Secrets to Happiness
Sarah Dunn, 2009
Little, Brown & Company
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316013604
Summary
Holly Frick has just endured the worst kind of breakup: the kind where you're still in love with the person leaving you. While her wounds are still dangerously close to the surface, her happily married best friend confesses over a bottle of wine that she is this close to having an affair. And another woman comes to Holly for advice about her love life—with Holly's ex!
Holly decides that if everyone around her can take pleasure wherever they find it, so will she. As any self-respecting 30ish New York woman would do, she brings two males into her life: a flawed but endearing dog, and a good natured, much younger lover. She's soon entangled in a web of emails, chance meetings, and misguided good intentions and must forge an entirely new path to Nirvana.
From the author of The Big Love, Secrets to Happiness is a big-hearted, knife-sharp, and hilariously entertaining story about the perils of love and friendship, sex and betrayal—and a thoroughly modern take on our struggle to be happy. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 28, 1969
• Where—Phoenix, Arizona, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Pennsylvania
• Currently—lives in Garrison, New York
Sarah Dunn an American author and television writer. She is known for the ABC sitcom American Housewife (starring Katy Mixon), as well as for her novels, The Big Love (2004), Secrets to Happiness (2009), and The Arrangement (2017). Her books have been translated into 19 different languages.
Born in Phoenix, Arizona, Dunn headed east to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated magna cum laude as an English major. She remained in Philadelphia after college, writing a humor column for the Philadelphia City Paper and waiting tables at TGI Fridays. A few years later, at the age of 24, Dunn published The Official Slacker Handbook, and was subsequently lured out to Hollywood to write for Murphy Brown, Spin City, Veronica’s Closet and Bunheads. With Spin City co-creator Bill Lawrence, Dunn penned Michael J. Fox's final episode of the series.
On her (now defunct) website, Dunn claimed to have moved from Los Angeles to New York five times, and from New York back to Los Angeles four times, which means she is still living in New York …or, as of this writing, in the state of New York. In 2007, Dunn married former New York Observer executive editor Peter Stevenson, and the couple lives in Garrison, New York, with their children.
Dunn is a member of the all-female television writer group "The Ladies Room," which also includes Vanessa McCarthy, Stephanie Birkitt, and Julie Bean. The group was founded in July 2016. (Adapted from various online sources.)
Book Reviews
In the end, what makes Dunn's novel such a pleasure to read is the very thing that keeps it from being a breathless page-turner: Holly's singular spirituality. She may be as baffled as everyone else about how to achieve happiness, but she also knows that happiness isn't all it's cracked up to be. In a world—fictional and non- —where doing a good thing gets you accused of having a messiah complex, and doing whatever you want is justified as following your path, Holly never stops trying to figure out where her duty lies. Underneath it all—the sex, the shopping, the city—she's an old-fashioned heroine. Also funny.
Jincy Willett - New York Times
Sarah Dunn's Secrets to Happiness zips along hilariously, fueled by pitch-perfect dialogue…[It] is an antic urban comedy, with enough neurotic characters to fill the cast of a Woody Allen movie. It's great fun.
Boston Globe
The hapless protagonist of this topical novel is such a clever observer of modern life, offering a wealth of Exacto-sharp theories that echo sentiments we may feel but would hesitate to express.... Charming and approaching Tina-Fey funny, Dunn, whose first novel was The Big Love (no connection to the HBO series), combines crackling dialogue and absurdly real-feeling scenarios to create a big-city smart, yet universally appealing, little gem.
People
Secrets to Happiness is smart, bitingly funny, laced with sitcom-sharp dialogue and bittersweet. Far from a confectionary tale, it reads more like a spiritual journey, one that follows Holly and a cast of supporting characters as they try to turn their lives around.... But since this is not a chick-lit book, a guy is not the answer here. For Holly and her supporting cast, the secret to happiness is embracing the fact that, as one character states, it's O.K. to live an ordinary life. This means accepting a life they would have otherwise shunned.
New York Observer
Dunn charts several New Yorkers' lives in this snappy novel. The spotlight most often falls on Holly Frick, a 35-year-old divorcée whose egg walls "are taking on the consistency of tissue paper as we speak." A writer whose cheeky first novel bombed, Holly now resides low enough on the TV totem pole to be cranking out after-school dreck with her gay pal Leonard. Meanwhile, her best friend, Amanda, is cheating on her husband, and Holly adopts Chester, a cute little dog with cancer whose hopeful approach to life mirrors Holly's. While Holly's love life follows a formula-familiar trajectory, Amanda's romantic flailing ensnares Holly, and Chester's destiny takes an unexpected turn that means big changes for both of them. Although cliches pop up (the supergay friend, a $1,200 purse splurge), the energetic and witty prose speeds along the narrative. It's smarter than the usual single-in-the-city fare, and funnier, too.
Publishers Weekly
Like Dunn's heroine in her debut, The Big Love, Holly Frick is brokenhearted and looking for happiness against the backdrop of hectic New York City. Holly believes in doing the right thing. Whether it's a result of her evangelical Christian upbringing or just a generally overactive conscience, the "right thing" includes adopting a dog with a brain tumor and meeting her married friend's paramour because her friend thinks they'll like each other. The assorted cast of supporting characters includes a 22-year-old lover, a skinny girl who finally agrees to date the overweight guy from her gym, and a gay man who has an unhealthy relationship with his attention deficit disorder meds. These characters circle around Holly in an exploration of six degrees of separation as she touches each of them—and they her—in their quests for happiness. Readers of Dunn's previous novel and fans of Jennifer Weiner and Jane Green will enjoy the sophisticated tone of this classic searching-for-love story. Recommended for popular fiction collections.
Anika Fajardo - Library Journal
Holly Frick is smart and sassy, loyal and dedicated. All the qualities a woman could want in a girlfriend, but not the ones that seem to resonate with men, if her roster of failed relationships is any indicator. There’s her ex-husband, Alex, with whom she’s still in love; her ex-boyfriend, Spence, a womanizing creep whom Holly scathingly immortalized in her first novel; and Lucas, a 22-year-old boy-toy who, for all his playful sexuality, ultimately makes Holly feel like a cradle-robbing matron. But then she meets Jack, an opinionated Buddhist who is having an affair with her married best friend; and even though Holly takes an immediate dislike to him, she has to admit there’s something undeniable lurking just beneath the surface. Dunn displays a rapier wit; a perfectly nuanced gift for savvy, sophisticated dialogue; and an endearing moral compass, which she uses to great advantage as she blithely navigates the fraught and fatuous world of trendy New York’s treacherous dating scene.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Secrets to Happiness:
1. Reviewers note the humor in Dunn's novel, a good place to begin. What do you find funny about her book—about Holly's life, her cast of friends, and her perceptions?
2. Consider the genre referred to as "Chick Lit"—a term Holly finds objectionable. Why? What, if anything, distinguishes chick lit from all "fiction by and for women"? Does Secrets to Happiness itself fall into the chick lit category? Check out the LitLovers blog post, Chick Lit—Enough Gum to Chew On? You might also take a look at this post: Venus & Mars—Do We Write Differently Too?
3. All the novel's characters, including Holly, are searching for happiness. How do they define happiness, what are their expectations, and what eventually do they come to realize? For Holly what in particular is learned—and how does Chester help her along her path?
4. More than most of her friends, Holly seems grounded in morality—trying to doing what is right. Where does her moral compass come from—and how is it tested by her friends and her life in general? In life, just how difficult is it for any of us to stay on the straight-and-narrow ... (or is it "straightened arrow")?
5. What's with Jack? Or any of the males in this novel...Alex, Spence, Lucas?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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