Joyful, Anyway - Hardcover

Bowler, Kate

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059373419X ISBN 13: 9780593734193

Verlag: The Dial Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • New York Times bestselling author and Duke University professor Kate Bowler offers a profound, funny, and deeply human case for joy that doesn’t depend on everything getting better.

“Joyful, Anyway is colorful and layered, unafraid of the occasional gut-punch of raw feeling and vulnerability—much like Kate Bowler herself. She suffers no fools, especially the toxic optimists.”—Jerry Seinfeld

“A book to take you through life’s aftermaths.”—Katherine May, New York Times bestselling author of Wintering

You can’t always be happy, but you can be joyful, anyway.

We live in a culture convinced that chasing happiness will optimize our bodies, our minds, our relationships, our lives. But in the meantime, bad news usually stays bad: illness, chronic pain, grief, and disappointment don’t obey our timelines or vision boards. We are left wondering why, if we’re doing everything right, life still feels so hard.

Honest and bracingly tender, Joyful, Anyway proves that experiencing joy does not depend on resolving everything that makes life difficult. Drawing on a decade of living with serious illness and a lifetime studying America’s obsession with progress, Kate Bowler shows why people so busy chasing happiness miss out on actual joy.

Joy isn’t something you can optimize or manufacture—it finds us at the edge of expectation, when life interrupts our scripts. Joyful, Anyway gives language for the ache we all carry and practices for “putting yourself in the way of joy”: loosening control, introducing novelty, choosing charity, and staying open to the surprising, technicolor moments that pull us back into life.

Joy reminds us that no matter what, life is still worth loving. For every time we ask is this it?, joy will answer: There is more.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kate Bowler is the three-time New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason, No Cure for Being Human, Good Enough, The Lives We Actually Have, Blessed, and The Preacher's Wife, and hosts the popular podcast Everything Happens. A Duke University professor, she earned a master's of religion from Yale Divinity School and a PhD at Duke University.

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1

Joyful, Except on Tuesdays

The alarm starts blaring and I’m up. I’m up now.

Through the grainy dark, across the bedroom, I see the door crack open and stop abruptly. Then a figure turns sideways and slips through. For months I have been trying to give away a blanket that looks like a lightly toasted burrito, which undermines my living room’s attempts to be sufficiently mid-century modern. But, rather mysteriously, the blanket continues to disappear from the Give-Away Box and here it is, floating like a phantom through the dark until it pauses by my bed.

The burrito wedges himself under the duvet and sighs.

“What did you dream about, Mom?” hisses my son Zach, because he can’t possibly whisper.

“I dreamed I was being pulled behind an enormous boat and I couldn’t let go,” I tell him, and glance toward the bedside table. My phone is blinking with a reminder about the “no lateness” policy at my pilates class as tardiness disturbs the vibrational atmosphere. And below that is a WhatsApp message letting me know that while I was sleeping there was a flurry of classroom moms who needed someone—but who?—to bring gluten free cookies for the fundraiser. I read both a few times over to make sure I am not still in the fugue state of sleep medication. Ever since chronic pain and cancer made their sudden appearance way back when, I don’t so much fall asleep as need to be put to sleep like a tranqued bear. I put my head back under the sheets.

Lately the number of small obligations and small heartaches—the sheer volume of them—makes me feel like I can’t breathe. Like every thought about what I should do races from my head to my heart to my lungs. Then every thought about what I can’t do constricts my chest for a moment. Every time I allow myself to fully consider the direction my life is taking, I feel a little shock wave running through me. But soon I’ll get up, make breakfast, and take a lot of fish-oil vitamins with the chilling guarantee of “minimal burp-backs” and that will allow me to limit a normal intake of self-esteem for the day.

“Don’t worry about the dream,” says the boy, burrowing deeper into his tortilla wrapping. “It’s like cupping water in my hands in the bath. It slips away.” He says it exactly like that, those precise words, like a seasoned meditation instructor. Then he adds: “Also I have learned that grenades are very simple devices. Is there a place where children can practice using grenades?”

He has been enthusiastically ignoring our family’s commitment to pacifism for some time now.

