H

HANGOVER

Your forehead is a stage, thudding with the beat of thirty drummers. Your tongue is a piece of cooked bacon that’s been sitting in the fridge for a week. And your mind is a washing machine on a fast spin cycle, with shreds of the events of last night whapping against the sides, revealing their colors for a brief, ghastly moment before sinking back into the foamy suds.

Yes, you have a hangover.

You get out of bed, or off the sofa, or wherever it was you passed out. You stumble toward the sink and fill a glass with cold water. You tip back your head (ouch!) and begin to gulp, the lovely cool liquid bringing back to life the . . . oh, God. That’s when you remember. Worse than the pounding head. Worse than the confusion. The memory. Of what. Exactly. It was. You did. Last night.

At this point, reach for The Little White Car by Danuta de Rhodes. Because whatever it was you did, it wasn’t as bad as what Veronique did, the spoiled twenty-two-year-old Parisian girl who emerged from her hangover to realize, with a plunge into a new ice age . . . Well, you’ll have to read it and see.

Call in sick, then go back to bed. There you will read—in big, fat type that won’t challenge your eyes and straightforward prose that won’t befuddle your head—a lesson in how much worse it could have been.

Go on, indulge.*

See also: Anxiety • Bed, inability to get out of • Headache • Lethargy • Nausea • Pain, being in • Paranoia • Sweating

HAPPINESS, SEARCHING FOR

Happiness: the ultimate goal in life. Or is it? Many of us spend our lives searching for this transitory state in love, work, travel, and home life. As images of material wealth and blissful lifestyles taunt us from advertisements and television screens, we often feel like we just can’t get enough—not enough luck, romance, possessions, or free time. It’s a modern malaise. Or is it? Didn’t Dickens’s Fagin think he deserved a bigger piece of (someone else’s) meat pie? Didn’t Voltaire’s Candide demonstrate the folly of thinking that “the best is yet to be”? And long before, then, weren’t Milton’s Adam and Eve told they’d be “happiest if ye seek no happier state”—advice that they, being human, ignored? Start raising your personal requirements for what it takes to be “happy” and you will open yourself up to all kinds of misery.

We’re with Eastern philosophy on this one: the relentless pursuit of happiness is an ailment, and must be cured. Ray Bradbury knew this too. His prescient Fahrenheit 451, first published in 1953, came very close to showing us life as we now know it. In his dystopian future, nobody reads novels anymore. At first this is because people want their fiction in smaller and smaller doses, not having the attention span or patience to read a whole book. (Sound familiar? See: Give up halfway through, tendency to.) Then they start to think that books are their enemy, irresponsibly presenting different views and states of mind. Surely they’d all be happier living in an emotionless no-man’s-land with no strong feelings at all?

To counteract their emotional void, deprived of culture and deep thought as they are, people begin to live faster and faster, racing around the city at breakneck speeds—and killing whatever gets in their way. They almost never see their children, who go to school nine days out of ten. Having kids is a waste of time anyway; the women prefer to stay at home watching an endless interactive soap called The Family—the fate of which becomes more important to them than their own. (Brilliant as he was, Bradbury didn’t quite make the leap into a time when women might want to work too.) Doped by these sagas, they go to bed with “shells” in their ears transmitting junky newsfeeds and more meaningless dramas all night long. Sleeping pills are popped like candy. Suicide is common, and attracts little remark.

When Montag, a fireman whose job it is to burn illegal books—and sometimes the people reading them too—meets a teenage girl who takes the time to look at the stars, smell the grass, and question the dandelions about love, he realizes that he is not as happy in his emotionally neutered state as he thought he was. He begins to wake up to a world of beauty and feeling, and wonders what the books that he burns might contain. One night he reads Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” to his wife’s guests, interrupting an episode of The Family to do so, and the result of his reading is uncontrollable weeping and heartbreak: “Poetry and tears, poetry and suicide and crying and awful feelings, poetry and sickness; all that mush!” one distraught listener cries. Montag is forced to burn his own books—and his house with them—but he holds on to the belief that a future without the wisdom of books is an unbearable one. He would rather feel and suffer than live the comatose life that “civilization” considers the route to happiness.

