Customer Reviews

My Happy Life: A Novel

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"I have always wished the present to resemble memory: because the present can be flat at times, and bald as a road. But memory is never like that. It makes hills of feeling in collapsed hours, a scene of enclosure made all precious by its frame."
It is the Narrator (never identified) who makes the comment above in Lydia Millet's, "My Happy Life," a woman who has had almost no real happiness in her life and who always recovers from whatever blows and misfortunes life deals her without any ill feelings or rancor. She is resilient to a fault..always looking on the bright side, always making excuses for those who mistreat her.
We all know this woman. She's the one who cleans our hotel rooms or offices. She's the one with the bad haircut and out-of-style coat whose smile we do not return on the street. She's the one we hope never to become.
But Millet makes her a heroine with a profound sense of insight and razor sharp introspection...a kind of life experience idiot savant. And in the end....we, at the very least, admire her and maybe even secretly want to be her.
The Narrator takes us to her bosom early on when she says: "so now I seem alone...But I am not alone...I have You." And that she does through 150 pages of heart-wrenching bad luck and unspeakable misfortune. But nonetheless, the tone of the novel is sweet with the fragrance of a life fondly remembered.
Our Narrator is "Everywoman" and by extension Everyman: exploited, abandoned, discarded, imprisoned, rejected, made invisible by age. Millet seems to be saying: Look at this woman, Look at this Life, Look how she recovers and perserveres... Don't complain to me about your petty upsets and daily trials and tribulations! Here is how it is in the extreme...in a place where you can't fathom from where your next kind word or small affirmation will come; much less your next meal.
Along the way Millet composes some breathtaking phrases and descriptions: "So I was not alone. With me were the absent people. And all of them were not bodies but only the forms of all their sorrow and longing. By and by I felt what I had always known, that myself I was neither a city nor a rock, but only particles and figments. And like all people I was quite imaginary when I was alone. And alone we were all of us ghosts."
"My Happy Life" is anything but. And Lydia Millet has managed to write a fictional biography which is on the one hand scary, pitiful and pathetic while on the other, one of extraordinary beauty and unexpected humor and elegance.

'My Happy Life' is about a life that has been anything but happy, but our nameless protagonist doesn't see it that way. When a State Hospital for the mentally ill is shut down, our nameless protagonist is left behind, forgotten, in a locked isolation cell.

She begins to write her story on the wall, talking to you as if you were there with her, and her story will stab at your heart even if it is a black shriveled heart. It will bleed for her, trust me.

Left as a newborn in a shoebox near an orphanage, she has never known anything other than state homes and the occasional foster home. Our protagonist comes across as being mentally slow, which may explain her ability to retain her innocence through constant physical and emotional abuse, even turning such abuse into what she feels is a caring connection with others. She simply does not see the bad in anybody.

From state homes to being kept at the mercy of an abuser, who gets her pregnant and then runs off with her baby, our protagonist somehow survives ever mean and vile dish that is handed to her, seeing only nourishment on silver platters.

The tale of her life is sad, poignant, beautiful, upsetting, dramatic, and tender. Millet's prose is stylish, rich, and smacks of true poetic talent. She pulls you into her characters life so quickly and completely that you will not be able to put the book down once you start. Don't worry, its only 150 pages, but the impact it will leave on your is far greater than the thickness of the book.

This is my first Lydia Millet book, and I am definitely buying more of her work. I consider 'My Happy Life' a must read, something for you to think about when you believe your life has gone all wrong because your DVD player broke and your Mercedes has a flat. Truly, a ten star book. Enjoy!

If you have enjoyed previous books by Lydia Millet, jettison your preconceptions. With "My Happy Life," she is now writing like someone who sold her soul to the devil and still came out on top in the bargain.

