This book is many things, it is philosophy, memoir, general life advice and musings on a life well lived. It’s unusual in its structure in that it is not a straight-line narrative in which ideas build on each other. Rosen does not have a theory of happiness or a five-step plan to a happier life.
While the word is in the title, he doesn't really talk about happiness in the narrative. He's thinking less in terms of how to be happy and more in terms of what we can do to have a good day.
He acknowledges that we're living in a time when life is hard in many ways, and that a lot of us are struggling. So, it’s easier to think about ways both small and significant to have a good day than to think in terms of a whole happy life. After all, if we manage to have enough good days that will add up to a mostly happy life.
Rosen comes at this from a personal perspective, writing about the things that he does, in order to have a good day. The same things might not work for someone else, but as he says in the introduction, we can use his ideas as blueprints, something to spark inspiration as we find our own way to bringing a bit of lightness, laughter and delight into our lives.
This book is organised alphabetically. Rosen chooses a word or a phrase for each letter of the alphabet and builds off of that, often sharing anecdotes from his life as a way to illustrate his point.
Some of these anecdotes are funny, as with C for camping where he writes about his parents taking him and his brother camping when they were kids. It was nearly always raining, and he and his brother never saw the point of it, but their parents would bring such enthusiasm to the whole endeavour that they couldn't help but humour them. This entire section is hilarious and it's something that a lot of people will see themselves in.
Some of the stuff he shares in the book is painful and poignant like his grief over the death of one his sons who got meningitis and died at the age of 19. This is something that happened twenty-five years before this book was written. Michael Rosen is now in his seventies. But the grief and the sense of loss are still very much there. He writes about his many attempts to make sense of what happened, his pain and his anger, and then his acceptance.
The structure of the book leads the author to go from one subject to another somewhat randomly, so it's a great book to dip in and out of. While the narrative flits from subject to subject, there's an underlying structure that makes it read like a meandering conversation with a close friend. There's a lot here to stop and think about, a lot to laugh at and a lot to empathise with. This book made a real difference to me.