Live to the full not by seeking happiness, but by embracing knowledge, literature, truth, and feeling of every sort. And in case Bradbury’s vision becomes a reality, consider learning a novel by heart, as Montag does. You never know when you might need to pass it on to the rest of humanity.

See also: Dissatisfaction • Mr./Mrs. Right, looking for

HATRED

Hate is like a poisonous plant. Allow it to take root inside you and it will gradually consume you from within, contaminating everything you touch. Whether you hate another person, other drivers, semolina, hipster bloggers, or reality TV, it doesn’t make much difference. Neither does it make it any better if the hate is justified and understandable, such as hating someone who has done you a grievous harm. The fact that you are nurturing this violent emotion in your heart will ultimately be a violence against yourself.*

In The River Between, Ngugi wa Thiong’o shows very clearly how hatred can set in between two factions with opposed religious, political, or philosophical beliefs. Those consumed by hate would do well to read this fablelike retelling of Romeo and Juliet. As you read, ask yourself if you, too, are clinging too rigidly to a set of beliefs.

On either side of the river Honia (meaning “cure”) lie two ridges. On one is the village of Kameno, and on the other Makuyu. Here the Gikuyu people of Kenya live undisturbed—until the white man arrives with his “clothes like butterflies,” new ways, and new religion. Joshua, an elder of Kameno, is the first convert to Christianity. Soon he has the villagers turning away from their tribal customs. Trouble hits when his daughter Muthoni decides that she wants to be initiated into womanhood in the traditional “beautiful” way—circumcision—and dies following the procedure. She rapidly becomes a symbol for everything deemed barbaric and pagan about the old Gikuyu ways. The two villages pit themselves against each other, the old ways against the new. And when Waiyaki from Makuyu, with his beautiful “kinking” hair and eyes that “blaze,” falls in love with Nyambura, Joshua’s remaining daughter, the people are given a focus for their hate. This shared hatred gains momentum in the same way a herd of bullocks running downhill gains speed, and in the way of things that have lost control, it heads only one way: to mayhem and destruction.

Don’t let yourself get swept up mindlessly by hate in this way. Instead, allow yourself to be lulled by Thiong’o’s poetic, expansive prose, the importance he places on the land, and the concept of love as a guiding principle. Don’t be a zealot. See things from another’s point of view. Be open to compromise and embrace difference. This way you can turn your hate into love.

If letting go of hatred is just too hard, read George Orwell’s 1984. Start by studying “Hate Week”—seven days dedicated to rousing processions, speeches, banners, and films intended to whip the masses into a frenzy of hatred for the state’s number one enemy, Eurasia. By day six, the crowd is in such a maddened delirium of hatred that if they could get their hands on individual Eurasians they’d tear them to pieces. But then, suddenly, the object of hatred is switched. Word goes around that the enemy is no longer Eurasia. It’s Eastasia. Hurriedly, posters are ripped off walls, banners are trampled underfoot. The crowd barely misses a beat. Within a few moments, the “feral roars of rage” have been redirected to the Eastasians instead.

The apparent ease of this refocusing certainly gives one pause for thought. Does the feeling of hate have anything to do with the object of hate at all? Does it not perhaps have more to do with a determination to find any object on which to unleash one’s ire? If this resonates, it’s time to take a break from your hatred, and take a long, hard look within yourself.

See also: Anger • Bitterness • Judgmental, being • Murderous thoughts • Rage

HAUNTED, BEING

If you count yourself among the haunted, one of your problems will be getting others to take your tales of the haunting seriously. So give them The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. Set in Eel Marsh House, a lonely abode that is cut off by the tide twice a day, this novel recounts the story of Arthur Kipps, the solicitor called in to clear up the estate of the house’s recently deceased mistress. He has no idea what the extremely bitter spirits that haunt the place have in store for him—especially one particular ghost, a woman dressed all in black. The story cannot fail to send multiple chills down your spine, and while doing nothing to cure you of your own haunting, it will persuade your friends to listen to you a bit more closely.