The novel is narrated by a haunting, isolated figure who seems to have stepped into, or perhaps out of a Francis Bacon painting, and somehow stakes an indisputably valid claim to uncharted regions of the psyche. This visceral portraiture simultaneously emphasizes a brutal and beautiful new reality. Like a Bacon masterpiece, Millet presents a mesmerizing, shocking supra-real view of humanity. The work defies categorization by establishing a new one against which others must now be measured. The book will stand as a significant contribution to literature.

After reading Lydia Millet's latest book, "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart," I bought all her books. In a week I devoured "George Bush, Dark Prince of Love" and "Everyone's Pretty." Sadly, I have just finished "My Happy Life" and am down to the last, "Omnivores." I admit I am obsessed with Millet's writing: It is exquisite, flowing, the subject matter jarring, disturbing, crazy-ass weird and captivating. I haven't been this enthralled with a writer since I discovered Vonnegut as a teenager(before that, of course, there was Judy Blume and, I'm sort of embarrassed to say, V.C. Andrews). Millet is a brilliant, beautiful writer. I am so grateful for her work and can't wait for her next feat.

Lydia Millet has achieved something wonderful and rare with this novel - she has envisioned and brought into being a difficult character, one who is uneducated yet breathtakingly eloquent, a mental patient who has every right and reason to be terminally angry and bitter at the world and the treatment she has received at its hands. Her nameless narrator instead draws us gently into her world, allowing us to see and experience in an almost firsthand way the view from where she sits, her joys and sorrows and her very thoughts. By the time I came to the end of this short book, I felt like I had met one of the gentlest, most forgiving spirits possible. In spite of the horrific abuse she has suffered - at the hands of various foster parents, child services workers, doctors and others - she rarely voices a harsh word about anyone. She experiences love and loss, pain and suffering, laughter and tears - and memory. Her musings on memory are some of the most beautiful I've ever encountered, unencumbered as they are by the weighty trappings of a so-called education - they have the purity and honesty of a child, but reflect truths worthy of the deepest adult thought.

The entire story is narrated by the woman from within her locked room in a mental hospital - it has been abandoned, and is ready for demolition. She has been forgotten - or perhaps left there purposely. For a while, she thinks that someone is coming back for her, and she sits on her cot, waiting patiently for the door to open. Eventually, she realizes that this is not going to happen. She has water, but nothing to eat except toothpaste, shampoo and soap - and she doesn't recommend the latter two items as food. Her memories begin to flow - she is writing them on the walls of her room with the stubs of pencils. Her entire life is laid out before us in a tableau of unbelievably inhuman treatment - from her time as a foundling taken into the system (the `kindness of the state', as she puts it), to her placement in a succession of incredibly abusive and exploitative foster homes, to her eventual life on the street as a teenager who has `slipped through the cracks' (as have far too many), to her eventual commitment to a psychiatric hospital.

It's hard to imagine how someone who has been treated so badly by so many finds in her heart the ability to see beauty in the world and its people - but she does it. There's no `Pollyanna' quality about her - Millet never lets her character slip into such syrupy, maudlin goop. The author lays out the story with kindness and empathy for her character - and from time to time, doses of humor as well, which are carefully meted out and fall into the narrative quite naturally. Her descriptions of the events in her life, and of the places she has seen, are quite lovely - rather than being inappropriately eloquent for someone who is uneducated (in a formal sense, at any rate), I think the beauty of her narrative should be taken as a literal rendering of her thought-flow. As such, it's not at all incongruous with its narrator - and it manages nicely to connect her with the reader.

The book is a pretty quick read - and as such, it merits re-reading. It's full of passages and thoughts that will resonate more and more deeply with repetition. It's a thing of great beauty and feeling - don't let it slip past you.

`And I thought: There is one birth of bones and skin, and then there is another. And the second birth is the birth of the dream.'

The tone of Lydia Millet's My Happy Life alternates between depressing and uplifting, and for a few hundred pages, you get to see life through the eyes of an unnamed woman and it changes your perspective entirely. The title is rather misleading, as she hasn't lived a "happy life" at all. In fact, her life is one of the worst I've read about, though I'm generally not shocked by fiction. But what incredible fiction it is!

