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An elegant dissection of how youthful happiness is lost, by a memoirist of great style and insight.
Riverhead
March 2006
256 pages
ISBN: 1594489041
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
"The happiness of childhood is existential, not
psychological," writes Emily Fox Gordon. Are You Happy? is
an evocation of a peculiar and paradoxical kind of
happiness-the happiness of an unhappy child. Gordon was a
fatty, an academic failure, a schoolyard pariah, a
disappointment to her highly educated parents. And yet her
early life was, as she puts it, "a succession of moments of
radiant apprehension." In a later age she might have been
medicated and counseled and ferried from one appointment to
another. But growing up in the college town of Williamstown,
Massachusetts, in the fifties, she spent her days rambling
through woods and meadows, rattling around in the basements
of college buildings and dropping in on student
acquaintances via the fire escapes of dormitories. She was
free to be alone with her thoughts, to mumble observations
and descriptions as she cultivated the writer's lifelong
habit of translating experience into words. In the hands of this exceptional stylist and rigorous,
elegant thinker, we understand how happiness can be
recaptured through telling the story of its loss. As Gordon
grew older, she began to be aware of her charming mother's
long, slow withdrawal into alcoholic depression. This was a
new kind of observation, made from the outside. Having
learned to assume this perspective, Gordon began to see
happiness as something outside herself, something she could
appropriate from the world and make her own. In Are You
Happy? Gordon recounts how her childish view the world was
lost, and of how that loss ended her childhood. Depicted here is the evolution of a wise and perceptive
child's self-awareness-and as such, it is an exemplar of the
examined life.
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