How to Be Happy

"It’s less short stories than a series of vignettes told in graphic narrative form. They’re gorgeous, and they also have a very colorful, fantastical element. They each provide different windows into the question of the desire for self-betterment, for finding mechanisms for coping with one’s emotions and desires. So they’re a loosely related constellation around that theme. It’s a collection of Davis’s work that was put together after she had composed these different vignettes, so there’s a belatedness to the ‘how to how to be happy’ frame for this. She’s another author who’s talked about that process of coming to find that as a title. She describes how it initially began somewhat as a joke for her, but on the other hand, the act of reading self-help is something that she actually takes very seriously as an author. Self-help is something that she reads a great deal herself, so she felt a little bit guilty about using it in a tongue-in-cheek way for the title of her book. The unique thing about her book is that it begins with this big disclaimer: when you open it, it says this is actually not a book about how to be happy, and if you’re if you’re feeling depressed or if you really need practical advice about that, then read these other books. And then she refers you to more legitimate therapeutic or self-help material. That disclaimer is a sign of the compassionate approach that she takes to the problem of the quest for happiness, which I think is evident throughout the graphic narrative. The first episode shows these people who have developed this commune, and it describes the breakdown of the commune because the founder of it, Adam, can’t escape his anger management issues. He gets really mad when somebody sneaks something like a candy bar into the commune, which is against the rules. “The book is making you question what is true and what isn’t” All of them are sort of linked by this problem of how to escape oneself and one’s emotions, and she does it not in a didactic way, but in a very open-ended, inconclusive way. It’s a strange experience to read these vignettes, because you leave them and you really don’t know what to make of what you’ve just read. They’re embracing of both inconclusiveness and ambiguity in a way that contrasts with reading a traditional self-help book, which is so full of probably illegitimate certainty and authority. It’s formally modelling and enacting an alternative to the methods of a lot of self-help, which says ‘Do this, don’t do that’. Instead, this book is making you question what is true and what isn’t, and what is certain and what is not. Yes, and one that is so diffuse that it’s spread into all areas of conversation and life, and really isn’t confined to a book at all. It’s something you absorb through conversations, through advertisements, through the internet, music, everything."