She has lived a harsh and difficult life and gone through unspeakable things, yet she remains incapable of bitterness or anger. Her ability to love and forgive is staggering, and she sees beauty in things that others wouldn't think at all about. Locked up and abandoned in a mental hospital, the woman struggles to survive and eventually begins writing the story of her life on the walls.

I love this book because after the first couple paragraphs, I felt like a completely different person. And after I finished it, I realized that I was still me, but I felt different, like my mind had been expanded and I'd seen the world through someone else, someone who could only love. Millet's writing hits you right in the pit of the stomach, and I'd be interested in seeing what else she has to say. I'd recommend this to anyone who thinks they would appreciate a book like this.

This book will tug at your heart, with it's unusual premise and lead character. I'm not sure it's the kind of book that you could love but it does hold your attention and make you think.

This particular novel captured me, on several levels, though I was not very interested in the way that the author wrote the book, it was still enjoyable to me. The tale of a woman, and her life being told that she was nothing, and would never amount to anything. She was raped, (several times,) abused, and made homeless. After being taken advantage of by a man named "Mr. D." and was forced to have his baby, her child (whom she named "brother" after spending time with a native tribe on a primitive island that "Mr. D." owned,) was taken away from her, (at the young age of thirteen) and she was blamed for a suicide at a mental hospital she was put into during one point of her life.
I believe that this book could be interesting to an audience of almost all ages over ten. Adults, growing up, and sharing these same traumas, and the adolescence, and learning how to cope, and deal with hardships, and abandon, and abuse. It is easier for people to relate, rather than imagine.
It is obvious that there is a lot of "bad" in the world, and sometime it can, or at least can seem to overcome the "good." So much in fact, that it is difficult to even begin to think about things being good ever again. In the novel, she (who never is really given a "name,") seems to find the good in her life, even though it is (to someone like you or I,) the most horrible living condition you could ever hear of. She creates a motivation after her son is taken, and all she wants is to see him, to be with him, so she searches...She goes back to the town where he took her, attempts to find "Mr. D's" boat, tries to find some shred of her son, though she does not, and still finds the "silver lining" in her "simple" existence. I think that we could all learn a lesson from this brave female figure. When I read this book, I know that it made me more thankful for what I have (that not being very much, though still,) extremely philosophical, it made me think, and I believe that it would do the same for you.

I found this book an astonishment and the feeling has stayed with me. the author tackles a story of mental illness, abandonment and abuse through a veil of happiness. It is from the softness of kindness and charity that the events are disclosed. She takes the opposite approach from sadness and self pity. We couldn't read of this much grief otherwise, but we read it gratefully , because the prose is so lovely and her spirit so brave. The writing is lyrical which combines with the sweetness of it to be believable. We are carried through the events as if in a dream state. We ride with the author through the misery, but just above it as she does.
I think this is a must read for memoir readers. Those who want to understand mental illness need to put this up there with the story of the dog in the nighttime.

This is a very descriptive and beautifully lyrical book about a possibly mentally-ill woman who grows up in an abusive orphanage and endures abuse throughout her life from others. She is friendless but finds comfort in small things, such as the sight of the stars, the shape of a leaf, the crawl of a spider. The book opens with the woman abandoned in a derelict mental institution and her writing memories of her life on the wall. She is the narrator of the novel and is, apparently, not too bright - the language used by the author does not sound true to what such a character would write as it is too lyrical and complex. She is friendless but not alone as she takes comfort in whatever she can in this world. However, the book reads like a long stream of consciousness and the author goes overboard with the description and the lyricism which caused me to somewhat lose interest in the book after a while. I recommend the book; however, I would not compare it to Dickens. Dickens has a tight, riveting writing style which is not present in this book.