Joyful, Anyway

Summary

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A profound, funny, and deeply human case for joy that doesn’t depend on everything getting better, from the beloved author of Everything Happens for a Reason and No Cure for Being Human

“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

True joy—an unmistakable blend of gratitude, hope, and delight—will find you, even in the midst of sadness. Allowing yourself to receive this gift is what will get you through.

We are overwhelmed. Frightening headlines, illness, uncertainty, grief, and email. We are left wondering why, if we’re doing everything right, life still feels like an endless game of whack-a-mole. Joyful, Anway is bestselling author Kate Bowler’s bracingly honest exploration of this dilemma.

By sharing her personal experience and stories from some of our culture’s preeminent historians, philosophers, and religious scholars, Bowler presents an original and inspiring understanding of joy. This is a type of joy that is different from happiness, and it does not depend on resolving the things that make life difficult. Drawing on a decade of living with serious illness and a lifetime, as a divinity professor, studying America’s obsession with progress, she shows why the relentless pursuit of happiness may, in fact, keep us from experiencing true joy.

Joy isn’t something you can optimize or manufacture. It subverts our expectations, finding us when life rewrites our scripts. Joyful, Anyway offers language for the ache we all carry and practices—loosening control, introducing novelty, choosing charity—that will open us up to the surprising, technicolor moments that pull us back into life. Inspiring, funny, and soulful, Joyful, Anyway is a book you will turn to again and again.

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.