Happier Far - (Crux: The Georgia Literary Nonfiction) by Diane Mehta (Paperback)

About the Book

"Diane Mehta's Happier Far is a funny, profound, and engrossing journey from her childhood in India and New Jersey to life as a single parent and artist in Brooklyn. She documents as she goes, the many ways that the story of a life is in the journey. Mehta is a beautifully lyrical writer with an associative mind that wanders and resolves, and she writes in a frequency entirely her own. She believes that all topics are fair game, and she interrogates what's around her while always turning the lens back on herself. She is propulsive and hilarious in her letters to animals, and profound and moving in meditations on the dead, chronic pain, migraines, being immigrant with mixed-race Jewish-Jain parents, Beethoven, swimming, chanting, and coping with the demands of love, marriage, divorce, parenting, and being an artist. She loosens pathos with humor and writes ravishing sentences that stop you in your tracks. She is an original and feisty voice who telescopes the ways that you don't have to fit in to be "happier far.""--

Book Synopsis

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."

Review Quotes

Anyone engaged with Jewish or Indian culture will happily absorb the richness of everyday detail Mehta provides. Finally, however, the lasting impact of Happier Far is a pondering of that most intimate form of bringing ethnicities together--marriage and children--Carlin Romano "Moment Magazine"

This slim vol-ume is packed with poet-ic and pen-e-trat-ing insights into the human condition.--Lauren Gilbert "Jewish Book Council"

Diane Mehta's Happier Far is a volcano of sensory association and a conceptual exploration through time and space, skittering across the globe, projecting into the fourth dimension, ocean beds, and the afterlife, bringing art and literature of the past to bear on an endurable contemporary moment; communing with memory and the tracks people leave; chasing words into silence, a whirlwind, a torrent of molten lava. I couldn't trace the itinerary of this reading experience on a map, but the journey is epic.--Minna Zallman Proctor "author of Landslide: True Stories"

If you are a writer, 'you have to claw and fight over every verb and part of speech or life loses its electricity.' Diane Mehta's phrase is perfectly apt for her memoir, which digs in deep and does so many things at once: following a path of self-encounter that begins with her Indian origins and ends up in a castle in Italy keeping anxious company with a baby bat. Rhythmic, syncopated, the prose has an astute lyric edge. Engaging hard memories as well as the absurdities of the lived day, Mehta scoops up details with a Nabokovian eye. These essays come at us from every angle and amount to a wholly original self-portrait.--Sven Birkerts "author of The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing"

In this wonderful collection, the poet's imagination and inventive language meets the essayist's quest to find meaning in the everyday chaos of life. The result is work of rare thoughtfulness and surpassing beauty.--Clifford Thompson "author of What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man's Blues"

This is an intellectually ambitious collection of essays written by a woman whose longing for inner wholeness is deeply moving.--Vivian Gornick "author of Approaching Eye Level and Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader"

About the Author

Yaddo and Civitella Ranieri fellow DIANE MEHTA is the author of two poetry collections, Tiny Extravaganzas and Forest with Castanets. Her poetry, criticism, and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Times Literary Supplement, American Poetry Review, and A Public Space. She is a poet in residence at the New Chamber Ballet in New York City.