Are You Happy? Emily Fox Gordon Paperback $15.00 add to cart Read more...

INTRODUCTION

"The happiness of childhood is existential, not psychological," writes Emily Fox Gordon. Are You Happy? is an evocation of a peculiar and paradoxical kind of happiness—the happiness of an unhappy child. Gordon was a "fatty", an academic failure, a schoolyard pariah, a disappointment to her highly educated parents. And yet her early life was, as she puts it, "a succession of moments of radiant apprehension." In a later age she might have been medicated and counseled and ferried from one appointment to another. But growing up in the college town of Williamstown, Massachusetts, in the 1950s, she spent her days rambling through woods and meadows, rattling around in the basements of college buildings and dropping in on student acquaintances via the fire escapes of dormitories. She was free to be alone with her thoughts, to mumble observations and descriptions as she cultivated the writer's lifelong habit of translating experience into words.

In the hands of this exceptional stylist and rigorous, elegant thinker, we understand how happiness can be recaptured through telling the story of its loss.

Praise for Are You Happy?
"Dazzling in its cool, clear-eyed, unsentimental vision." —The Boston Globe

"Gordon's prose beckons like a friendly open door, inviting us to share in the radiant spaces of her childhood." —The Houston Chronicle

"A wonderfully illuminating memoir."—Rosellen Brown, author of Half a Heart and Before and After

"Gordon's acute eye and exacting prose make Are You Happy? a scrupulously drawn map to a lost world." —Mark Doty, author of Heaven's Coast and Firebird

ABOUT EMILY FOX GORDON

Emily Fox Gordon has published personal essays in Boulevard, Salmagundi, and The American Scholar, among other literary magazines. Her work has won two Pushcart Prizes and has been shortlisted in Best American Essays, and three of her essays were anthologized in the Anchor Essay Annual. An essay about her hospitalization as a teenager at Austen Riggs formed the basis for Mockingbird Years (2000), a memoir which was also a critique of psychotherapy. Mockingbird Years was named a New York Times Notable Book and was chosen as one of Amazon.com's top ten memoirs for the year. It also received glowing front-page consideration in The New York Times Book Review and was subsequently translated into Hebrew and Chinese.

Gordon has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell colony. She has developed a strong interest in teaching as well, and has taught workshops at Rice University, Houston's INPRINT program, and the University of Wyoming. Emily Fox Gordon lives in Houston, Texas.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. The act of engaging in memoir-writing can be a path to finding a perspective point, or among other things, a way of attentively bearing witness to the events of one's life. In Are You Happy?, Emily Fox Gordon recounts her own route to self-discovery—illuminated through documentation and marked by "the beginning of remembering it" (pg. 218). Gordon's uneasy, yet hope-filled reflections on her adolescence make her not only an intriguing guide to the Eden of 1950s Williamstown, but a meticulous and imaginative portraitist. Do you think a hyper-awareness of one's inner monologue makes it easier to deal with the world? Is crafting a memoir a healing act?

2. "Nobody could see the purely internal process of turning experience into words; if anything it tends to make a person look dim-witted."
   

   Explain the significance of Emily's inability to choose pre-existing or appropriate words to describe her experience. What impact does this have on her as a student-and ultimately as a writer? Does she succeed in making language fit her reality?

3. Several creatures serve as guides into new stages of consciousness for the young Gordon—unusual messengers in the form of a baby bird, bees, and the startling occasion of a rabbit birth (pgs. 34, 42 respectively). Have you had a particularly affecting interaction with an unusual messenger that brought you a deep sense of understanding? What is it about the natural world that can inspire such a jump in awareness? What gates might be open in this environment that are closed in our more developed surroundings?
   

4. How does Gordon define happiness? What are its essential components—and its limitations? Do you agree with her classifications? Do you have a working definition of happiness?
   

