Happy Never After:
why the happiness fairytale is driving us mad (and how i flipped the script)
Happy Never After:
why the happiness fairytale is driving us mad (and how i flipped the script)
Overview
Jill Stark was living the dream. She had a coveted job as a senior journalist, she was dating a sports star, and her first book had just become a bestseller. After years of chasing the fairytale ending, she’d finally found it. And then it all fell apart.
Getting her happy-ever-after plunged Jill into the darkest period of her life, forcing her to ask if she’d been sold a lie. What if all the things that she’d been told would make her happy were red herrings? Could it be that the relentless pursuit of happiness was making her miserable?
From the ashes of Jill’s epic breakdown comes this raw, funny, and uplifting exploration of our age of anxiety. Charting her own life-long battles with mental-health problems, Jill asks why, in a western world with more opportunity, choice, and wealth than ever before, so many of us are depressed, anxious, and medicated. When we’ve never had more ways to connect, why do we feel so profoundly disconnected?
Happy Never After is a soul-searching journey from despair to clarity and a forensic examination of our troubled times. Road-testing neuroscience’s latest psychological frontiers in compassion, acceptance, gratitude, play, hope, and solitude, Jill turns the happiness fairytale on its head, and swaps the ‘quick fix’ approach to mental ill health for the long road back to herself.
In the end, Jill has a hard-earned question for us. We’re all looking for answers. We all want the happy-ever-after. What would happen if we stopped chasing, stayed still, and found calm and meaning in places we least expected?
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Paperback
- 6in x 9.2in
- 352 pages
- 9781947534704
- USD$18.00
- 2 April 2019
Praise
“A moving, insightful analysis of our collective pain and how we can heal.”
“Funny, wise, poignant and compelling, Happy Never After is a brilliant intersection between searing personal experience and the wisdom of the elders: nothing brings us closer to despair than the relentless pursuit of our own happiness.”
About the Author
Jill Stark is an award-winning journalist, author, and mental health advocate, with a career spanning more than two decades in both the UK and Australia. She spent ten years on staff at The Age covering health and social affairs as a senior writer and columnist. She now works as a freelance journalist, speechwriter, media consultant, content creator, and public speaker. Her first book, High Sobriety, was longlisted for the Walkley Book award and shortlisted for the Kibble Literary Awards. Her other books, Happy Never After and When You’re Not OK, are mental health memoirs offering hope and connection to anyone doing it tough.