For you, we prescribe Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved. Sethe is an ex-slave living with her teenage daughter Denver—and the ghost of her dead baby. They have grown used to the presence of the spiteful spirit, which shatters mirrors, makes baby handprints in the icing of birthday cakes, and creates puddles of red misery in the doorway that visitors must wade through to come inside. Indeed, most people give the house and its occupants a wide berth. But when Sethe’s old friend Paul D reappears after eighteen years, the ghost seems to go quiet. Until, that is, it returns in human form.

Beloved walks out of the river as a fully clothed adult. She spends a few days summoning up the energy to open her eyelids while her dress dries and her perfectly unlined skin grows accustomed to the sun. Her voice is peculiarly low, she is eternally thirsty, and she seems to possess superhuman strength, able to pick up her older sister with one hand. But Beloved is not a positive force. She drinks in her mother’s love like the milk she never had enough of. She pushes Paul away from Sethe while forcing him, against his better judgment and desire, to “touch her on the inside part.” She gorges on life like a blowfly. We know this cannot last. Sethe has within her the means to placate Beloved, but first she has a difficult truth to acknowledge to herself.

Hauntees, take heart. Whatever haunts you cannot only be faced, but spoken to, negotiated with, even loved. If your ghost wants to come and live with you for a while, spend all your money, and drive your loved ones away, so be it. Once it’s got over itself, you can send it back to where it belongs.

See also: Demons, facing your

HAY FEVER

Hay fever can ruin entire summers. When the itchy eyes, streaming nose, tight chest, and difficulty breathing get too bad, you long to plunge into a cool, clear pool—somewhere no pollen can reach you. Or, even better, to hitch a ride in a submarine and go live at the bottom of the ocean. Perhaps it was hay fever that drew Captain Nemo, the mysterious nautical traveler of the most famous of Verne’s novels, to his peculiar underwater existence. The misanthropic captain shrugged off “that intolerable earthly yoke” and took to living in a “sea unicorn of colossal dimensions” (which naval observers at first took to be a giant narwhal), shunning everyone and everything apart from the sea creatures he studies (see also: Misanthropy). His ship, Nautilus, travels at incredible speeds and is capable of scientific wonders far beyond the technological know-how reached on land, since Nemo is both explorer and inventor. He dines off sea cucumber preserves that he believes even a Malaysian would declare to be unrivaled, sugar from the North Sea fucus plants, and marmalade of sea anemone. Nemo is not shy about his success as an underwater despot, calling himself “The Man of the Waters, the Spirit of the Seas,” recognizing no superiors, and confident that he could pay off the ten-billion-franc national debt using the treasures he has found beneath the waves.

Whenever those pesky pollen motes threaten to invade your head, grab Jules Verne and escape to the airlessness of Captain Nemo’s underwater kingdom. You never know—it might inspire you to strap an oxygen tank to your back and take to the depths yourself.

HEADACHE

Snow falls; flame-hair Snow steps light through air.

Bed of ice. Resting blind.

Mind pure.

See also: Pain, being in

HEMORRHOIDS

If you suffer from hemorrhoids, it’s unremitting agony. And we all know about those medical cures. Tie an elastic band around them till they drop off. Freeze them off. Have them amputated. Stuff them back into your arse. Ignore them. Walk around wanting to shove a cactus up your bum. Have colonic irrigation.

A more gentle cure is to read Iain Sinclair’s novel Downriver. In twelve interwoven tales, stretching from the tragic sinking in the Thames of the Princess Alice in 1878, when 640 people drowned, to a near future in which the Thatcherite-style government policies of the “Widow” have inexorably destroyed life along London’s river, Sinclair’s enigmatic narrator takes us on a waterside tour. He travels mainly by foot—for Sinclair is the “walking author,” renowned like Dickens for his London perambulations—and in the company of a motley collection of friends: actors, secondhand book dealers, tour guides. We visit a world of criminals and vagrants obsessed with the occult—a London that most of us know little about. His prose is dense and witty, sending your imagination ahead of your feet. Play it as an audiobook and walk as you listen. You’ll be so well entertained that your mind will be taken off your bottom.

