The Sad Truth about Happiness

by Anne Giardini (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2011

  $3.47

  A first novel - bittersweet and comic - on the elusive nature of happiness, from the eldest daughter of novelist Carol Shields.

  Maggie, the 31-year-old middle child who is just a little too predictable, is ready for change - but not the kind that swoops down on her in The Sad Truth about Happiness. Maggie's roommate Rebecca devises questionnaires for women's magazines, and she is convinced her newest one can predict the exact date of death of anyone who answers the questions honestly. Rebecca, they learn, is going to live to a healthy old age. When Maggie fills it in she is puzzled to discover that she'll live to be 132 years old, until she realises that in fact the test is telling her she actually has only 132 days more, and is scheduled to die shortly before her next birthday. The fact that she has answered the 'are you happy' question with a 'no' appears to have shaved decades off her life expectancy, and she resolves to live differently; if she can become happy in her three remaining months, perhaps she can wrest her fate free of the prediction.

  But with wry comedy, Maggie's life takes a dramatic turn for the worse from that very moment. Trying to protect her younger sister Lucy from the attentions of a spurned boyfriend, Maggie finds herself on the run with Lucy's newborn child. And this is only the beginning of her problems...

  Anne Giardini has written a poignant and sharply witty novel on the bonds between sisters, the pull of home, and the nature of happiness: elusive, fleeting, inspiring, infinitely variable. Her bittersweet portrait of domestic life spiralling out of control is the work of an important new voice and a natural storyteller.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $5.26

  A bittersweet, comic novel from a warm new voice in fiction. Maggie is thirty-two-years-old, single, solvent, the middle child of eccentric parents. Maggie accepts her roommate Rebecca's invitation to complete a magazine quiz that Rebecca, a freelance journalist, has designed, a quiz that predicts that Maggie has only three months more to live. Her answer to one of the questions: 'Are you happy?' is 'Not completely', and this response shaves decades off her life. Maggie is distracted in her quest to achieve her own measure of happiness by Lucy, her stormy younger sister, who's just returned from Rome, pregnant and unmarried, by Janet, her self-absorbed older sister, who has found contentment in a single daily pill, and by the sudden and surprising admiration of three -- or possibly four -- very different men. Maggie rescues a homeless girl she finds on the street, and soon after she slips away with Lucy's newborn baby. She is aided and abetted in her flight with baby Philip by a succession of women, who speed her, like the heroine on an old-fashioned quest, on her journey. Are any of these the route to happiness or is happiness too subtle, too mysterious to lend itself to capture? In a witty and poignant first novel that smartly deconstructs our notion of this maddening, inspiring, fleeting, infinitely changeable state that we all wish for, Anne Giardini has penned a wise and wonderful read. The daughter of Carol Shields, Anne has an intuitive storytelling ability, an affinity for the interior voice, and a warm affection for her flawed characters. 'The Sad Truth About Happiness' is a terrific literary debut.