Status Updates From Why Be Happy When You Could...

One thing I really love about this is how the author has a clear love for literature. I tend to love books about books and while this is a memoir, it perfectly encapsulates the power of books and literature. How it's for everyone. The author could be someone you have almost nothing in common with, yet there are sections that feel as if they were written specifically for me.

“Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.”

“A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.”

‘But as I try and understand how life works, and why some people cope better than others with adversity- I come back to something to do with saying yes to life, which is love of life, however inadequate, and love for the self, however found. Not in the me-first way that is the opposite of life and love,but with a salmon-like determination to swim upstream, however choppy upstream is, because this is your stream’