HICCUPS

Nobody knows what causes them, but we all have our own favorite method of curing them. John, the narrator of Philip Hensher’s The Fit (in which a hiccup is designated by a “!”), has the hiccups for an entire month—starting the morning his wife, Janet, unexpectedly walks out. He tries a litany of cures, from the classic (drinking a glass of water backward, holding his breath, drinking champagne) to the not so classic (smoking a cigarette, being tickled, kissing, snorting cocaine). Several shocks occur, quite by chance—including a German man with three rucksacks who turns up on his doorstep and announces he’s in love with him. None of it works.

But then, finally, something does. You’ll have to read to the end to find out what, but suffice it to say that, as with most literary afflictions, psychology has a lot to do with both cause and cure. And if this novel doesn’t do the trick, we suggest you administer a short, sharp literary shock—the best of which are waiting to jump out at you from the pages of the novels below.

THE TEN BEST SHOCKING NOVELS

Guaranteed to deliver an ice cube down your back, these novels either accumulate shock as they go or pack a punch on a particular page. We’re not telling which.

Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES

The Hunger Games SUZANNE COLLINS

Gone Girl GILLIAN FLYNN

Schindler’s Ark THOMAS KENEALLY

The Painted Bird JERZY KOSINSKI

In One Person JOHN IRVING

Rosemary’s Baby IRA LEVIN

The White Hotel D. M. THOMAS

Anna Karenina LEO TOLSTOY

Legend of a Suicide DAVID VANN

HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE

Known to reduce anxiety, reading is a great habit to acquire if you’ve got high blood pressure—especially if you do it with a small furry animal curled up on your knee. Be careful what you choose, though—something too racy or nail-biting, and you’ll be pumping the blood even harder than before. To slow you down, reduce anxiety, and encourage you to live in the moment, take your pick from our list of calming reads—novels that do not rush toward their resolutions, but luxuriate in nonevent and the virtues of the placid life. What they lack in pace they more than make up for in beauty and their ability to promote reflection.

See also: Stress • Workaholism

THE TEN BEST NOVELS TO LOWER YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE

The Mezzanine NICHOLSON BAKER

A Closed Eye ANITA BROOKNER

The City of Your Final Destination PETER CAMERON

Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto MAILE CHAPMAN

The Hours MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

The Remains of the Day KAZUO ISHIGURO

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter CARSON MCCULLERS

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society MARY ANN SHAFFER AND ANNIE BARROWS

Crossing to Safety WALLACE STEGNER

The Waves VIRGINIA WOOLF

HOMELESSNESS

If you’re a vagabond at heart—or in reality—homelessness may at first have some appeal. Without being tied down to one particular place, you’re free to go where the wind blows you; without rent or bills to pay, you can spend your time in non-laboring ways. But whatever its cause, the state of homelessness becomes exhausting after a while. Whether you are constantly on the road, living in a makeshift tepee exposed to the elements, or endeavoring to adapt to the habits of other people kind enough to take you in, the need for privacy, independence, and rootedness becomes impossible to ignore in the end.

For twelve-year-old Ann in Mona Simpson’s spirited novel Anywhere But Here, homelessness brings with it a constant state of anxiety. After three short years of marriage, her mother, Adele, decides it’s time to move on, and drives them both from Wisconsin to California on her abandoned husband’s credit card—ostensibly so that Ann can “be a child star while [she is] still a child,” but actually because being on the move is all Adele knows how to do. While they’re waiting for their car to be fixed in Scottsdale, Arizona, Adele asks a real estate agent to show them a house. For a moment, Ann allows herself to believe her mother is serious, that this might be the place she can, at last, make her home. She starts to “breathe slower.” But before she knows it they’re back on the road again.

Ann understands far better than her mother that to develop and explore in normal adolescent ways, she needs stability and routine. If you spend all your energy looking for somewhere to sleep every night, how can you have energy for anything else?

