In “Happier Far,” Diane Mehta takes readers on a tour of the absurdities and dilemmas of becoming a writer, detailing how family can sometimes help or get in the way.
Mehta explores the impactful moments in her life, from a vibrant childhood in India to spending her youth in an unwelcoming New Jersey suburb to the confusions of marriage, divorce and life as a single parent. In these pages, she chronicles her search for a family history that can help explain who she is and what matters most.
Shifting from concert halls, art galleries, parks, cemeteries and hospitals, Mehta follows her curiosity to imaginatively expand her immediate world. With a voice that’s propulsive and ironic, sly and profound, she takes a look at these snapshots of her life.
She wrestles with a personal tragedy in a letter to a turtle and reveals the hallucinatory mania of migraines in her interactions with a dog-walking service. She connects with her mother by listening to Beethoven’s late sonatas. She examines family documents in an effort to pin down the story of her Indian-Jain and Jewish-American parents. She figures out what it takes to express herself clearly while trying to meet the demands of love, marriage, divorce and parenting.
An original and feisty storyteller, Mehta shows readers that if the life they thought they were going to lead becomes unattainable, they can still rebuild it and become, as Milton said in “Paradise Lost,” “happier far.”
