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
What if all the things you'd been told would make you happy … didn't?
Jill Stark was living the dream. She had a coveted job, she was dating a sports star, and her first book had just become a bestseller. After years of chasing the dream, 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 we've been sold a lie. Could it be that the relentless pursuit of happiness is making us miserable?
From the ashes of Jill’s epic breakdown comes this raw, funny, and uplifting exploration of our age of anxiety. 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 asks what would happen if we flipped the script and found contentment in places we least expected?
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Rights held
- Other rights
- Paperback
- 234mm x 153mm
- 352 pages
- 9781911617587
- GBP£14.99
- 14 March 2019
- World
- Audio [World] WF Howes
Praise
‘Faced with the crippling paralysis that comes with anxiety and depression, Jill Stark doesn’t completely crumple. Instead, she does what a good journalist does: looks it directly in the face in order to explain, investigate, and reveal. Anyone who reads this book who lives with anxiety will be a beneficiary of its courage and clarity.’
‘By looking back on her childhood, interviewing experts and amassing anecdotal data, Stark expertly links her lifelong struggle with anxiety with a collective social malaise that is exacerbated by our constant connectivity, underfunded mental healthcare systems and the pervasive ‘happiness myth’ … The book’s resounding takeaway that there are multiple ‘happy-in-betweens’ instead of one ‘happy-ever-after’ is an uplifting and liberating one.’
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.
