Lionel Shriver: I was poor but I was happy

Lionel Shriver should have been miserable as a ‘nobody’ with no money and next to no readers. In fact she was having the time of her life …

• • Lionel Shriver - theguardian.com, Monday 3 November 2014 

Lionel Shriver: ‘If happiness is a little club that admits a select few, then its members are unbearable, with spreading bald spots from patting themselves on the head.’ Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

In my country, we’re sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness? I fear that for too many people the word conjures “a condition of ceaseless ecstasy and perfect self-actualisation (whatever that is) experienced by pretty much everyone but me”.
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