Happier Far: Essays

In Happier Far, Diane Mehta takes us on a funny and engrossing tour of the absurdities and dilemmas of becoming a writer, and how family can sometimes help us and sometimes get in the way. From a vibrant childhood in India to her youth in an unwelcoming New Jersey suburb, from the confusions of marriage and divorce to life as a single parent, she chronicles her search for a family history that can help explain who she is and what matters most to her now.

In concert halls, art galleries, parks, cemeteries, and hospitals, Mehta follows her curiosity to imaginatively expand her immediate world. With a voice that's propulsive and ironic, sly and profound, she takes stock: She wrestles with a personal tragedy in a letter to a turtle and reveals the hallucinatory mania of migraines in her interactions with a dog-walking service. She meditates on memory with ghosts of the dead, teaches herself to swim despite chronic pain, connects with her mother by listening to Beethoven's late sonatas, and examines family documents in an effort to pin down the story of her Indian-Jain and Jewish-American parents. Mehta tries to meet the demands of love, marriage, divorce, and parenting, all while figuring out what it takes to express herself clearly. An original and feisty storyteller, Mehta shows us that if you are kicked out of the life you thought you were going to lead, you can still rebuild it and become, as Milton said in Paradise Lost, "happier far."