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

read every single one. I also had a videotape and a used book that was nothing but Saint Thérèse photographs—for which I’d paid $75 (“Indulge in a modest splurge”). Light dawned. I had a spiritual master. Saint Thérèse was my spiritual master. But why was I attracted to this Catholic saint, a French woman who had died at the age of twenty-four after having spent nine years cloistered with some twenty nuns—Saint Thérèse, the “Little Flower,” known for her “Little Way”?
    After I thought about it for five seconds, it became perfectly obvious.
    I’d started my happiness project to test my hypothesis that I could become happier by making small changes in my ordinary day. I didn’t want to reject the natural order of my life—by moving to Walden Pond or Antarctica, say, or taking a sabbatical from my husband. I wasn’t going to give up toilet paper or shopping or experiment with hallucinogens. I’d already switched careers. Surely, I’d hoped, I could change my life without changing my life, by finding more happiness in my own kitchen.
    Everyone’s happiness project is different. Some people might feel the urge to make a radical transformation. I was vicariously exhilarated by these dramatic adventures, but I knew they weren’t the path to happiness for me. I wanted to take little steps to be happier as I lived my ordinary life, and that was very much in the spirit of Saint Thérèse.
    Thérèse Martin was born in Alençon, France, in 1873. Before her parents’ marriage, her father had tried to become a monk and her mother a nun, but both had been rejected by religious orders; her five sisters who survived childhood all became nuns, and Thérèse became a saint. Thérèse tried to enter a Carmelite convent at Lisieux at age fifteen (two of her sisters were already there), but the bishop wouldn’t permit it because she was too young. She traveled to Rome to ask Pope Leo XIII’s permission personally, but the pope stood by the bishop’s decision. Then the bishop changed his mind. When Thérèse was in the convent, her “Mother” was her older sister Pauline, who instructed Thérèse to write the story of her childhood, which became the basis of Story of a Soul. In 1897, at the age of twenty-four, Thérèse died an agonizing death from tuberculosis.
    While she lived, no one outside her family and convent had heard of Thérèse. After she died, an edited version of her memoir was sent to Carmelite convents and Church officials as an obituary notice. Just two thousand copies were printed initially, but the popularity of this “Springtime Story of a Little White Flower,” as she’d characteristically titled it, spread with astonishing rapidity; just two years after her death, her grave had to be placed under guard to protect it from pilgrims seeking relics. (It’s hard to understand how such a short, modest account of childhood and youth could have such spiritual power—yet of course I feel it myself.)
    Accordingly, in a suspension of the ordinary requirements, Thérèse got a fast-track canonization in 1925 and became “Saint Thérèse” just twenty-eight years after her death. To mark the centenary of her death, in 1997 Pope John Paul II made her a Doctor of the Church, the elite category of thirty-three supersaints that includes Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas.
    To me, the fascinating aspect of her story was Thérèse’s achievement of sainthood through the perfection of small, ordinary acts. That was her “Little Way”—holiness achieved in a little way by little souls rather than by great deeds performed by great souls. “Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by…every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love.”
    There was nothing outwardly striking about Thérèse’s life or her death. She lived an obscure existence, much of it without stepping foot outside her convent, and though she was born just one year before Churchill (while she was dying in the convent infirmary, he was fighting as part of the Malakand Field Force in British India), she seems like a figure from the distant, quaint past. Thérèse didn’t overcome a dysfunctional family or monumental difficulties; she had loving parents and a tender, indulgent upbringing in prosperous circumstances. Although Thérèse confided in Story of a Soul that “I want to be a warrior,