Happier at Home by Gretchen RubinCrown Archetype, 2012

I read and liked Rubin’s previous book, The Happiness Project, in 2010; in a lot of ways, this book is more of the same. Like that book, this one is organized by month, and each month has a theme. (This time around, Rubin sticks with the school year instead of the calendar year, so there are nine months and nine themes: Possessions, Marriage, Parenthood, Interior Design (that one’s about the self, not about furniture), Time, Body, Family, Neighborhood, and Now.) Within each month, Rubin talks about specific resolutions she has made related to the month’s theme, and talks about how those resolutions do or don’t work for her, and how they do or don’t contribute to her happiness. The book’s subtitle is “Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life,” and for me, that last bit is what’s appealing : the “practice of everyday life.”

In this book, Rubin explores the things she can do in and around her home to make it what she wants it to be. “My home should calm me and energize me,” she writes (8). “It should be a comforting, quiet refuge and a place of excitement and possibility.” (ibid.) She talks about wanting to feel “engaged with” her possessions: not necessarily getting more stuff, or getting rid of stuff, but knowing/using/appreciating what she has (28). Relationship-wise, she write about wanting “more appreciation, more tenderness, more cooperation, more fun” with her husband (67). She writes about needing to remind herself to “choose the bigger life” rather than sticking with what she already does/knows (79). (Relatedly, she talks about the “feelings of ineptitude and anxiety” she gets when doing something she doesn’t feel good at: “In every area of my life, I dislike the feeling of uncertainty or unfamiliarity. I love mastery” (81). Yeah, I relate to that.) She talks about filling her days with things she loves, and about appreciating her routines: “The things I do every day,” she writes, “take on a certain beauty and provide a kind of invisible architecture to my life” (146-147).

All of this is fine, but I think I would have liked a book that had more about home as a place/idea, and less about family/relationships. My favorite bits of the book are when Rubin writes about wanting to pay more attention to the sense of smell, and when she writes about seeing Charles Simonds’s “Dwellings” at the Whitney and a) deciding she wants a miniature landscape in her home and b) realizing she has long had a fondness for miniatures, which she somehow hadn’t articulated to herself yet. I think Rubin’s enthusiasms come through strongest in these sections—or maybe these are just the enthusiasms that resonated most to me.