'"All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them,' Isak Dinesen once said. Sorrows are all pain otherwise, pain without sense or meaning. But joys, too, it seems to me, need their context. And sometimes their coexistence needs to be borne. The coexistence or possibility of the opposite can be what gives an experience its meaning. At its simplest, that is a story." —Camilla Gibb, This Is Happy In this profoundly moving memoir, Camilla Gibb, the award-winning, bestselling author of Sweetness in the Belly and The Beauty of Humanity Movement, reveals the intensity of the grief that besieged her as the happiness of a longed for family shattered. Grief that lived in a potent mix with the solace that arose with the creation of another, most unexpected family. A family constituted by a small cast of resilient souls, adults broken in the way many of us are, united in love for a child. Reflecting on tangled moments of past sadness and joy, alienation and belonging, Gibb revisits her stories now in relation to the happy daughter who will inherit them, and she finds there new meaning and beauty. Raw and unflinching, intelligent and humane, This Is Happy asks the big questions and finds answers in the tender moments of the everyday.
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Camilla Gibb was born in London and grew up in Toronto. She has a PhD in social anthropology from
Oxford, for which she conducted fieldwork in Ethiopia. Her novels, Mouthing the Words, winner of the City
of Toronto Book Award in 2000, and The
Petty Details of So-and-So’s Life have been published in eighteen countries
and translated into fourteen languages, receiving rave reviews all around the
world. She is one of twenty-one writers on the Orange Futures List—a list of
young writers to watch, compiled by the jury of the prestigious Orange Prize. She
serves as vice president of PEN Canada and is currently writer-in-residence at
the University of Toronto.