   Suggested passages:
   

   • Childhood happiness = as having its own purpose, "given to us by God," the constant rush of fresh attention (pg.17)

   • Adolescent happiness = disruption is bliss, the romancing of mental illness (pg. 19)

   • Adult happiness = gained through ritual, reflection, overcoming boundaries to find the states of harmony and balance (pgs. 85, 161)

5. Why might Gordon have chosen such an unconventional patron saint of happiness in the writer and traveler George Orwell? How does this kinship with Orwell influence her journey? What icons (or iconic qualities) do you—or in a broader sense, we as a culture—find palliative or inspiring?

6. "At the very moment it was extended to me I realized what my happiness had been, and knew it was lost to me forever."
   

   In her reflection, Gordon argues happiness is elusive and impermanent, and that the struggle to attain and preserve it may be more work than we might give it credit for. Is happiness our "natural" condition? What must we, and Gordon, overcome to re-attain it?

7. "On every school day my real happiness began at the moment when I was released into the reviving waters of my Williamstown life like a gasping, flopping trout tossed over the side of a boat."
   

   Gordon seems to find full happiness in the ritual of initiation-the promise of acceptance at the end of a trial-which leads her to experiment with religion, and with her blossoming sexuality. How might Gordon's needs and desires conflict with the cultural expectation of finding happiness in relationships-experiences often chaotic, emotionally challenging, and having no fixed ends? [Please see pages 85, 161, and 194 for reference.]

8. Discuss the level of co-dependency in the relationship between Gordon and her mother. How does this effect the shaping of their separate destinies and their individual experiences of happiness?
   

9. In what ways did both mother and daughter embrace writing as a starting point to contextualize their lives and experiences? Is the choice of venue for their work an important element—journalism (the Eaglet columns) versus memoir pages? Does this shared experience bring them closer?
   

10. In very broad and in intimate strokes, how does Gordon's life echo that of her mother's? What might it be like to see your life and path foreshadowed? How does Gordon rise above the instability of their relationship to become cognizant, optimistic and self-possessed?
    

11. "I sweep from one end of the town to the other, following the straight line of Main Street like a low-flying airplane, hovering above the campus, passing over the Haystack Monument and the infirmary and the tennis courts and the woods beyond them."
    

    What function does "stealing back" to Williamstown serve for Gordon (pgs. 30, 231)? Is she attempting to catch things before they developed into more complicating realities or personalities? Does this constant eulogizing bring her any sort of peace-any lasting happiness?

12. "It's my old happiness, magically retrieved..."
    

    Even though stormy, Gordon finds the Williamstown period in her life ripe with developmental gems (pg. 31). Is there such a thing as an ideal childhood-and are we capable of looking at our own with an unbiased, psychological eye? What are our barriers, or blinders, in this process?

13. "There is no absolute darkness anywhere on earth, he insisted, except possibly deep under the ocean, where the eyeless fish live."

    In recounting an adolescent prank, Gordon reveals how at a tender age, she made a willful choice to confront the blanketing darkness around her, wishing it could go on forever—with a calmness and then a rush of exhilaration, rather than with pangs of panic or anxiety [see pgs. 168-170]. In what forms might we encounter darkness in our lives? What might Gordon be trying to teach us about the act of confronting this shadowy presence?

14. How has the threat of the clinical haunted Gordon's self-development? When Gordon questions her giftedness and intellectual aptitude, she fearfully imagines a team of New York researchers assembled to hook her into "a great shining machine...[who] would gather around to measure just how bright I really was" (pg. 229). Do you think aptitude, or more importantly in this case, the capacity for happiness or brightness (as they are linked in Gordon's mind) can be accurately, or even measured at all? What kind of tools or exercises might we need to capture these results?

15. "'Are you happy?' A very important question, and one which, from time to time, we should all remember to ask our children."

    Though menacing when wielded by the elderly school custodian John Steele, the spotlight question of the book, "Are you happy?," simultaneously delights and frightens Gordon—forever haunting her with its power. What is it about this question that makes it so powerful a tool, a self-improvement weapon? What are other daily affirmations we might aspire to check-in on ourselves with?