(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
By and large we flee from honest expression of heart, mind and soul like it’s the plague.
Oh, we talk a big game about living authentic lives and place the idea of unfiltered, soul-freeing truthfulness up on a pedestal, but in practice, we go to great lengths, thanks to all kinds of social niceties and civilisational constructs to pretend we aren’t as fractured and broken and lost inside as we actually are.
Therapy is one of the few places where we can truly let the “weird” person within out, but even in this place where honesty is king and confidentiality reigns, the protagonist of Adelaide Faith’s debut novel, Happiness Forever, isn’t entirely sure it’s in her best interests to really lay the idiosyncratic but painfully truthful oddities of her small “l” life bare.
It’s not simply that she only feels good at therapy, admitting to her therapist, who admirably handles all kinds of escalating admissions – once Sylvie admits to herself that not saying anything is having a corrosive, pressure-filled effect on day-to-day life – with professional aplomb (cracks do appear or is Sylvie imagining that?), that she wants to be her, so much that there’s some very strange and unorthodox things she’d like to do to ensure the only person her therapist has in her life is Sylvie.
There are times in the lyrical truthfulness of Happiness Forever that you may cringe and recoil, feeling like the things Sylvie acknowledges out loud should never see the verbal light of day.
‘I’d like to see how you talk to your other clients, maybe to see if you are the same with them, and if you say the same thing to everybody.’
The therapist nods. ‘I can tell you I don’t say the same thing to everybody.’
‘Maybe I want to see if you like them more than you like me,’ Sylvie says, ‘and see if you look like you’re enjoying yourself more, with your other clients.’
But here’s the thing – we have been so conditioned and accustomed to keeping a lid on the strange and unmentionable thoughts that ping through our brains and feelings like rabid lemmings rushing to a “You can’t say that!” cliff, that anyone who actually utters what’s actually going on inside, who lifts the veil of rigid propriety that governs our lives to keep the charade of perfect, socially acceptable lives in place, is seen as some kind of shunnable traitor.
We wouldn’t come out and say that, but it’s true, and we know this because as we read Happiness Forever Sylvie acts as our Everyperson, censoring herself not to admit what’s really going on inside before lambasting herself when she does.
She admits to her therapist that she thinks and feels all kinds of things that we would normally decry as Things You Simply Shouldn’t Say and Certainly Shouldn’t Admit To and to her credit, thought she blanches at times, her therapist takes it all in her stride.
Largely because, if we are truly vulnerable with ourselves, what Sylvie says is very much what we are all feeling much of the time; that for all the good and proper thoughts that zoom around with an assured pat of approval, that we have a slew of thoughts that horrify us because they expose what we are really feeling, and in lives devoted like a cult to not acknowledging that, that can’t be allowed.
Sylvie’s therapist takes all the sorts of utterances that make Sylvie uncomfortable and make her wonder what kind of person she is, which is not a very good one, convinced that all the vile naysayers and awful people in her life were bang on (when, spoiler alert, they cruelly weren’t), well and truly in her stride because (a) she knows Sylvie won’t act on them (which she finally admits is true) and because (b) they point to real underlying pain, loss and dark troubling passages in her life that need healing, not condemnation.
While it will make you uncomfortable in the most unexpected of ways because we don’t like the idea of all that dirty laundry hanging out to dry, is how charmingly freeing Happiness Forever is to read.
Sylvie genuinely wants to get better, she wants friends which she finds in Chloe who loves books and being honest about life every bit as Sylvie actually finds out she does – realising Chloe will embrace her as a friend even when the real Sylvie emerges is just the tonic our besotted therapy patient needs – and she wants to feel like what she does and who she is matters.
When it comes down to it, so do we all, and while her delightful if bonkers brain-damaged dog Curtains is a wonderful companion and she enjoys her job as a veterinary nurse, even if she thinks the role isn’t a good one, she wants more out of life even if she struggles to articulate what that is.
‘Is there no test to see if you’re done? Do I not get a certificate, a patch or a rosette?’
‘No, there’s nothing like that,’ the therapist says, smiling.
And that’s precisely what she gets even if her route to this place of low key therapeutic efficiency isn’t arrived in the bright lights and shining glory Hollywood style we imagine it will.
No, Sylvie’s small but pivotal breakthroughs arrive in a welter of awkward admissions to her therapist, and hatred of her life which she comes to understand is a whole lot better than she will admit.
Like many of us, Sylvie has been conditioned to rigorously assess herself against a barrage of unyielding social constructs and to be found wanting, and to view those weirdly honest truth bombs bouncing around our psyche as some sort of dire existential threat.
When in fact they are the gateways to identifying what has broken us, to dealing with them and to maybe opening our lives in ways we dare not to because all that honesty is horribly so sit and live with and we simply don’t have the tools to do that.
But as Sylvie progresses through her therapy sessions, all too aware you shouldn’t be fixated with your therapist and that wanting to be adopted by her or do away with all her other patients so only she has her therapist’s undivided attention are not the sorts of things that you should actually want or do, you see her beginning to understand what it means to embrace honesty and to use it to build a life that defies all the cruel voices we fold into ourselves.
You will flinch and recoil at times in this charming and brilliantly written book because we don’t like the curtain of unnamed honesty being pulled to one side, but you will love Happiness Forever and Sylvie too as she says the things she “shouldn’t”, admits to the dark and uncomfortable places we routinely avoid and finds that while her therapist as a person is the solution to what ails her, that her willingness to hear Sylvie out, no matter how strange her admissions, is the doorway to a life that finally feels like it might be the one she’s wanted all along.