Anne Giardini’s Advice for Happiness

“I always absolutely knew I would write,” says Anne Giardini in the P.S. section of The Sad Truth About Happiness.

A Talent for Double Happiness

Louise Tucker talks to Anne Giardini

“We would make different choices from those our parents made, and have lives different from theirs in ways we were certain of but could not predict.” How does your life differ from your parents’?

Until I was ten years old and in grade five, I imagined that I would do exactly as my mother had done: have five children and do bits and pieces of work from home. I was ten at the end of the 1960s, a period of great change and disruption, a time when commonly accepted ideas were turned inside out and held up to critical scrutiny. Some of this percolated through even to children, and one day at school I had one of those moments of realization and clarity that I wish came more often: that I might well have to fend for myself and that I should have a career. I think, from then on, I never questioned that I would live differently from my parents. And in fact, I did marry later, have fewer children, and have things my mother didn’t have, at least when my sisters and brother and I were children: an office, a boss, a briefcase, a pay cheque, a secretary. Looking forward at ten years of age, all of this seemed marvelous and exotic and adventurous.

Your mother, Carol Shields, was also a writer, and, like you, started long after her youth. How did she influence your decision to write, if at all?

I always absolutely knew I would write. And I always knew I would write a novel. As a child, I liked to tell long, complicated stories to my three sisters — the most attentive and astute of audiences. Whenever my Manchester-born sister Catherine thought that a narrative needed more drama, she would urge me to “put a fire into it,” and I would conjure up a dramatic blaze that threatened but never consumed the heroes and heroines of the story. I have included a fire in The Sad Truth About Happiness for Catherine’s benefit.

For several years, I wrote a weekly column for one of Canada’s national newspapers, the National Post, and this was the best possible experience. Having to write from scratch on a regular basis forced me to pay attention and react quickly and authentically to life, and to people and events. My mother’s advice — and I have seen other good writers do this — was to always produce my best work. Nothing should be held back or saved for later. Writing is like drawing from the most abundant aquifer something new and interesting always wells up to replace what has been taken. When I stopped writing the weekly columns, I realized that just enough time might have been opened up for me to undertake something more sustained.

My family had also been ambushed by my mother’s diagnosis with an aggressive form of breast cancer, and this led me to think in a new way about happiness and its central difficulty, which is that it can’t be sought directly and can’t be grasped securely. The novel contains much of my thinking about happiness over the two and a half years I spent writing it, as well as other issues and ideas that interest me.

What was the inspiration for The Sad Truth About Happiness and how did you start writing it?

I had as one of my starting points an encounter with a single friend in her late thirties. We were seated together at a dinner party. We had drunk a bit too much and had begun to have a quite amusing talk that led to the topic of pain — she had just run a marathon. She asked me about childbirth and I told her that, for much of labour, the pains come and go, so there is respite. To emphasize the point, I squeezed her knee quite hard, and then relaxed the pressure.

I was surprised to see tears come into her eyes, and I said, “I can’t have hurt you, can I?” “No,” she said. “It’s just that no one ever touches me any more.”

I felt that this was the most intimate insight into what life can be like when you are yearning for love. I realized, as I began to write, that as the author I could provide Maggie with someone to love. In fact, perhaps because I was so fond of her myself, I found that more than one of the men I introduced her to became quite taken with her too.

Maggie says that she wants “to do something manifestly practical.” Do her choices echo your own, to be a lawyer first, then a writer?

I see myself as very much the blended product of my gentle, creative mother and my resolute, engineer father. Once I had realized I would have a career, I thought I might be an actress, but eventually I learned I had absolutely no talent. When I went to university, I very consciously took a broad spectrum of courses, but in the end, law had what it seemed I needed — rigour, challenges, the creative use of language, and many stories. I have a fairly rare combination of careers, but I am not surprised at all that so many lawyers I meet write or want to write fiction. The law is all about stories. It contains thousands — millions — of individual narratives, and it creates from all of these narrative threads a good part of the cloth, the stuff, that we call society. On the other hand, I am beginning to believe that novels are a form of advice, so my two careers may be more closely linked than might be obvious at first glance.

The book lovingly describes Vancouver in all its colours and seasons. Why is it so special, and could you ever imagine living (or have you ever lived) anywhere else?