Perhaps the answer is to build yourself a house. If you’ve got a big enough book collection, you could steal an idea from Carlos María Domínguez’s novel The House of Paper. This delightful book about books begins at the scene of an accident: the narrator’s friend Bluma has been hit by a car while engrossed in a volume of Emily Dickinson poems. While debate rages as to whether Bluma was killed by a car or by a poem, the narrator receives a mysterious parcel. Inside is a book encased in cement. It turns out to be a Joseph Conrad novel from the collection of an obsessive bibliophile named Carlos Brauer, who has lost his mind in the interstices between reality and fiction. (Beware his fate, readers—see: Read instead of live, tendency to.) Obsessed with the preservation of his twenty-thousand-strong collection, he decides to encase them in cement and build a book house.* Which all goes well—until he needs to find one of his books.

If you don’t have enough books for such do-it-yourself measures, acquire A House for Mr Biswas by V. S. Naipaul instead. Set in the rich cultural melting pot of 1940s Trinidad, the story follows the young Mohun Biswas from cradle to grave as he searches for a place of his own. Biswas comes from a “family of nobodies,” with no reason to hope for anything better than a life as an odd-job man. When, more by accident than design, he finds himself marrying into the vast and successful Hindi Tulsis family, he’s guaranteed a roof over his head for the rest of his life. But in return, he has to contend with an entire extended network of in-laws at Hanuman House. Yet too sensitive to hold his own, he finds himself yearning for privacy and solitude.

Mr. Biswas gets his house in the end. His checkered journey will give you courage, and faith, that you too can find a roof of your own.

HOMESICKNESS

It’s hard enough being homesick when you’re away from home only temporarily. But what do you do when homesickness is your permanent state, and your native land lies at an enduring remove across the ocean?

Jhumpa Lahiri, born in England to Indian parents but raised in the United States, and Monica Ali, born in Bangladesh but raised in England, have written sensitive books dealing with this global longing. In Lahiri’s The Namesake, the Ganguli family are the only Bengalis in their university town outside Boston. Being a foreigner, Mrs. Ganguli reflects, is “a sort of lifelong pregnancy—a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding.” Her children will grow up to become unquestioningly American, but Mrs. Ganguli will always retain her hyphen.

In Ali’s Brick Lane, Nazneen has left her village in Bangladesh for an arranged marriage in London to Chanu, an older Bangladeshi man with “a face like a frog.” Though she misses her sister and her native land, Nazneen accepts her fate, having believed since childhood that “since nothing could be changed, everything had to be borne.” But she doesn’t find London terribly hard to bear; she adjusts, gives birth to two daughters, and gets used to her gossipy immigrant neighborhood. Only when Nazneen falls in love with a stranger does she think of returning to Bangladesh; and that is not because she wants to go “home”—she intuitively knows that “where she wanted to go was not a different place but a different time.” Rather, she wants to escape the tumult of the love affair. It’s Nazneen’s husband, Chanu, whose nostalgia finally puts him on a plane back to Dhaka. He tells a London friend that Benglalis in England never really belong to their new country: “Their bodies are here but their hearts are back there,” he proclaims. But Nazneen disagrees, and so do her daughters, for them, London is their true home. And that is the cure for homesickness that “Brick Lane” provides; the demostration of how, slowly, organically, even the most unfamiliar surroundings can evolve into the place where you belong. The cure for homesickness, in other words, is time.

See also: Family, coping without • Foreign, being • Loneliness • Lost, being • Yearning, general

HOMOPHOBIA

Once, not so very long ago, homosexuality was seen as an aberration, a perversion, a sickness. Even though gay men and women enjoy greater acceptance and equality than ever before, homophobia is still very much alive—but the tables have turned: homophobia is now the sickness in need of correction. For those still harboring sexual prejudice—whether openly or in the dark recesses of their heart—we implore you to read Maurice, arguably the first modern novel dealing with homosexuality.

It is impossible not to be moved by this story of male love. From the first stirrings in Maurice’s heart when he meets Clive Durham at Cambridge, to his initial refusal—both to himself and to Clive—of that love, any reader will recognize the tender connection and the gentle eroticism of their touch. Ultimately Maurice turns from inward self-loathing to outward fury at a world that won’t allow him, and his deepest emotions, to be “normal.” He finds himself increasingly surrounded by unenlightened, hateful souls—even Clive, who first enabled his love, but who becomes the worst oppressor of them all.

