Sophie Hannah - Happiness, a Mystery

HAPPINESS, A Mystery

ALSO BY SOPHIE HANNAH

Culver Valley Series Crime Novels

Little Face

Hurting Distance

The Point of Rescue

The Other Half Lives

A Room Swept White

Lasting Damage

Kind of Cruel

The Carrier

The Telling Error

The Narrow Bed

Standalone Crime/Mystery Novels

The Orphan Choir

A Game For All The Family

Did You See Melody?

Havent They Grown

The Understudy (with Holly Brown, Clare Mackintosh and B. A. Paris)

Hercule Poirot Mysteries

The Monogram Murders

Closed Casket

The Mystery of Three Quarters

The Killings at Kingfisher Hill

Self-Help Books

From Resentment to Contentment How to hold a Grudge: The Power of Grudges to Transform Your Life

& 66 attempts to solve it

Sophie Hannah

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

29 Cloth Fair

London EC1A 7JQ

www.profilebooks.com

Published in association with Wellcome Collection

183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE

Wellcome Collection publishes extraordinary books that explore health, science, life, art and what it means to be human.

Happiness, A Mystery accompanies the season On Happiness at Wellcome Collection, 27 May 11 October 2020.

Copyright Sophie Hannah, 2020

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset in Caslon by James Alexander at Jade Design

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78816 294 4

eISBN 978 1 78283 575 2

For all my Dream Authors,

who have been a joy and an inspiration

Why 66?

I assume you know what Im talking about. Right? Ill give you a minute to work it out.

Welcome back. Hopefully, you just looked again at this books cover and noticed that the title contains the word mystery and the subtitle is and 66 attempts to solve it. Yet in the Contents list, theres a chapter called The 65 Days. And 65 is the number that comes before 66. Is this pure coincidence, or is there a mystery to be solved?

Here is my recommendation: wherever possible, treat anything you can as a mystery. Why? Because mysteries make life better. I love mysteries, including the desperately-craving-an-answer part, more than I love their solutions. Definite answers shut down possibilities, while an unsolved puzzle ignites our imagination and invites us to think, What if it turns out to be something shocking and unguessable that will well and truly blow my mind? Then we start to imagine how exhilarated well feel when we encounter that unimaginable, mind-blowing solution.

I love mysteries so much that I have a tendency to invent them where they dont exist. Ive done this since childhood. Age seven, on a family holiday in Lytham St Annes, I saw two cars driving along a road, one behind the other. I wonder why that second car is chasing the first one, I said to my parents.

They explained that there was no mystery; the two cars had nothing to do with each other. I refused to accept this hypothesis. I wanted and needed a better story.

Im not going to dwell on The Two-Cars Mystery, because I never solved it and never will not unless I go to Lytham St Annes to investigate, and I refuse on principle ever to go there again. (It was supposed to be a seaside holiday, and guess what? The sea was not there like, at all for the whole time that we were. Where was it? I dont know: another mystery. There was a beach, and there were slightly damp mudflats stretching as far as the eye could see, but there was no sea for me to swim in. I was too young to understand about tides, and Im glad I didnt. I wouldnt have approved.)

If solved and never-to-be-solved mysteries are equally disappointing, its clear what the ideal is: a puzzle that makes you want to hunt for its solution, happy in the knowledge that theres a fair chance of success.

Im delighted to be able to present you with that very thing. Id like to invite you to be my sidekick as I investigate the mystery of happiness. I should probably say mysteries, plural. What is happiness? How does one pursue and/or achieve it? Where is it to be found, and with whom?

If you noticed the 65/66 discrepancy before I drew it to your attention, well done. You are perfect sidekick material. If you didnt, do not be disheartened theres another significant clue in this introduction and you might notice that instead. If you havent already, dont give up. (NB: There is no limit to how often you can read a books introduction before proceeding to .)

Lets do a feasibility study before we start our investigation. Is the puzzle of happiness definitely solvable? Isnt it, rather, something that people have opinions about, with no right answer? Well, if happiness is real, then it must be possible to define it and to suggest ways to increase our chances of achieving it if we want to.

All right, you might say, but thats equally true of love or any other human experience. Or pies. Some people think a pie must have pastry covering its entire surface area in order to qualify for the description, while others believe that a stew in a dish with a pastry topping can legitimately be called a pie. (Those crazy fools! I bet theyre the same people who book seaside holidays without any sea.) So, why not investigate pies, or the meaning of love? Why happiness?

I was drawn to this specific mystery by my own personal happiness-related dilemma. Thats also what led me to have my first ever one-to-one session with a life coach, and Im going to invite you to be a fly on the wall at that session in a moment, so that you can experience the beginning of the mystery in the most authentic way possible. After all, as any fan of the detective fiction genre knows, the main detective, the sidekick and the reader must all have equal access to the clues at all times. In this case, youre the sidekick and the reader, and I dont want to hear any complaints about that being too much work, okay?

Good. Im glad we agree. Lets proceed to my first (but by no means last) session with a life coach, which contained a revelation so startling that it called into question my whole belief system about how the world works.