I have lived and been happy in many other places, including England, France, Italy, and other cities and towns in Canada. Vancouver was wonderful to write about, however, because it is still a young city, and not terribly well known, and because it has so many interesting neighbourhoods and moods. My next novel is set in Ontario, in an Italian-Canadian working-class suburb, and I am having fun capturing a very different community.

I think the place where I have been happiest is Rome, and I would love at some time to live there again. Maggie’s sister Lucy lives in Rome before she returns to Vancouver, and I have given to her some of my love for that city.

“Something to love, something to do, something to hope for… these are the essentials of happiness.” What is, if anything, the essential “sad truth” about happiness for you? Of course, the sad truth about happiness is that it is entrancing, desirable, and maddeningly elusive. The moment you say the words “I am happy” some of it leaks out. You can’t aim directly for happiness, or, once you attain it, hold on to it for long. Happiness is replete with paradox; hard work can make you more genuinely happy than rest, and difficulties can provide fertile ground for the seeds of future joy.

Do you believe that happiness is the key to longevity?

A happy life feels longer because it is richer. Happiness is a prism in which a moment’s joy reflects and shines and expands into infinity. I understand that scientists have discerned many more dimensions than the four we are familiar with and perhaps happiness will be discovered to be yet another dimension, with its own laws of time-bending relativity.

The chapter headings all refer to parts of a house, and for Maggie, a house must have a heart to be a home. What or who makes you feel at home?

I have used the central metaphor of home in the book because it is the location of our deepest joys and conflicts. I wanted to have Maggie, my protagonist, describing the events of the months just past in the way that someone in a new home takes a visitor on a tour through it. This impulse to give guided tours fades, so I have come to believe that showing someone through one’s home is really a means of getting to know it for oneself by seeing it through different eyes and from different angles, and that this must lead to a deeper knowledge and understanding of where one is — in all senses. Our homes enfold us; they are a refuge, a place for the kinds of routines and nourishment that steady and ready us for creative work. I don’t think a home needs to be complex to serve.

In university, I lived in a succession of well designed rooms that held all that I needed: a bed, a chair, a shelf for books, a place for my cup and spoon, ideally room for a visitor. I have a larger space to live in now, but I share it with a husband, two teenage sons, my daughter, and her nanny. Sometimes I catch myself longing for a simple room with chair and board. Maybe this return to simplicity is what people strive for when they seek out a cottage retreat.

Having lost your mother to cancer, was anyone that you met during her treatment the particular inspiration for Maggie?

What a wonderful question. This is not something I have ever actually considered, but I think you are right. My mother’s cancer brought me into contact with many people whose focused intelligence and understanding and warmth reaffirmed my belief in the essential goodness of people. I think of Maggie as someone who makes mistakes, and who is cautious by nature, but who, like her eccentric parents, is driven by an instinct for goodness.

Was it difficult or therapeutic to write about an illness that has affected you so closely?

My mother’s lengthy illness and death were devastating to me, as they were to many others of her family and friends. Even today, two years after her death, I am still struggling to understand her loss. It doesn’t seem quite possible. I miss her constantly. But I also found this process through pain and loss to be fascinating. I was deeply interested in how my appetite dulled or quickened in sympathy with my mother’s; in how sorrow differs so profoundly from depression (although it can lead you there and sometimes leave you stranded); in the etiology of cancer and in its spread and in its treatments; in the physicians and caregivers and hospice workers and in other patients and their families; in the intense bursts of laughter and wild jolts of joy in a chemo treatment wing, beside a hospital bed, at a memorial gathering. I felt and still feel strongly that none of us is immune from life’s most profound sorrows, but we can go through them unthinkingly, or we can proceed fully conscious that all of life is brimming over with many different experiences and we can experience them narrowly or fully at our will.

I was determined to find interest and passion and joy in my mother’s illness and death in part because she was determined to find them too. In her last few days she was reading and thinking about apples and beekeeping, and sonnets — she compared them to cutlery drawers, the words lined up in rows — and Iceland and the Swedish neighbourhood of the Chicago of her childhood. And she was sick! How could I do less? Writing provided me with the opportunity and the privilege of working through some of this and was in the end, for me, the best kind of therapy for sorrow.

How did writing this book change you, if at all?

Most obviously, writing this book made me a novelist. I see the world now through a novelist’s eyes. Everything is material; everything is weighed for its narrative possibilities. I think of novels as enormously capacious, and I am always looking for interesting ideas to appropriate.

From The Sad Truth About Happiness. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. copyright © 2005 by Anne Giardini. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.