Perhaps you’re thinking, Really? You were lucky enough to get a book contract, and now you’re not writing the book? Boo-hoo! Try working twelve hours a day in a factory, for God’s sake! I understand how this comes across. I mean, who do I think I am, Elizabeth Gilbert at the beginning of Eat, Pray, Love when she’s crying on the bathroom floor as she thinks about leaving the husband who loves her? Gretchen Rubin in The Happiness Project who has the loving, handsome husband, the healthy daughters, and more money than most people will ever see but still has that niggling feeling of something missing?
Which reminds me—I left out an important detail about the book-I’m-not-writing. The topic? Happiness. No, the irony hasn’t been lost on me: the happiness book has been making me miserable.
I should never have been writing a happiness book in the first place, and not just because, if Wendell’s grieving-something-bigger theory holds water, I’ve been depressed. When I made the decision to write this book, I’d recently begun my private practice, and I’d just written a cover story for the Atlantic called “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy: Why Our Obsession with Our Kids’ Happiness May Be Dooming Them to Unhappy Adulthoods,” which, at the time, was the most emailed piece in the hundred-plus-year history of the magazine. I talked about it on national television and radio; media from around the world called me for interviews; and overnight, I became a “parenting expert.”
Next thing I knew, publishers wanted the book version of “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.” By wanted, I mean they wanted it for—I don’t know how else to say this—a dizzying sum of money. It was the kind of money that a single mom like me only dreamed of, the kind of money that would provide our one-income family with some financial room to breathe for a long time. A book like this would have led to speaking engagements (which I enjoy) at schools across the country and a steady flow of patients (which would have helped, as I was starting out). The article was even optioned for a television series (which might have gotten made had there also been a best-selling book to go along with it).
But when given the opportunity to write the book version of “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy,” a book that could potentially change the entire landscape of my professional and financial future, I said, with an astonishing lack of forethought: Thanks very much, that’s so kind, but . . . I’d rather not.
I hadn’t had a stroke. I just said no.
I said no because something felt wrong about it. Mainly, I didn’t think that the world needed another helicopter-parenting book. Dozens of smart, thoughtful books had already covered overparenting from every conceivable angle. After all, two hundred years ago, the philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe succinctly summarized this sentiment: “Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.” Even in recent history—2003, to be exact—one of the early modern overparenting books, aptly named Worried All the Time, put it this way: “The cardinal rules of good parenting—moderation, empathy, and temperamental accommodation with one’s child—are simple and are not likely to be improved upon by the latest scientific findings.”
As a mom myself, I wasn’t immune to parental anxiety. I wrote my original article, in fact, with the hope that it would be useful to parents in the way that a therapy session might be. But if I eked a book out of it in order to jump on the commercial bandwagon and join the ranks of insta-experts, I thought I’d be part of the problem. What parents needed, I believed, wasn’t another book about how they had to calm down and take a break. What they needed was an actual break from the deluge of parenting books. (The New Yorker later ran a humor piece about the proliferation of parenting manifestos, saying that “another book at this point would just be cruel.”)
So like Bartleby the Scrivener (and with similarly tragic results), I said, “I would prefer not to.” Then I spent the next several years watching more and more overparenting books hit the market and beating myself up with a rotating roster of self-flagellating questions: Had I been a responsible adult by turning down that kind of money? I’d recently finished an unpaid internship, I had graduate-school loans to repay, and I was the sole provider for my family; why couldn’t I have just written the parenting book quickly, reaped the professional and financial benefits, and gone my merry way? After all, how many people have the luxury of working only on what matters most to them?
The regret I felt about having not done the parenting book was compounded by the fact that I continued to get weekly reader mail and speaking-engagement queries about the “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy” article. “Will there be a book?” person after person asked. No, I wanted to reply, because I’m a moron.
I did feel like a moron, because in the interest of not selling out and cashing in on the parenting craze, I agreed instead to write the now-dreaded, depression-inducing happiness book. To make ends meet as I launched my practice, I still had to write a book, and I thought at the time that I could provide a service to readers. Instead of showing how we parents were trying too hard to make our kids happy, I was going to show how we were trying too hard to make ourselves happy. This idea seemed closer to my heart.
But whenever I sat down to write, I felt as disconnected from the topic as I had from the subject of helicopter parenting. The research didn’t—couldn’t—reflect the subtleties of what I was seeing in the therapy room. Some scientists had even come up with a complex mathematical equation to predict happiness based on the premise that happiness stems not from how well things go but whether things go better than expected. It looks like this:
Happiness (t) = w0+ w1
γt−jCRj+ w2
γt−jEVj+ w3
γt−jRPEj
Which all boils down to: Happiness equals reality minus expectations. Apparently, you can make people happy by delivering bad news and then taking it back (which, personally, would just make me mad).
Still, I knew I could put together some interesting studies, but I felt I’d just be scratching the surface of something else I wanted to say but couldn’t quite put my finger on. And in my new career, and in my life more generally, scratching the surface no longer felt satisfying. You can’t go through psychotherapy training and not be changed in some way, not become, without even noticing, oriented toward the core.
I told myself it didn’t matter. Just write the book and be done with it. I’d already botched things up with the parenting book; I couldn’t botch up this happiness book too. And yet, day after day, I couldn’t get myself to write it. Just like I couldn’t get myself to write the parenting book. How had I gotten here again?
In graduate school, we used to watch therapy sessions through one-way mirrors, and sometimes when I’d sit down to write the happiness book, I’d think about a thirty-five-year-old patient I’d observed. He’d come to therapy because he very much loved and was attracted to his wife but he couldn’t stop cheating on her. Neither he nor his wife understood how his behavior could be so at odds with what he believed he wanted—trust, stability, closeness. In his session, he explained that he hated the turmoil his cheating put his wife and their marriage through and knew that he wasn’t the husband or father he wanted to be. He talked for a while about how desperately he wanted to stop cheating and how he had no idea why he kept doing it.