Are All Happy Families Alike?

In praise of narrative optimism, a term I just made up.

Photo by Josh Felise on Unsplash

I wrote a book that is often described in shorthand as being “about grief.” That was only part of it, the moon in shadow.

“It’s really about pleasure, and about joy, and that is so hard to write,” a writer told me recently. She gets it, I thought.

Lately I have been thinking about what I want from stories. Incidentally, it’s the same thing I’ve wanted since childhood, since Miss Rumphius. If you think about the reading experiences you’ve most loved, I wonder if you’d discover the same thing about yourself.

I want to know how people go on. I read for reassurance in humanity, in our astonishing capacity to endure and flourish.

But I’m most interested in flourishing, in the meaning found in pleasure and contentment. Like MFK Fisher’s, “I Was Really Very Hungry,” about eating a perfect truite au bleu and the cold glass of wine she drank along with it. What remains of a book club novel I read years ago a winter vacation with unvarying daily routine: A couple spent the mornings cross-country skiing, then returned to lounge fireside, pleasantly exhausted, bodies alive with endorphins. They drank beer, ate bread and cheese, read, and then had sex. What a vacation! I would reread that otherwise mediocre book…