Human Happiness: A Memoir

"The last time I talked to my mother, she announced that she hated my father."

So begins Brian Fawcett''s compelling new book about happiness and a new way of looking at family.

A public intellectual who will shame the devil in the interests of truth, Brian Fawcett has staunchly refused to buy into the prevailing techno-corporate ethos that defines our culture today. With Human Happiness, Fawcett has taken another leap into unexplored territory. Where previously Fawcett has explored such topics as globalization and the role of the media, this time he turns the lens inward to search for the meaning of happiness by examining the mysteries of marriage and family.

Featuring prose that is often painfully candid and frequently laugh-out-loud funny, Human Happiness is a story-driven narrative centered around the seemingly happy marriage between Fawcett''s parents, about how families really work (or don''t), about the intergenerational conflicts that seem inevitable between headstrong fathers and sons, and how old hostilities can poison and distort through generations and - in extraordinary cases - can be resolved.

For 25 years now, Brian Fawcett has been Canada''s most unconventional writer and public intellectual, a man Paul Quarrington described as our literature''s enfant terrible and eminence gris rolled into one. His true gift is for making readers laugh while raising the most fundamental questions that face us. He might be Canada''s most original writer.