I hear the sound of the coffee grinder downstairs and feel a wave of gratitude for this off-ramp. My son feels my attention shifting and wraps his arms tighter around me.

“Please consider today if we can buy a zeppelin,” he says, and I resolve to have another word with my father about whether he can lay off military history in his nightly Zoom chats with his grandson. How about cultivating an appreciation for nature? I will say, and my dad will invariably reply that air-conditioning is God’s promise that we never need to go outside again.

By the time I have put on my jeans and a blazer, waterproof mascara, grabbed my gym bag, and made some hurried but uninterpretable sounds of thanks to my husband for the coffee, I’m out the door.

Good habits are the foundation of everything, so I start the weekday morning like every other. I sit down at my desk with a hot cup of hazelnut creamer and a splash of coffee, a heating pad for my old-man back, and a feverish delusion that I will claw my way out of the overflowing garbage heap that is my inbox and list of tasks.

Never mind. I’ll do it later. Errands are never errands. Errands are the referendum on whether I have enough of my nervous system left over to restart a fight with Linda from HR about a billing error. Sometimes I get the distinct impression that my feelings are not actually my own. I have been plugged—Matrix-style—into the parasympathetic circuitry of the universe.

I run through today’s litany of activities: praying for the Best Friend’s dumb relationship, waiting on my mammogram result for a suspicious lump, worrying about someone who is irritated with me (I think, not sure), and calling my mom to ask about her gum graft surgery while pretending that I am also recovering from my own gum graft surgery to see if I can make her feel sorry for me. But that’s just for fun. And of course there’s my actual job: grading, research, faculty meetings, interviewing for my podcast, and writing, writing, writing.

After an hour or so, the mania has subsided. Digging into some historical research gives me the strange synchronized calm of a woman in motion. I have always been quieted by work, squeezed into the wonderful necessity of what is in front of me. At the very least, it feels necessary, and that feeling turns down the volume on the deafening needs of everyone around me. Marriage made me a wife, my son made me a mother, and cancer made me a feminist. Had I not been diagnosed, I never would have turned up the sound of my own screaming desires. Not that anyone else heard them scream. I think, in the end, I mostly sounded like I was politely clearing my throat.

It has been ten years since that diagnosis, which is a shocking gift. And now that I am technically cancer free, I am left with the health problems of a very optimistic septuagenarian. I lecture strangers about colonoscopies. I have mysterious ailments and random lumps that make people start sentences with “Well, at least . . .” And like every retiree, I accept ongoing and future pain as an unwanted assignment.

Sometimes suffering will make you better, so much better than you wanted to be. It has the wonderful advantage of sloughing off some of the soft rot in the human heart. Like ignorance. That is probably the first thing to go. Slice, slice. Then arrogance. Cut, cut. This is the forced humility of experience. It’s hard to feel better than other people when you are certain that you are made up of sadness and deli meat.

Because suffering is mostly a knife, cutting away parts of you that, all things considered, you would prefer to keep thankyouverymuch, and when it ends—when you survey what’s left—people will expect you to be filling your gratitude journal, while you feel like a coroner.

Hard to say it better than Job. We are “born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”

People who have suffered greatly—suffered unimaginably—will say that you never set your burdens down exactly. You learn how to carry them as you shoulder all the other invisible challenges that come with the imperceptible changes of becoming someone new. But I had sort of hoped that there was an unspoken guarantee that it would all get easier.

It didn’t. Life went on and it became harder and harder to feel like it was the miracle everyone told me it was.

I have been explaining all this to my psychologist, Henry, who I started seeing when I was very sick. I report that I’ve been googling the symptoms for an anxiety disorder. “I feel buzzy,” I say. “Like I’m alert but it’s not useful . . .” He explains that what I have might not technically be a disorder if what I’m alert about (cancer! loss!) is concrete and likely imminent. How comforting. Perhaps it is the feeling that philosopher Martin Heidegger described about the moment people awaken to their own helplessness. This is the thrownness of life, Heidegger explained, the way we cannot choose our future. We drift between...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The Dial Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059373419X
• ISBN 13: 9780593734193
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar