Joyful, Anyway

New York Times bestselling author and Duke University professor Kate Bowler offers a profound, funny, and deeply human case for joy that doesn’t depend on everything getting better.

“Joyful, Anyway is colorful and layered, unafraid of the occasional gut-punch of raw feeling and vulnerability—much like Kate Bowler herself. She suffers no fools, especially the toxic optimists.”—Jerry Seinfeld

“A book to take you through life’s aftermaths.”—Katherine May, New York Times bestselling author of Wintering

You can’t always be happy, but you can be joyful, anyway.

We live in a culture convinced that chasing happiness will optimize our bodies, our minds, our relationships, our lives. But in the meantime, bad news usually stays bad: illness, chronic pain, grief, and disappointment don’t obey our timelines or vision boards. We are left wondering why, if we’re doing everything right, life still feels so hard.

Honest and bracingly tender, Joyful, Anyway proves that experiencing joy does not depend on resolving everything that makes life difficult. Drawing on a decade of living with serious illness and a lifetime studying America’s obsession with progress, Kate Bowler shows why people so busy chasing happiness miss out on actual joy.

Joy isn’t something you can optimize or manufacture—it finds us at the edge of expectation, when life interrupts our scripts. Joyful, Anyway gives language for the ache we all carry and practices for “putting yourself in the way of joy”: loosening control, introducing novelty, choosing charity, and staying open to the surprising, technicolor moments that pull us back into life.

Joy reminds us that no matter what, life is still worth loving. For every time we ask is this it?, joy will answer: There is more.