Release date: January 19, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0374114897 | ISBN-13: 978-0374114893 | Edition: First Edition
CAN A WOMAN BE SMART, EMPOWERED, AND HAPPY ?
Happiness has become a serious business. Where twentiethcentury psychology focused on depression and illness, in the new millennium scientists have begun focusing on “positive psychology”—the study of happiness. Ariel Gore first became intrigued by this subject when she discovered that Positive Psychology was the most popular course on the Harvard campus. As she read deeper into the topic, she noticed something disturbing: everyone in this happy land was a man. Worse still, some of these new “experts” seemed hell-bent on proving that women with traditional values and breadwinning husbands—those who had made “an effort to expect less,” according to one sociologist—were more content than women with feminist values. The more she read the more she wondered: Can a woman be smart, empowered, and happy? Determined to find out, Gore began her own “study in living”— a journey into the feminine history, science, and experience of happiness. Her results, chronicled with humor and curiosity in Bluebird, are by turns fascinating and enriching. A woman’s happiness may not come easy, and it may not take the forms prescribed by popular culture. But, as Gore discovers, it is not only possible but necessary. Bluebird is a smart, no-nonsense, uplifting study of the real secret of joy, and whether it’s truly at odds with the goals of modern women.
The study of happiness has become serious business. Gore finds the fact that virtually all its exponents are male intriguing and, to counterpoint such male domination, offers a female perspective. Positive psychology, as happiness-study is often called, has ignored women’s issues, she says. She proffers her own system for truly comprehending the concept of happiness, especially women’s personal happiness, by maintaining a happiness journal recording the happiest moments of each day. She presents interviews with hundreds of women, including “a council of experts” consisting of artists, service workers, scholars, psychologists, and women’s health-care providers. The search for happiness, she suggests, is spiritual as well as material. She discusses everyone from Thomas Jefferson and Norman Vincent Peale to graphic designer Harvey Ball, inventor of the ubiquitous smiley face. She distinguishes between forced cheerfulness and depression, scrutinizes the growing gender gap in the happiness sweepstakes, and comments on the trend toward treating anxiety and sadness with medication. Thoughtful, funny, and inspiring, Gore is a down-to-earth guide to the elusive human quest for happiness. --June Sawyers
About the Author
ARIEL GORE is the author of numerous books on parenting, the novel The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show, the memoir Atlas of the Human Heart, and the guidebook How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead.
Product Details
Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (January 19, 2010)
Born on the Monterey Peninsula and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Ariel Gore spent the years she was supposed to be in high school as an international bag lady traveling through Asia and Europe. She returned to California at age 19, baby in tow.
Following her misspent youth, she graduated from Mills College and earned a master's degree in journalism from U.C. Berkeley.
In 1993, she founded of Hip Mama, an award-winning parenting zine covering the culture and politics of motherhood. Widely credited with launching maternal feminism, the New Yorker said, "It's the quality of the writing that sets Hip Mama apart."
Ariel's pregnancy and parenting books, The Hip Mama Survival Guide (Hyperion, 1998), The Mother Trip (Seal Press, 2000), and Whatever, Mom (Seal Press, 2004), have been called "delightful" (Glamour), "Terrific and important" (San Francisco Chronicle), and "revolutionary" (The Seattle Times).
Her lyrical teenage memoir, Atlas of the Human Heart (Seal Press, 2003), was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. The Utne Reader says: "Ariel Gore's transformation from globetrotting teenager to the hippest of mamas reads like a movie script about a Gen-X slacker following her bliss to unlikely success."
Her novel, The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show (HarperOne, 2006), was featured on MTV and was a BookSense pick praised by the Los Angeles Times as "Beguiling" and highly recommended by Library Journal as "a savvy rebuke of religious bigotry and a fun, fast, memorable read."
Her guide to writing and the creative life, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead (Three Rivers, 2007) was praised by Booklist as "The snappiest, most useful books a writer for hire is likely to read."
She was named one of "20 Under 30" influential women by Working Woman Magazine and called "conservative Americva's worst nightmare" by San Jose Mercury News. She debated Newt Gingrich on MTV and is a sought-after expert on creativity and women's issues interviewed on NPR and Life & Style as well as CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and MTV news.
Ariel's essays, articles, and short stories have appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, and periodicals including the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, Salon, Parenting, and Utne, as well as in anthologies including Wild Child (Seal Press, 1999), the American Book Award-winning Mothers Who Think (Washington Square Press, 2000), Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation (Seal Press, 2001), Because I Said So (HarperCollins, 2005), Lost On Purpose (Seal press, 2005), and Portland Noir (Akashic Books, 2009).
Her latest book, Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness, is forthcoming from Farrar Straus Giroux. She lives in Portland Oregon with her partner Maria and her son Maximilian.
Ariel Gore is The Indiana Jones of literature. --Chuckpalahniuk.net
In this mix of research and personal experience, Gore faults the Positive Psychology movement (Seligman, Csikszentmihalyi and others)for ignoring or underemphasizing the differences in male and female happiness, and how it's gained. Gore's own study of women's happiness--performed by collecting journal entries and forming "expert" panels of women-- is interesting, but only feels incisive and truly informative in the last quarter of the book. While I enjoyed reading Bluebird and find many of its insights useful, I often found myself wishing A.G. had either come down hard on the side of personal narrative, or hard on the side of research and investigation. Gore's highly readable middle ground loses some of the lyricism of memoir and the intellectual rigor of topically-driven nonfiction. I'd love to see her let her self-identified "nerdy" side loose on a topic like this. Nevertheless, a book I would give to friend and recommend; a book I'm glad someone has written.
"Bluebird" cannot be typecast. It is not a self help book, nor a flat essay. It is a true, no nonsense exploration of what happiness truly consists of. Ariel Gore, though extensive research, countless quotes from women around her, with deep intelligence and compassion, takes us through all the accepted notions of what happiness should be like, and what women were taught to expect from an early age. Halfway through the book, suddenly and with no warning, everything becomes clear. There is no fake optimism, forced emotion, or New Age one-ness in the pages of "Bluebird". But reaching the end, between the lines of this incredibly sharp study, well researched and truly personal without indulgence, the reader feels a true uplift, a real feel for what it means to be happy. Behind the words, there is a precious jewel glistening in the shadows. Ariel Gore's revelation is straightforward: the jewel is ours, ours to keep, ours to enjoy. It was ours all along, its beauty somewhat hidden behind our various dissatisfactions and frustrations. "Bluebird" gives it back to us, as logically and simply as in giving us the solution to a mathematical problem. Definitely a must read for women of all ages.
Ariel Gore weaves together the findings of recognized authorities (most of them men), commonly cited studies (most done on male subjects), the experiences of a hundred real women (imagine that!), and her own life experiences, to paint a picture of what women are up against in a search for happiness. Be they women of traditional values or feminists, married or single, raising families or running corporations, happiness can be equally elusive.
In eighteen years of pastoral ministry and counseling, few books have given me as insightful and honest a look into the heart of this matter as Bluebird. If you're a preacher, pastor, or counselor, and you want to understand the hand that the women you minister to are dealt by society, this book is a worthy read. I'll also recommend this book to the women in my congregation, that they might reject the psychology that has failed them and be encouraged: cultivating true happiness is hard work, but good work.