Share Maurice’s sad joy at overcoming his own hypocrisy. Burn with his rage at the society in which he has to live with “the wrong words on his lips and the wrong desires in his heart.” Ache with him at the devastating loneliness he’s left with when Clive finally rejects him in disgust. And be thankful that we no longer live at a time when an author would not dare to publish this novel during his own lifetime. (It was published in 1913, after Forster’s death.)

Maurice does not speak in euphemisms. If you are homophobic, you will have no choice but to confront your fears and prejudices and—hopefully—see that the characters are as human as us all.

See also: Hatred • Judgmental, being

HONEST, BEING TOO

See: Beans, temptation to spill the

HOPE, LOSS OF

We can cope with anything as long as we have hope. If you don’t believe this, it’s time for you to pick up Steinbeck’s classic Of Mice and Men. George and Lennie are itinerant farmhands. They arrive at a new ranch, “work up a stake,” then go to town and blow it all. With no family, no home, nothing more to look forward to in life, they consider their kind to be the “loneliest guys in the world.” Except that they are different—as George keeps telling Lennie. One day, he says, they will hit the jackpot and have enough money to buy themselves a little house and a few acres on which to keep a cow and some chickens and “live off the fatta the lan’.” George loses his faith in this dream eventually, but continues to nurture it in Lennie. He knows life is easier with hope.

See also: Broken dreams • Despair

HORMONAL, BEING

See: Adolescence • Cry, in need of a good • Menopause • PMS • Pregnancy • Teens, being in your • Tired and emotional, being

HOSPITAL, BEING IN THE

When we’re in the hospital, we desire the tender administrations of angels—or an escape to somewhere wild and woolly. Take your pick.

See also: Boredom • Pain, being in

THE TEN BEST NOVELS TO READ IN THE HOSPITAL

ANGELS

Skellig DAVID ALMOND

Good Omens NEIL GAIMAN AND TERRY PRATCHETT

The Vintner’s Luck ELIZABETH KNOX

Mr. Pye MERVYN PEAKE

Gabriel’s Angel MARK RADCLIFFE

ADVENTURES

The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES

The African Queen C. S. FORESTER

The Woman and the Ape PETER HØEG

The Bean Trees BARBARA KINGSOLVER

The Call of the Wild JACK LONDON

READING AILMENT Household chores, distracted by

CURE Create a reading nook

If there isn’t a meal to cook, there’s vacuuming to be done. And if the vacuuming’s done, there’s the bathroom to clean. If the bathroom is clean, there’s the fridge to sort. And if the fridge has been sorted, it’s probably time you went shopping. And when you come back, there’ll be the laundry, the beds, the car washing, the garden, the recycling, the trash, and all the other myriad tasks that living in a house demands. What hope is there for one dreaming of a precious hour tucked away with a book?

Create a cozy reading nook—a dedicated space where you go to read. This should be in a small and enclosed corner of your house or garden—an alcove, a study, behind the curtains in a large bay window. The important thing is that when you are nestled inside it, you cannot see anything that needs your attention.

Make your nook deliciously warm and inviting. If you like to curl up on the floor, fill it with cushions and a furry rug. If you prefer to stretch out, treat yourself to an elegant chaise longue. You’ll need good lighting in your nook, a soft blanket, socks or slippers, and a flat surface on which to put some books, your reading journal, a pencil, and a cup of tea. Keep earplugs in there, and a set of headphones for audiobooks. Hang a sign at the entrance to your nook gently dissuading others from visiting—unless they, too, want to crawl inside and read.

Once inside your nook, forget about the chores. Take your hour with your book. With luck, someone might see you in there and do the chores instead.

HOUSEWIFE, BEING A

On the surface, you’re the perfect wife and mother—content to stay at home and look after your spouse and children. But are your cleaning products shelved in alphabetical order? Do you have unnaturally gleaming grapefruit spoons? Do you dress like a belly dancer to greet your husband at the door when he returns from work? If so, all is not well underneath. Perhaps you find you need to self-medicate with a shot of vodka before you pick up the kids in the afternoon. And that you are just a bit too obsessed with plumping your scatter cushions. You could be suffering from being a housewife in the clinical sense and need to draw from our Valu-Pak of cures to wrench yourself away from the kitchen sink.

