How To Be Happy

How To Be Happy tries to tell you that you don't need to be happy all the time - or, more accurately, it tells you that you are looking at happiness all wrong. Remember that age-old adage, without pain there would be no joy? Davis calls bullshit. She tries to show us how our need for a coherent narrative drives us to hide behind the stories we make up about ourselves. We try to impose order upon the chaos of our lives by snip snip snipping out what we don't want until we've made bonsais out of ourselves. Davis tells us to lose the script.
We try to be happy all the time because we are told that we need to be. When we discover that we can't be, we see it as a flaw and try to fake it until we make it. In one story, a woman discovers that she cannot love and decides to have a baby so that she can trick herself into it.
Another reaction to the chaotic, complex world of today is the need for some kind of return to simplicity. Davis tries to pop that bubble and show us that it wouldn't make us any happier.
Her characters cannot get rid of their romantic idealism. They don't want to. After all, it's easier to live in our heads than out here in reality. In one page, her characters do just this by getting into a bag and zipping themselves up quietly from inside.
We do need to stop with the positivism mania. We do need to divorce ourselves from this obsession with happiness. This book is funny because it's true.