In Hap­pi­er Far, Diane Mehta takes us on a fun­ny and engross­ing tour of the absur­di­ties and dilem­mas of becom­ing a writer, and how fam­i­ly can some­times help us and some­times get in the way. From a vibrant child­hood in India to her youth in an unwel­com­ing New Jer­sey sub­urb, from the con­fu­sions of mar­riage and divorce to life as a sin­gle par­ent, she chron­i­cles her search for a fam­i­ly his­to­ry that can help explain who she is and what mat­ters most to her now.

In con­cert halls, art gal­leries, parks, ceme­ter­ies, and hos­pi­tals, Mehta fol­lows her curios­i­ty to imag­i­na­tive­ly expand her imme­di­ate world. With a voice that’s propul­sive and iron­ic, sly and pro­found, she takes stock: She wres­tles with a per­son­al tragedy in a let­ter to a tur­tle and reveals the hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry mania of migraines in her inter­ac­tions with a dog-walk­ing ser­vice. She med­i­tates on mem­o­ry with ghosts of the dead, teach­es her­self to swim despite chron­ic pain, con­nects with her moth­er by lis­ten­ing to Beethoven’s late sonatas, and exam­ines fam­i­ly doc­u­ments in an effort to pin down the sto­ry of her Indi­an-Jain and Jew­ish-Amer­i­can par­ents. Mehta tries to meet the demands of love, mar­riage, divorce, and par­ent­ing, all while fig­ur­ing out what it takes to express her­self clear­ly. An orig­i­nal and feisty sto­ry­teller, Mehta shows us that if you are kicked out of the life you thought you were going to lead, you can still rebuild it and become, as Mil­ton said in Par­adise Lost, ​“hap­pi­er far.”