Are You Happy?

An elegant dissection of how youthful happiness is lost, by a memoirist of great style and insight. The happiness of childhood is existential, not psychological, writes Emily Fox Gordon.Gordon's 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 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 rigorous 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. 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 child's self-awareness. Moving and perceptive, it is a memoir not to be missed.