The Sad Truth About Happiness

Book Review

Anne Giardini

The Sad Truth About Happiness is the story of the seemingly happy Maggie, a woman in her thirties who works as a radiology technician, giving other women breast exams. While she is not exactly “settled down,” she has meaningful relationships with several men and stability in the form of her friend and roommate Rebecca, who creates questionnaires for women's magazines.

When Rebecca asks Maggie to test her latest quiz, which aims to predict the day a person will die, Maggie's life is suddenly thrown into turmoil. According to the quiz, Maggie will die before her next birthday. Faced with this information, Maggie begins to seriously question her life choices. Her death date, it seems, was predicated by one question – “Are you happy?” Maggie sets out to discover the answer to this seemingly innocuous question, surprising both herself and her friends and family.

Anne Giardini has written a lovely debut novel – wise, wry, warm, and beautiful. It would be interesting to read this novel back-to-back with Unless, by her late mother and esteemed Canadian author, Carol Shields. Each novel explores similar themes, such as love, happiness, and mother/daughter relationships – but in different ways. This is a fabulous first novel, and it is clear that Anne Giardini has earned the publication of this first book on her own merits, proving wrong the critics who would assert that it was only published because she is Carol Shields' daughter.

“There is a kind of very nice man who tends to marry short-tempered or self-absorbed, even neurotic women, maybe because such women provide their lives with some critical measure of conflict and friction, or because this sort of man realizes that he has enough virtue for two. Or it may be that the cheerful expansiveness of such a man makes him unable to believe that the selfishness manifested by the woman he loves is either inherent or incurable.”

“Everyone's response to pain is different. There is no way to be sure that any two people feel pain in the same way. So much depends on our idiosyncrasies, how finely attuned our nerve endings are, how tightly or loosely our pain receptors are wired in to our brain and spine and fears. Our responses are entwined with our history and emotions, and are unmeasurable in any case. Even if we all did experience the same stimulus in the same way, there would be no way of knowing it. It is impossible to tease out the physical from the complex overlay of our motivations, anxieties, and tolerances. Pain has a limited and far from perfect vocabulary. I read once about an African language that must have arisen in a country with a great deal of experience in suffering. This language had a word for malaise as specific as a painful pinching in the armpit. English is much less precise. Not much useful is conveyed by the words “sharp,” “searing,” “throbbing,” or “dull.”