Camilla Gibb forges happiness out of misery
Her new memoir details the harmony of joy and pain, and dealing with heartbreak
Camilla Gibb begins her story with the bleakest of admissions: “I never expected to be happy,” writes the award-winning Canadian novelist in her new memoir, This Is Happy. With that, one predicts an uplifting Hollywood-worthy tale about discovering joy in a hopeless place, or a nihilistic declaration that waiting for happiness is like waiting for Godot. This book is both.
Gibb’s childhood was sometimes boring, sometimes grim, sometimes normal and sometimes abusive, leaving her to inherit the kind of ambiguous anxieties one could — and she does — spend adulthood trying to solve. Her grown-up life is defined by escape routes: new medications, new partners, new cities, new fantasies of how to, and attempts to, no longer be alive. Gibb is always leaving, always on some bold new quest. Until Anna.
“You’re compelled by the search for new experience when you’re younger,” Gibb told the Star. “There are opportunities elsewhere and things that keep you moving. There was something settling and domesticating about marriage that I had never thought would be me. But it was.”
Of “Anna,” her partner of nine years, Gibb writes, “We were better for knowing and being loved by each other . . . Anna made being in the world easy.”
At 36, Gibb becomes pregnant but suffers a devastating miscarriage. She becomes pregnant again, with their daughter. Anna leaves.
(It is known that Gibb’s former partner is Heather Conway, the executive vice-president of English services at CBC.)
The sadness that follows is difficult and impenetrable. “I was supposed to grow a person. When I was no longer a person,” writes Gibb of being pregnant while heartbroken, of carrying new life and wretched grief inside her at the same time.
With Anna, Gibb had been happy or at least happy-ish. Now she was alone again and with a baby. For years she’d been out of therapy and off medication. As a new mom, crying everyday, enduring heartbreak, fear, loneliness and postpartum depression, she became a patient once more.
“The love I feel for my child, the love that feels like ache in the marrow, does not mitigate or murder the anger,” she writes of this staunch emotional duality. Her joy and her pain must coexist.
Much of this book is about the harmony of joy and pain. Never does happiness switch on like a light that won’t go out. It flickers.
“It’s startling to me how much we’re all floating around like icebergs, with one 10th of ourselves above the surface,” Gibb says. “We can all afford a bit more compassion toward each other. Maybe that’s what this crazy, unlikely family taught me. We expended respect and compassion toward each other when we were at our most broken.”
Gibb’s story doesn’t have a happy ending, because for Gibb — and for many people — happiness is not a promised land to which to make pilgrimage. Gibb’s honesty about this is admirable.
That honesty extends to her depiction of pregnancy and motherhood. “Where was the overwhelming swell of love I’d been promised I would feel in this instant?” she writes of giving birth.
That’s the painful part. And then there is the joy. At seven and a half months pregnant, Gibb goes kayaking alone on a cold Ontario lake. “That was really empowering,” she recalls of the experience. “I thought, I can lower myself into this kayak, nobody’s here, nobody knows where I’m going. I get to make the decisions about what I do with this pregnant body. It was a very moving moment. It shocked me. It was a moment of communion with my unborn child. Had I had a doting partner, I may not have had that experience.”
This is Happy is a powerful testament to what people can overcome and permission for what people can’t.
“I didn’t want this wreckage that I’d become to be me,” says Gibb.
“It’s startling to me how much we’re all floating around like icebergs, with one tenth of ourselves above the surface.” CAMILA GIBB