Joyful, Anyway

Joyful, Anyway

About the Book

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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Praise for Joyful, Anyway

“With luminous clarity and unsentimental grace, Kate Bowler delivers a meditation on the sacred, vivid, heartbreaking absurdity of being alive. Her prose is both razor sharp and tender, avoiding easy answers (which never help us anyway) while extending a spirit of friendship to all who have suffered and who long to carry on. A deeply moving everyday masterpiece. I loved it.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“If it feels like joy is missing from your life, drop what you’re doing and read this book. Kate Bowler is a beacon—she radiates light even when the world seems dark. Her wisdom is perfectly timed for our tumultuous times.”—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential and Think Again, and host of the podcast Re:Thinking

“Bowler’s richest and wisest book yet, and if possible, the most charming. Absolutely lovely. It changed me.”—Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling author of Somehow

“A delight from start to finish, Joyful, Anyway embodies the mix of pleasure and aching that makes us human. A book to take you through life's aftermaths.”—Katherine May, New York Times bestselling author of Wintering

“A profoundly wise, hilarious, large-hearted and down-to-earth meditation on the fundamental unsolvability of being human—and how it’s in the very middle of the mess that joy is waiting to be found. I know I'll be returning to this book again and again.”—Oliver Burkeman, New York Times bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks

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. With her signature mix of tenderness and ache, Bowler lingers comfortably in the strange terrain where joy and pain don't alternate, but constantly intertwine.”—Jerry Seinfeld
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About the Author

Kate Bowler
KATE BOWLER is the four-time New York Times bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved, 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. She is a professor of history at Duke University and shuttles home to Winnipeg for the summer with her husband and son. More by Kate Bowler
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