in a homeless hostel. She refuses to talk to her mother and Reta’s life is thrown into turmoil, her certain surefootedness undone.
ACCIDENTS IN THE HOME by Tessa Hadley
Clare is a married mother of three, the glamour in her life dependent on what she finds to wear in the charity shop; her best friend Helly is a successful actress, her looks plastered on billboards. When Clare discovers that Helly is going out with a man she had sex with as a teenager the odd coincidence starts to effect and unravel her life.
FIRST AID by Janet Davey
After Jo’s husband leaves her she must raise her three children alone. Living in a seaside town, surviving on income from working in a junk shop, she hopes that a new love will lead to a new beginning. But when her lover hits her she packs up the children and catches a train to London to be with the grandparents by whom she was raised. Shortly after they set off, however, her daughter jumps off the train and runs away. Taking place over one summer weekend, First Aid tackles the tangles of family life and the ever-present desire to start again.
“[In Accidents in the Home,] when Clare discovers that Helly is going out with a man she had sex with as a teenager the odd coincidence starts to effect and unravel her life.”
AUGUST and I’LL GO TO BED AT NOON by Gerard Woodward
These two books chart the rise and demise of the Jones family. August tells the family’s story from 1955 to 1970, relating how their relationships with one another and with a place of presumed happiness (a campsite in Wales where they spend their annual vacation) change over the years. I’ll Go to Bed at Noon continues their story in the 1970s, as several members of the family succumb to alcoholism and the destruction it engenders.
BEL CANTO by Ann Patchett
Guests at a vice-presidential mansion in a South American country are taken hostage by a group of terrorists aiming to capture the president; luckily for him (but not them) the president has stayed home to watch his favorite soap opera. One of the hostages is a world-renowned soprano and her voice makes their ordeal palatable. As days stretch into months and the inevitable denouement approaches, relationships develop between hostages and terrorists that will change their lives forever. Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002.
CAT’S EYE by Margaret Atwood
Elaine’s return to Toronto brings back horrible memories of her childhood and the girls who made it a misery. Cruel and aggressive, ringleader Cordelia destroys Elaine’s self-esteem and haunts her for the rest of her life. Now an adult, Elaine must come to terms with her past.
“[In Bel Canto,] relationships develop between hostages and terrorists that will change their lives forever.”
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PRAISE FOR The Sad Truth About Happiness
“A confident voice and a luminous lyrical prose style.”
—Boston Globe
“Giardini deserves applause for her debut effort. She clearly demonstrates a talent for distilling moments that touch the human heart.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“What is more fleeting, more elusive than happiness? First-time novelist Anne Giardini delivers a powerful story that answers that question as clearly as anyone ever can. . . . [She] is a nimble storyteller who creates a character for the ages in dignified, wise-beyond-her-years Maggie Selgrin.”
—BookPage
“So emotionally honest and engaging that it is irresistible. . . . A wise reader should probably buy two copies, one to keep and one to lend, because the lent copy is never coming back.”
—Denver Post
“Giardini’s peripatetic style reveals an attractive curiosity about the infinite variety in people’s lives, both happy and sad.”
—Washington Post Book World
“The sad truth about happiness is that it’s often fleeting and ineffable. The happy truth about Giardini’s debut novel is that it appreciates how important the difference between happy enough and deeper satisfaction can be, and parses these nuances with an appealingly light touch.”
—Newsday
“This first novel may remind us of works by the author’s mother, Carol Shields, in sensitive handling of rich characters and domestic detail. . . . A touching and satisfying read.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“A fully formed new voice, poignant, funny, and acute.”
—Fay Weldon, author of Wicked Women
“Charming. . . . A pleasantly entertaining journey.”
—Publishers Weekly
Credits
Cover painting: Betty, 1988 (663-5) © by Gerhard Richter
Copyright
THE SAD TRUTH ABOUT HAPPINESS. Copyright © 2005 by Anne Gi
ardini. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
The Library of Congress has catalogued
the hardcover edition as follows:
Giardini, Anne.
The sad truth about happiness : a novel / Anne Giardini.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-074176-7
I. Title.
PR9199.4.G526S23 2005
813'.6—dc22
2004061938
ISBN-10: 0-06-074177-5 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-074177-8 (pbk.)
06 07 08 09 10 /RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
EPub Edition © June 2011 ISBN: 9780062106377
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