Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life

Publishers Weekly

In her earlier book The Happiness Project, Rubin dedicated each month for a year to a theme (friendship, work, etc.), each accompanied by “a handful of modest resolutions.” In this sequel, spanning September through May, Rubin narrows her focus to strategies “to feel more at home, at home.” A goal for her for September was to glean more happiness from her possessions by arranging and spotlighting meaningful possessions and getting rid of meaningless stuff. Resolving to cultivate a shrine, Rubin transformed areas of her apartment into places of super-engagement such as painting wisteria climbing the walls of her tiny office. In October, Rubin’s thoughts turned to her 16-year marriage, and she started kissing her husband more often, took driving lessons to share motoring responsibility, began thanking him for tackling chores, and focused on being cheerfully accommodating. Other months concentrated on parenting, time management, body-related resolutions, parents and siblings, and neighborhood. Although it lacks the freshness and originality of her earlier book, this perceptive sequel offers elegant musings about the nature of happiness combined with concrete ways to make the place where we sleep, eat, and watch TV truly a home. Illus. Agent: Christy Fletcher, Fletcher & Company. (Sept.)

Kirkus Reviews

A well-meaning but not especially insightful guide to deriving greater satisfaction in life by feeling "more at home, at home." In this sequel to her bestselling The Happiness Project (2009), Rubin explores some of the elements that influence happiness in domestic contexts. After being inexplicably "hit by an intense wave of homesickness" in the well-ordered world of her New York apartment, she created a plan to examine the concepts she saw as inextricably linked to her own personal satisfaction. "I took my circumstances for granted," she writes. "[I] wanted to appreciate my life more, and to live up to it better." Rubin began her learning project in September, just as her children were going back to school. She first took account of her possessions and the relationship she had to them and discovered that her material happiness came from wanting what she had rather than making efforts to have more or less. Rubin reached similarly mundane conclusions about other concepts in the months that followed. Marriage, family and parenthood took work, and time management was as essential as determining how to most meaningfully use it. Taking care of herself and feeling good were important because how she behaved influenced the happiness of those around her, and staying mindful of the present was the key to appreciating just "how fleeting [and] how precious" her seemingly ordinary days actually were. Rubin's aim is clearly to help people enhance their relationship to all things domestic, but the portrait of her privileged, relatively trouble-free home, along with the earnestness with which she speaks of being a "moral essayist" interested in delineating "the practice of everyday life," make her look out of touch. Read Samuel Johnson instead.

Publishers Weekly

In her sophomore effort, Rubin (The Happiness Project) narrows in on a single element of happiness: the home. Whether it's decluttering her apartment, falling in love with fragrance, or trying to better manage her time, she wants to discover what it is that makes her happiest in her favorite place. In this audio production, veteran narrator Käthe Mazur's performance is competent but uninspired. Mazur's narration is soft and elegant, which does justice to the many historic quotations and the scientific research that Rubin did for this book. However, it is also slow and almost wholly lacking the indomitable cheer that characterizes Rubin's writing. Mazur does come to life in the more humorous parts of the book, which helps to break up the plodding nature of her performance. The narrator also does a marvelous job with various French names and phrases, and offers strong vocal interpretations of some of the memoir's supporting characters, such as Rubin's two young daughters. Overall, however, the listener may wonder why Rubin-who briefly introduces and wraps up the audiobook in her own voice-didn't perform the whole thing. A Crown Archetype hardcover.