For Sarah, a young mother (and grad school dropout) in the 1990s in Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, being a stay-at-home mom fills her with anxiety. As she halfheartedly joins in the chatter with other mothers about their various levels of exhaustion and the eating habits of their offspring, she tries to transcend the tedium of her child-bound days by pretending inwardly that she’s an anthropologist, the Margaret Mead of the modern American playground scene. “I’m a researcher studying the behavior of boring suburban women. I am not a boring suburban woman myself,” she tells herself. Might this strategy work for you? Or does it hit too close to home?

To ponder the burdens of domesticity at a soothingly distant remove, pick up Winifred Peck’s 1942 novel House-Bound. Rose, the privileged heroine, had “never washed a vegetable” in her life, until the Second World War brought a national shortage of servants. Lacking a scullery maid, Rose must learn to run the house herself. Chaos ensues. As she becomes increasingly enslaved by domestic duties, Rose comes to realize that we are all housebound, not just within our four walls, but “tethered inexorably to a collection of all the extinct memories like bits of domestic furniture, inspected and dusted daily.” You might appreciate the freedom she eventually finds for herself, if not the means by which she comes by it.

Come the sexual revolution several decades on, the comparatively carefree Manhattan hausfrau Bettina “Tina” Balser, in Diary of a Mad Housewife, has a mental meltdown even if her life looks hunky-dory to outsiders. She has a maid, a handsome husband, and can float around all day drinking cocktails if she likes. But she’s dissatisfied all the same, and takes to keeping a journal to vent her frustrations and stay sane. “What I really am and have been since midsummer is paralyzed,” she writes. To fill the emptiness, Tina takes up a lover, the appalling George, an A-list celebrity. Meanwhile, her husband, Jonathan, is having a fling of his own, and things at his job are going down the tube. Like the cockroaches trapped inside the clock face in Bettina’s kitchen, squeezed between the two hands, the couple seem doomed to a slow, suffocating marital death. Luckily, they realize what is happening in time.

Breaking free of the husband as well as the house is the only answer for the female inhabitants of The Stepford Wives. Ira Levin’s 1972 novel is a terrifying exploration of what could happen if all the men in a small American town were to conspire to transform their spouses into their idea of the perfect wife. By chance, the characters have the necessary technical and practical expertise at their disposal to do just this. We all know what happens next—but it still makes for thrilling reading.

These days, it’s the liberated women—more than their husbands—who are likely to impose wifely transformations on themselves. Meg Wolitzer’s funny and poignant novel The Ten-Year Nap describes just such a woman. Amy Lamb has opted out of her law career to become an unimpeachable mom and housewife. She toys with the idea of going back to work—an idea her husband fully endorses—but the longer she stays out of the fray, the more she fears reentering it. When she finally snaps herself out of her domestic trance, she finds, to her relief, that “it was a pleasure, an honor, weirdly, just to be working.” The old Amy hadn’t gone away; it had just been buried under velveteen rabbits, mops, and coupons for a while.

So when the sippy cups become too much, do not fill them with booze and try to drink away your homebody blues. Remember that, unlike women of the past, you have a permanent ticket out of the nursery, and the children will be leaving it before long anyway. These novels will remind you that, once the children can dress themselves, you will be able to extricate the woman you once were from the mom and cutlery polisher you have become. Still, you may have to give yourself a gentle maternal nudge to be reminded to untie those apron strings.

See also: Boredom • Dissatisfaction • Household chores, distracted by

HUMILITY, LACK OF

See: Arrogance

HUMORLESSNESS

Everybody’s funny bone requires a different trigger. Use this list to help find what sets you off.

