WE ALL WANT TO BE HAPPY

In this motivational work, Mullen-Martin encourages readers to take an active role in their own happiness.

When the author was sad as a girl, her mother told her to list everything that made her happy in the pages of a notebook. The trick worked like a charm, helping shift the girl’s perspective away from the bad and back to the good. “There is no magic bullet,” writes Mullen-Martin in her foreword. “No one else can make you happy; happiness comes from within, or it does not come at all. If no one can make you happy, then it follows we cannot make others happy. However, our shared happiness can result in collective contentment.” With this book, the author aims to share some of the hard-won lessons she’s learned in her eight decades studying the nature of happiness. In one chapter, she discusses how she is willing to spend money on a telescopic lens for her birding camera, or anything else that brings her joy, so long as the money is available—why deprive herself, or feel guilty for treating herself? In another chapter, she remembers a time when she was 19, and her bank account was empty three days before payday. A woman who worked at the nearby liquor store lent her five dollars and a pack of cigarettes. “She was just living her life when she provided the glue I needed to hold my world together,” recalls the author, who looks for ways to be the glue in the lives of others. From stories of fostering children and unexpected divorces to tips on how to best enjoy a vacation and advice on growing old without getting down about it, Mullen-Martin takes the reader on a cheerful walk down a path beset on all sides by potential tragedies. She does so in the hopes that, by the end, her readers will be able to continue on with the same joy for living that she has managed to muster.

The author has known her share of heartache; she lost her mother at a young age and has been widowed twice. Mullen-Martin’s commitment to turning her frown upside down is admirable, though her prescriptions for happiness often feel platitudinal rather than constructive. She sometimes comes across as unsympathetic—her chapter on addiction doesn’t actually address substance abuse but rather laments people who are addicted as “being ill” or “complaining.” (“We should work toward becoming addicted to winning, to being satisfied, contented, pleasant and a contributing member of society,” she writes. “We don’t have the right to blame our lack of progress on society or on limited physical or mental capacity.”) She goes on, unhelpfully, to cite Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, and Helen Keller as examples of people who have overcome limitations. The book is a slim one at barely 100 pages, and its 20 short chapters zip by. Though some may find Mullen-Martin’s advice trite, others will no doubt take comfort in her optimistic meditations.

A sincere, if at times blinkered, volume about deciding to be happy.