Synopses & Reviews
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 womans 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-ups playground,, she embarks on a journey unlike any shes 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.
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Lisa Grunwald is the author of the novels New Years Eve, The Theory of Everything, and Summer. Along with her husband, Stephen Adler, she edited the anthologies Letters of the Century and the forthcoming Womens Letters. Grunwald is a former contributing editor of Life and a former features editor of Esquire. She and her husband live in New York City with their son and daughter.
From the Hardcover edition.
Reading Group Guide
1. At one point in the novel, Michael tells Sally that happiness is
“this moment.” What is T.J.s definition of happiness? What is
Lucass definition? Do you have a personal definition of happiness?
2. Grunwald uses beach glass as a metaphor to describe Sallys
own definition of happiness. What is the difference between
Sallys beach glass and Michaels “this moment”?
3. What is this book trying to say about happiness?
4. What, if anything, does Sally gain from her affair with Lucas?
Why does she pursue him—or allow herself to be pursued—in
the first place?
5. One of the quotes in the book is from Victor Hugo, who said,
“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are
loved.” Does this maxim hold true in the novel? Do you believe
that being loved is a requirement for happiness?
6. What is the importance of the death of Sallys father to the rest
of the story? What is the connection between loss and happiness,
in the book and in life?
7. Sallys two children are very different from one another, in
terms of how outwardly happy they seem. Are some people
born happy and others born unhappy? Do you think there is a
a basic level of happiness or unhappiness to which individuals
naturally gravitate?
8. Do you think that the book has a happy ending?
9. Do you think of happiness as a luxury? Do you think of it as
a right? Is our culture too obsessed with the idea of happiness?
10. When you hear the word “happiness,” what is the first thing
that comes to mind?
Exclusive Essay
Read an exclusive essay by Lisa Grunwald