See also: Grumpiness • Killjoy, being a • Querulousness

THE TEN BEST NOVELS TO MAKE YOU LAUGH

Lucky Jim KINGSLEY AMIS

Bridget Jones’s Diary HELEN FIELDING

Tom Jones HENRY FIELDING

Home Land SAM LIPSYTE

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ANITA LOOS

Election TOM PERROTTA

Straight Man RICHARD RUSSO

Where’d You Go, Bernadette MARIA SEMPLE

Care of Wooden Floors WILL WILES

Joy in the Morning P. G. WODEHOUSE

HUNGER

In those days when you wander about hungry in a strange city that no one leaves before it sets its mark on him; when you consider, by force of habit, whether you have anything to look forward to today; when you realize you have not a single krone in your pocket, you must seek out Knut Hamsun and you will find yourself so energized by this novel that you will be able to see everything in sharp and perfect detail and have no question that the mere appetite of your body is necessary to satisfy, but that the nobility of your mind is incalculably more important. If only you might sit down and write a treatise on philosophy, a three-part article that you can sell to the paper for probably ten krone; if only you will sit and write it now on a park bench in the sun, then you will have the money to buy a decent meal. Or, alternatively, pawn your jacket, your waistcoat, for one krone fifty ore. Just make sure you don’t leave your pencil in the pocket, like the unnamed hero of Hamsun’s novel does, as then you will never be able to write your article, which will not only earn you money but will help the youth of the city to live in a better way. You’re only pawning it, of course, because it is getting a bit tight for you, and you will pick it up again in a few days’ time, when your article is published. Then you can give a few krone to the man on the street with the bundle in his hands who hasn’t eaten for many, many days, and who made you cry because you could not give him a five-krone piece. Of course, you haven’t eaten either, and your stomach will not hold down ordinary food anymore as it has been empty for too long. Though don’t forget that you gave that ten-krone note that you felt was wrongly yours to the cake seller, you thrust it into her hands and she had no idea why, and perhaps you can go to her stall and demand some cakes that were paid for on account, so to speak. The police might pick you up as you are out in the early hours of the morning, lacking a place to stay—but, then, how could you wish for anything more than an excellent, clean, dry cell? The police believe, of course, that you are really a man of good character and principles, who has merely been locked out of his house and has plenty of money at home. You can use this experience and write all about it in your next article that you can sell to the paper, and it may even make fifteen krone; and, of course, there is your play, the one you just need to clinch that elusive last act of, and if this is published, you will never have to worry about money again. Before this, you will arrive at the joyful insanity hunger brings, and be empty and free of pain.

READING AILMENT Hype, put off by

CURE Put the book in its place

Sometimes a book generates so much buzz in the press—perhaps it has won a major award, or the author is particularly young or good looking—that you are bored of it by the time you get around to reading it. You’ve read so many reviews that you feel you know the book already. And you’re too sullied by everyone else’s opinion to have any hope of forming your own.

The best way to give such a book a chance is to store it in your garden shed, greenhouse, or garage. You might also like to re-cover it in a piece of leftover wallpaper, some Christmas wrapping paper, a brown paper bag, or silver foil. And when taking a break from watering the tomatoes one day, pick it up and start to read. The unexpected, unbookish surroundings will bring an air of humility to the book, counteracting the hype, and encourage you to come to it with a more generous and open mind.

HYPOCHONDRIA

Reading The Secret Garden serves as a polite reminder that many of our ailments are, in fact, fictional.

Young Colin, confined to his bedroom since birth, is convinced there is a lump on his back that will, eventually, lead to an early demise. Of course, there is no lump, unless you count the vertebrae of his spine. His caregivers have encouraged him to believe he is deformed, doomed never to grow to adulthood, and that fresh air is poison to his blood. Mary, his spoiled cousin, just as capable of throwing tantrums and ordering others around as he is, will have none of it. The only person brave enough to tell Colin that there’s nothing wrong with him, she matches his rage at his presumed fate with her own fury at his inertia. Only a fierce little girl hell-bent on bringing her secret garden to life can pierce the bubble of Colin’s terror and show him the truth.

Mary’s passion for the garden lures Colin out of his sick chamber into the world of buds and birds—a world also inhabited by freckled, irresistible Dickon, the quintessence of health. Let this novel lure you from your bed to find your own secret garden—maybe even your own Dickon—and a lusty return to tip-top health.

See also: Anxiety • Cold, common • Dying • Man flu