Happy is Boring
Happy is boring, they say, at least when it comes to stories. What good is any story without trouble? Of course, what if the writing is not a story, is not traditional narrative? Is happy still boring then? Are we ever allowed to write bright, happy things and have them not be treacly, saccharine, Hallmark drivel? I will return to that question shortly (hint: I think “writing happy” is, in fact, much harder than “writing sad,” but I also think it can and must be done, and for this reason, I used to teach an Elephant Rock writing salon called “Ugly, Beautiful,” which I’ve been thinking about reprising in 2023).
But for now, I want simply to explore why it is so much easier to write effectively about sadness than about happiness. The answer, I think, is simple: life hurts, and we need to read about that to feel less alone. Our need to see our own sadness reflected in literature makes sadness essential in a way that happiness is not. Also, there’s the fact that as a species we are hardwired to pay more attention to pain than to comfort. From an evolutionary perspective, pain and suffering represent threats to our personal and collective survival, therefore we must focus on those states (and representations thereof) for our own preservation. Consider this passage from Jane Smiley’s short story, “The Age of Grief” (if you haven’t read the full story, it’s one of my favorites—so inventive, so affecting—and you can find it in her collection by the same name):
I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have reached the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don't think it is the years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and the rest of the world have broken down, after all—after all that schooling, all that care. Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. But when you are thirty-three, or thirty-five, the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from.
Smiley’s passage explains so very much about why it’s easier to write sadness than happiness. But here’s the thing—if happy is boring, so is easy. Despite that it’s difficult, it’s also essential to include happiness (or, at minimum, something I think of as light) in our work, even, and, in fact, especially, when that work overall is sad and dark.
And there it is. There it is! The crucial thing to remember when writing happy: there must be more to the story than pure happiness. Ross Gay spoke about this in an interview regarding his marvelous Book of Delights, saying, in answer to a question about how he managed (and still manages, by the way, in his more recent collections, Inciting Joy and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude) to write about good and happy things without being overly sentimental and cloying. And what he said—I am paraphrasing here, but if I can retrace my steps to this interview I’ll share the exact quote in a future post—he said something along the lines of how he was able to avoid those pitfalls of writing happiness because he’s always, in one way or the other, also exploring death.
And, in a demonstration of the same principle in reverse, even when exploring death, Ross Gay manages to use quiet beauty and white space to shatter our hearts faster than any shouting of horror ever could. If you want to know what I mean by this, Gay’s devastating short poem about Eric Garner, “A Small Needful Fact,” will answer your questions. If you do not know this poem, I highly recommend not only reading it, but also studying it. I cannot even quote from the poem because to do so would fail to honor the tremendous power of its wholeness.
All of this brings me to this week’s writing exercise, which was inspired by several recent experiences, one of which was a Twitter thread in which another writer asked if anyone could recommend novels that included happy marriages. Turns out, such novels are rare. Can you think of any? The one that jumped to my mind was Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which I liked quite a lot (in general I enjoy McEwan’s work). Here’s from the publisher’s description of the novel:
Henry Perowne—a neurosurgeon, urbane, privileged, deeply in love with his wife and grown-up children—plans to play a game of squash, visit his elderly mother, and cook dinner for his family. But after a minor traffic accident leads to an unsettling confrontation, Perowne must set aside his plans and summon a strength greater than he knew he had in order to preserve the life that is dear to him.
McEwan speaks about his decision to write about happiness in Saturday here, acknowledging the struggle to sustain happiness on the page, the danger that it will seem sentimental, smug, etc. While noting that writing happiness and love is generally best left for the lyric poets, he says he waited twenty years to write a lovemaking scene, a “proper lovemaking scene,” in Atonement—but then goes on to acknowledge how there were already destructive forces moving around the two characters in that scene. And that same dynamic is at play in Saturday. Here again, McEwan gives us a generous clue, just as Ross Gay offers us such wise direction: we can write about happiness, as long as we are doing so within the reality of the inescapable heartbreak of living. “It’s the fleetingness,” McEwan says, “that gives happiness, and love, in fact, its preciousness.”
So let’s try our hand at writing happiness, but doing so in a way that pays homage to the darkness on the edges.