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This Is Happy
This Is Happy | Camilla Gibb
5 posts | 4 read | 2 to read
'"All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them, ' Isak Dinesen once said. Sorrows are all pain otherwise, pain without sense or meaning. But joys, too, it seems to me, need their context. And sometimes their coexistence needs to be borne. The coexistence or possibility of the opposite can be what gives an experience its meaning. At its simplest, that is a story." --Camilla Gibb, "This Is Happy" In this profoundly moving memoir, Camilla Gibb, the award-winning, bestselling author of "Sweetness in the Belly" and "The Beauty of Humanity Movement," reveals the intensity of the grief that besieged her as the happiness of a longed for family shattered. Grief that lived in a potent mix with the solace that arose with the creation of another, most unexpected family. A family constituted by a small cast of resilient souls, adults broken in the way many of us are, united in love for a child. Reflecting on tangled moments of past sadness and joy, alienation and belonging, Gibb revisits her stories now in relation to the happy daughter who will inherit them, and she finds there new meaning and beauty. Raw and unflinching, intelligent and humane, "This Is Happy" asks the big questions and finds answers in the tender moments of the everyday.
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quote
Citra182
This Is Happy | Camilla Gibb

You can let go only when your sense of self, your cohesion, no longer depends upon the idea of them, an idea that remains for a long time inextricable from the very idea of yourself. (Part 2)

quote
Citra182
This Is Happy | Camilla Gibb

In the absence of someone, even someone who has caused you great injury, the very idea of them can still be self-sustaining. You hold on because you are holding on to something that keeps your sense of self intact. You have come to know and understand yourself in relation to this person. (Part 1)

blurb
Citra182
This Is Happy | Camilla Gibb
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First book of 2020 done. I always feel weird “reviewing” a memoir. For me, a memoir is the raw story that someone decides to share - the lows and highs of life, which this book has a LOT of...mostly lows. It is strangely intimate reading someone‘s pain and struggles so openly - finding some moments resound with you while other moments feel so foreign, but experiencing it all the same. It makes me wonder what my happy is and how I got there...

review
Robinsroute
This Is Happy | Camilla Gibb
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Pickpick

For me, this personal story had given me a little moonlight in the darker corners of my shared experiences with the author. From a rocky upbringing to the depths of post-travel depression, reconciliations with family members, to navigating life as a newly single new mother, Gibb bares all of her ugly-cry moments to us, and best of all, she perfectly illustrates her zig-zagged journey to rediscovering what is love, family and ultimately happiness.

blurb
Moonpa
This Is Happy | Camilla Gibb
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"We come to know ourselves only through stories. We listen to the stories of others, we inherit the stories of those who came before, and we make sense of our experiences by constructing a narrative that holds them, and holds us, together. Stories are how we make sense of our lives."