Happy Never After: Why the Happiness Fairytale is Driving us Mad (and How I Flipped the Script)

Written by Jill Stark

Narrated by Jill Stark

What if all the things you'd been told would make you happy were red herrings?

Jill Stark was living the dream. And then it all fell apart. It forced her to ask if she'd been sold a lie. From the ashes of Jill's epic breakdown and through her own battles with mental-health issues comes this raw, funny, and uplifting exploration of our age of anxiety. Why, she asks, in a western world with more opportunity, choice, and wealth than ever before, are so many of us depressed, anxious, and medicated? When we've never had more ways to connect, why do we feel so profoundly disconnected? And could it be that our relentless pursuit of happiness is making us miserable?

Road-testing neuroscience's latest psychological frontiers in compassion, acceptance, gratitude, play, hope and solitude, Jill turns the happiness fairytale on its head. What would happen if we stopped chasing, stayed still, and found calm and meaning in places we least expected?

“A brilliant intersection between searing personal experience and the wisdom of the elders” HUGH MACKAY, author of The Good Life

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wavesound from W. F. Howes Ltd
• Release date: Aug 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781528841009

Jill Stark

Jill Stark is an award-winning journalist, author, and mental health advocate, with a career spanning more than two decades in both the UK and Australia. She spent ten years on staff at The Age covering health and social affairs as a senior writer and columnist. She now works as a freelance journalist, speechwriter, media consultant, content creator, and public speaker. Her first book, High Sobriety, was longlisted for the Walkley Book award and shortlisted for the Kibble Literary Awards. Her other books, Happy Never After and When You’re Not OK, are mental health memoirs offering hope and connection to anyone doing it tough.