Thursday, 21 January 2016

This is Happy


We are the storytelling animal; our stories are what make us human.
I didn't know what to expect from This is Happy – I picked it up because the book was recently shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize for literary nonfiction – and based on the title, I expected something, erm, happy. That it is not. In what is quite a short narrative, author Camilla Gibb describes a miserable and chaotic childhood, her mental illness and suicide attempts as a graduate student at Oxford, a string of tumultuous love affairs, and just when she believes her life is settled and complete (enjoying success as an author, and after four years of a happy marriage, eight weeks pregnant with a longed-for child), everything crumbles: her wife announces that she's leaving and Gibb must scramble to find a new place to live and a new support network, all the while crying incessantly and feeling inadequate to the task of motherhood. After the baby arrives and Gibb is still crying incessantly, she sends off an email to her writerly acquaintance Ian Brown (author of The Boy in the Moon about his experiences with his severely disabled son), and Brown advises her to “write it all down because you must”. Presumably, this book is what came of that advice.
Being able to put your experiences into a narrative gives meaning to the life you have lived. It can allow you to make sense of the things that have seemed the most senseless and cruel by providing some context - even if that context is nothing more than: it didn't kill me. I am alive to tell this tale. I am here, where I was once there. There is a story, possibly a universal one, of the passage between there and here.
Although in an interview Gibb said that she didn't want the breakup of her marriage to be seen as “the defining chapter” of her life, it was certainly a major turning point: whereas before she might have fantasised about ways to end her life, having sole responsibility for an infant removed that “option”. And by opening her home and her heart to a Filipina nanny, Gibb began to regrow the circle of support that she would need: a circle that would eventually include her estranged drug-addict brother; her emotionally distant mother and stepfather; a grad student trying to make sense of what it means to be a “lonely gay”; and the nanny's own growing family. In the end, it's in these relationships that Gibb recognises happiness. 
I can appreciate the beauty of these moments when I describe them, but I have little feeling of beauty inside me. I can create happy moments for us and I can know that they are happy. I am doing my best to give my daughter a good life, exposing and introducing her to diverse and interesting people and experiences. I am watching her, watching the world. I have spent so much of my life watching from a distance. Now it seems I am twice removed.
And this removal is evident in Gibb's storytelling: the language in This is Happy is sparse and matter-of-fact – even when she's relating very painful memories; even when recalling suicide attempts – and while every now and then there is a lovely or insightful turn-of-phrase, I think that the spare language serves Gibb well; we are shown the facts, but without florid writing, we are not invited to share in the pain. As an author memoir, I appreciated the parts about her time in Ethiopia (and how that would have informed Gibb's writing of Sweetness in the Belly; a book I loved), and after reading the scene where her then-homeless, alcoholic father showed up for a reading of Mouthing the Words, I am very interested in reading that. I want to point out that I was fairly incensed to read that the ex-wife – someone with no biological ties to the baby, and since she left Gibb so early in her pregnancy, someone with no personal investment in the baby – enjoys parental rights and visits and was even able to barge into the delivery room soon after the baby was born. I was also saddened to read that following the breakup of her marriage Gibb hasn't been able to write any more fiction. From the same interview, Gibb says, “I have no patience for it. I used to be the biggest champion of fiction. I can tell you why the artifice is necessary. But it’s an intellectual argument that doesn’t actually reflect how I feel.” So, as a reader, that's kind of sad.
I have a job to do as a storyteller: we all do. To tell stories that make us knowable to others, most importantly our children. To give them the tools to help them know themselves. And perhaps we come to know ourselves differently as a consequence.
In the end, this is a short read (something like four hours), and while Gibb's childhood was pretty terrible, she doesn't dwell on it like some others do in the recent spate of misery memoirs. The conclusions that she comes to aren't particularly earth-shattering – storytelling helps us frail humans to make sense of our lives and, in the end, “family” encompasses more than our blood relations – but perhaps that is simply what she meant about the “passage from there to here” being a “universal” story. Ultimately, I find Gibb to be a very likeable person and I hope she really has found her happiness; not because she deserves it more than anyone else, but because she deserves it just as much as we all do. It's a worthwhile read.


2016 RBC Taylor Prize Nominees


*This is my pick to win this year.
*Eventually won by Stalin's Daughter.
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