Whatever Makes You Happy
A Novel
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
What does it take to be happy? How happy is happy enough? And what does “happy” mean, anyway? So asks Sally Farber–wife, mother, daughter, friend, working woman, and lover–in this wise and funny novel about a woman’s search for happiness in some of the right, and a few of the wrong, places.
Summer in the city looms long for Sally Farber when she sends her two daughters off to camp for the first time. Suddenly freed of her usual patterns in a city that becomes a grown-up’s playground,, she embarks on a journey unlike any she’s ever had–filled with guilty pleasures and guilty pains.
Caught between the past (cleaning out her childhood apartment as her demanding mother offers edicts from South Carolina) and the future (facing her first semi-empty nest), Sally finds herself unexpectedly involved with a powerful, unpredictable man.
And as she researches a book whose very topic is happiness, she must weigh the relative merits of prescriptions for its attainment offered by Aristotle and the Dalai Lama, Freud and Charles Schulz, scented candles and Zoloft, her mother and her best friend. The answer comes, in the end, from a surprising discovery, in this rich and original novel about how we can find, and ultimately embrace, both happiness and love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sally Farber has everything a 40-year-old New Yorker could want: a loving doctor husband; two healthy, adorable daughters; great friends; and a charming book editor who used to be her lover and still calls her Cookie. Sally's fourth book is The History of Happiness, and there's the rub. The deeper she digs, the more elusive a definition of happiness becomes (is contentment just "resignation wearing a funny hat?"), and the more bedeviled she is by the guilty certainty that she isn't as happy as she should be. The great charm of Grunwald's sweet, comic novel is that it's two books: the one Sally's writing and the one about her. So why doesn't it feel more substantial? Certainly Sally's ironic enough, so you can't knock her for starving amid plenty. But there's something perfunctory about her affair with a famous artist when her girls go to sleep-away camp. Although she deems it a self-destructive act akin to cutting herself after her father's death when she was 19, the reader never doubts the affair will end without scars, and she will rediscover that happiness is a warm husband. Grunwald is smart, funny and talented enough for a reader to want one thing more the unexpected.
