Happier at Home

by Gretchen Rubin

As much as I enjoyed Better than Before and The Four Tendencies, I found reading Happier At Home to be a frustrating slog through minimal bits of usable advice and a lot of detailed personal journalling that I didn’t expect or enjoy.

This line from the cover copy best describes this book: “starting in September (the new January), Rubin dedicated a school year—September through May—to making her home a place of greater simplicity, comfort, and love.”

I live and work in my home (and I love my home, too) so I expected I’d find this book to be interesting and potentially useful in examining my own space. Instead of useful or practical ways of reframing or examining how we approach and find joy and contentment in our own homes, it was a memoir of six months in Rubin’s life and home, which ultimately did not hold my interest.

Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of home, and begins with a few major themes or points for that month, such as “follow a threshold ritual,” “have an uncomfortable conversation with my parents,” or “plan a nice little surprise.” Then each point would be elucidated, but because these points were loosely connected to happiness at times, I was left with a feeling that instead of identifying goals, the goals were defined after the event. In other words, I didn’t always see a connection between happiness at home and each chapter’s major themes and how they connected to happiness.

But what I found most infuriating is the lack of citation for readers and friends. There’s a lot of quoting in the book – Delacroix, Thérèse of Lisieux, Roosevelt, and so on. But many of the stories and suggestions come from readers of Rubin’s Happiness Project site or her personal friends, and they are listed as “a reader” or “a friend,” with no names.

One of the major themes of a chapter, “Underreact to a problem,” even comes from a reader:

I adopted a resolution suggested by a reader who wrote from a research ship in Antarctica. Her team leader, she reported, had urged them to “Underreact to problems,” not to ignore or minimize problems, but just to underreact to them.

There’s no citation of the reader or the team leader by name, and this really irked me. The concept is sound – underreacting would definitely be useful in not expending unnecessary energy on problems that aren’t that big a deal. It’s good advice, even. And, hey, maybe I’m overreacting to the issue, but I found the lack of attribution and the frequency of it in the text very frustrating.

I do not know if the lack of names was by request or by design, but the absence of explanation as to why there were no cited names (especially since so much research and many quotes are attributed and cited elsewhere) made me angry on those people’s behalf, and made me trust the provenance of the other guiding ideas in the book even less. I said in a recent Whatcha Reading? post that I was going backwards through Rubin’s backlist, and with this book, I’m stopping my journey.

 

– SB Sarah

In the spirit of her blockbuster #1 New York Times bestseller The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin embarks on a new project to make home a happier place.

One Sunday afternoon, as she unloaded the dishwasher, Gretchen Rubin felt hit by a wave of homesickness. Homesick—why? She was standing right in her own kitchen. She felt homesick, she realized, with love for home itself. “Of all the elements of a happy life,” she thought, “my home is the most important.” In a flash, she decided to undertake a new happiness project, and this time, to focus on home.

And what did she want from her home? A place that calmed her, and energized her. A place that, by making her feel safe, would free her to take risks. Also, while Rubin wanted to be happier at home, she wanted to appreciate how much happiness was there already.

So, starting in September (the new January), Rubin dedicated a school year—September through May—to making her home a place of greater simplicity, comfort, and love.

In The Happiness Project, she worked out general theories of happiness. Here she goes deeper on factors that matter for home, such as possessions, marriage, time, and parenthood. How can she control the cubicle in her pocket? How might she spotlight her family’s treasured possessions? And it really was time to replace that dud toaster.

Each month, Rubin tackles a different theme as she experiments with concrete, manageable resolutions—and this time, she coaxes her family to try some resolutions, as well.

With her signature blend of memoir, science, philosophy, and experimentation, Rubin’s passion for her subject jumps off the page, and reading just a few chapters of this book will inspire readers to find more happiness in their own lives.

Nonfiction