"Diane Mehta's Happier Far is a funny, profound, and engrossing journey from her childhood in India and New Jersey to life as a single parent and artist in Brooklyn. She documents as she goes, the many ways that the story of a life is in the journey. Mehta is a beautifully lyrical writer with an associative mind that wanders and resolves, and she writes in a frequency entirely her own. She believes that all topics are fair game, and she interrogates what's around her while always turning the lens back on herself. She is propulsive and hilarious in her letters to animals, and profound and moving in meditations on the dead, chronic pain, migraines, being immigrant with mixed-race Jewish-Jain parents, Beethoven, swimming, chanting, and coping with the demands of love, marriage, divorce, parenting, and being an artist. She loosens pathos with humor and writes ravishing sentences that stop you in your tracks. She is an original and feisty voice who telescopes the ways that you don't have to fit in to be "happier far.""--