Chasing Joy

“I bite and scratch and claw my way toward happiness every day...It’s a choice...A choice to value the good things that matter.“   —What You Wish For by Katherine Center

I have long been a fan of Katherine Center. I was introduced to her books through Book of the Month Club (seriously, if you love reading and haven’t checked this out, let me know and I’ll find a discount code for you), and I was drawn to the very real, imperfect characters all reaching for hope and stumbling into joy along the way, which is pretty much my formula for a perfect story. 

I’m still catching up on her back catalog, but Happiness for Beginners was one that stopped me in my tracks, from the great title on, and I also loved Things You Save in a Fire. But her latest book, What You Wish For, is an immediate top-of-the-list book, because of its central theme: joy.

Samantha Casey is a school librarian who has learned, after her parents’ divorce, her mother’s death, and the reemergence of her epilepsy, to treasure celebration and look for opportunities for joy. She creates joy in her bright dress and in the whimsy of the elementary school library. Under the leadership of her landlord/principal, the whole school community values play, creativity, and delight, but after his death, the new principal, who just so happens to be the main man in Sam’s past, threatens to destroy all the joy and celebration she has managed to cultivate in her world.

This book is fun, all the way through. I loved the clash between the ideal educational world for students and the heavy-handed mandates and necessary emphasis on safety. I loved the deep dive into humanity at the core of the book, and I loved the way Ms. Center showed that joy is something you cling to and create, not just something that happens to you because you’re lucky. I loved the picture of people as imperfect bodies reacting to an imperfect world, and able to reach a hand out to move everyone a little closer to beauty and love.

I think many of us right now have expected joy to work this way: here’s the terrible pandemic, but now it’s over, and we can be happy. Yet the strangeness and uncertainty stretch on and on. I’m thankful for writers like Ms. Center, showing us ways to celebrate and live fully even when things are not at all the way we hoped they would be.

I think I believed at one time that we can be either happy or sad, put together or falling apart. But experience has taught me that this is rarely the case. I can be broken over the death of my sister, but an old friend sits with me on the pew at her visitation, and his laughter hands me back a few of my missing pieces. I can be ripped with anxiety over events beyond my control, but then I walk down the road behind a little boy pedaling as fast as he can in the cool of the evening, executing his u-turn perfectly before heading back toward me. My head can be a jumble of thoughts bouncing against each other, but then I sit on the sofa during a thunderstorm while my kids nap, and The Hunger Games takes me out of myself, and when I finally look up from the book, nothing seems quite so bad. 

Joy doesn’t fix the problems. But it does make them more bearable. 

(If you are interested in reading more about joy, check out Ingrid Fetell Lee’s book Joyful, and the essay Katherine Center also wrote called “Read for Joy.”)