The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

fun?” and I had to think long and hard about it. Most of my pleasures are quiet and solitary. I love to be absorbed in a good book; I love to do needlework; I love to make jewelry. I’ve given myself permission to say that that’s okay. I do love to play board games, though, especially with my children.
     
    My understanding of fun is definitely not the same as other people’s. I enjoy solitary, quiet things. Even the sports I enjoy are quiet ones. Reading is fun, both books and blogs. Computer programming is fun. Diving and mountain climbing are fun. Yoga is fun. Shopping, on the other hand, which girls are supposed to enjoy, is definitely NOT fun. Parties are generally not fun either.
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    I tended to overrate the fun activities that I didn’t do and underrate my own inclinations. I felt like the things that other people enjoyed were more valuable, or more cultured…more, well, legitimate. But now it was time to “Be Gretchen.” I needed to acknowledge to myself what I enjoyed, not what I wished I enjoyed. If something was really fun for me, it would pass this test: I looked forward to it; I found it energizing, not draining; and I didn’t feel guilty about it later.
    I told a friend about my quest, and she said, “Gosh, if I had something fun I wanted to do, I’d feel frustrated, because I wouldn’t have time for it. I don’t want to add anything else to my plate.” This struck me as a bleak view—but it was something I might well have said myself in the past. My happiness project had shown me that I was better off saying “I have plenty of time to have fun!”
    But what, exactly, did I find fun? What did I want to do? I couldn’t think of much. Well, there was one thing: I really loved reading children’sliterature. I’ve never quite figured out what I get from children’s literature that I don’t get from adult literature, but there’s something. The difference between novels for adults and novels for children isn’t merely a matter of cover design, bookstore placement, and the age of the protagonist. It’s a certain quality of atmosphere.
    Children’s literature often deals openly with the most transcendent themes, such as the battle between good and evil and the supreme power of love. These books don’t gloss over the horror and fascination of evil, but in the end, in even the most realistic novels, good triumphs. Novelists for adults don’t usually write that way; perhaps they fear being seen as sentimental or priggish or simplistic. Instead, they focus on guilt, hypocrisy, the perversion of good intentions, the cruel workings of fate, social criticism, the slipperiness of language, the inevitability of death, sexual passion, unjust accusation, and the like. These are grand literary themes. Yet I also find it enormously satisfying to see good prevail over evil, to see virtue vindicated and wrongdoing punished. I love didactic writing, whether by Tolstoy or Madeleine L’Engle.
    What’s more, in keeping with this good-versus-evil worldview, children’s literature often plunges a reader into a world of archetypes. Certain images have a queer power to excite the imagination, and children’s literature uses them with brilliant effect. Books such as Peter Pan, The Golden Compass, and The Blue Bird operate on a symbolic level and are penetrated with meanings that can’t be fully worked out. Adult novels do sometimes have this atmosphere, but it’s much rarer. I love to return to the world of stark good and evil, of talking animals and fulfilled prophecies.
    But my passionate interest in kidlit didn’t fit with my ideas of what I wished I were like; it wasn’t grown up enough. I wanted to be interested in serious literature, constitutional law, the economy, art, and other adult subjects. And I am interested in those topics, but I somehow felt embarrassed by my love of J. R. R. Tolkien, E. L. Konigsberg, and Elizabeth Enright. I repressed this side of my personality to such a degree that when one ofthe Harry Potter books came out, I didn’t buy it for several days. I’d fooled even myself into thinking that I didn’t care.
    If I was going to “Be serious about play,” I needed to embrace this suppressed passion and have more fun with it. But how? While I was trying to figure that out, I had lunch with an acquaintance who was a polished, intimidating, well-established literary agent. We were having a “we’d like to become friends but haven’t figured out how yet” kind of