Women and Happiness

The history, science, and experiences of women and personal fulfillment.
by Ariel Gore

When I’m Not Okay and You’re Just So-So

Ariel Gore talks to author and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore about memoir, creating our own systems of care, and challenging the violence in the world around us. Read More

What Do We Owe a Dying Parent?

I didn’t want to take care of my mother. But I knew I would. I’d join 65 million other Americans—almost 30 percent percent of the U.S. population—who care for an ill, disabled, or aging friend or family member. These “informal caregivers” offer an average of 20 hours a week in unpaid labor and more than $5,000 a year in out-of-pocket expenditures. Read More

Laughing, Dancing, Grieving: How to Cope in Violent Times

"Passive violence can be as simple as someone honking their horn at you for not turning fast enough when the light changes. And it can be highly complex, like when your co-worker undermines all of your work relationships by spreading rumors and lies about you." Read More

Autobiography of a Serial Killer

A new book gives us a raw and complex portrait Aileen Wuornos, "the hitchhiking prostitute" turned America's "first female serial killer." Read More

If We’re Going to be Mothers and Writers, We Need Long Lives

With one kid in college, another in preschool, and my mother at home in hospice, I haven't produced much evidence of a life of the mind. Read More

The Happy Divorce

When Fran Drescher's new sitcom, Happily Divorced, debuted earlier this summer, I started noticing snippets and diatribes tisk-tisking Hollywood for sugarcoating the end of traditional marriages. Read More

One Big Lucid Dreaming Lovedoll

The "grandmother of erotica" Susie Bright on storming the gates of the status quo, becoming a dirty old lady, and other ways to be happy.

  Read More

Epigenetics, Save Me From My Family!

I've been thinking about disowning some of my genes lately. I have a few healthy, happy, long-living optimists in my family tree--most of them fans of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, a major champion of positive thinking. But I've got plenty of ancestors who played out more tortured hands. My family is probably something like yours, like everyone's: Read More

Give the Gift of Happiness

Experiences Make Us Happier than Things...

What to get for that special someone on your list who has everything?

It's not an uncommon dilemma. Read More

Seven Days to Wake Up & Live Intentionally

Let me listen to me and not to them.--Gertrude Stein I bought Life is a Verb: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally because it was listed on Amazon.com as "frequently bought together" with my own book, Bluebird.

(Surely there are worse reasons to buy a book). Read More

Relax: Vacations are Supposed to Be Unpredictable

I recently moved to a "tourist town" where the travelers seem to outnumber locals in the summer months.

I see them in the plaza. I overhear their conversations in restaurants and at the burrito stand. I run a retail store, so chat with them when they wander in looking for souvenirs or directions. Read More

Learn Something New Lately?

They say change gets more difficult as we get older--each year we're more stuck in our ways, more reluctant to learn something new. Read More

Can You be a Writer AND a Mother?

Can we be responsible to our relationships and still do the creative work we feel called to do? Read More

There's Downsizing, and De-cluttering--Why Not Just Get Rid of Everything?

"Stuff is sticky," my hoarder friend tells me as she struggles to de-clutter her house.

I don't share my friend's compulsion to collect, but I know what she means.

I've collected my fair share of knickknacks and furniture and books and paintings over the years, and I've assigned each artifact its sentimental and utilitarian value. Read More

The point of poetry?

Why bother with art? In the wake of the earthquake in Haiti, and when millions have no food and water, Scott Christian wonders on Salon.com: Who gives a shit about Picasso? What's the point of poetry?

My mother has lung cancer even though she never smoked. A visual artist, she wonders if she's ill from years of inhaling poisonous paint fumes and fixants. Read More

The Generosity of Happiness

My grandmother was a writer of epic thank-you notes. Her last words to me were on a voicemail: "Call me back, darling," she said. "I want to tell you how marvelous you are." Read More

The Happiness Journal

I do love January: The weather is dicey, the days still too short, but new projects abound.

This is the year we are going to detox, get in shape, meditate, save the world--or at least ourselves

This is the year we are going to write the book, dust off the old canvases and make time for painting, start the rebuilding project.

The days will get longer--this much is certain. Read More

Confessions of a Lousy Yogi

When I stared going to yoga classes, I figured my learning curve would be like it is with most things: I'd start out as the bumbling beginner in the back row and then, perhaps slowly, I'd get the hang of it. Read More

Papergirl Flow

I fold newspapers in the still dark morning. I fold them in three and snap a rubber band around the middle.

I am the first in our neighborhood to know that Mount St. Helens has erupted, that Ronald Reagan has won the presidency by a landslide, that John Lennon has been murdered. Read More

What Would Happen if You Killed Your Television?

"Commercialism is a vacuum," my mother warned me. "It will suck you in."

I was seven or eight years old and my mother was running a bath for me. I imagined being sucked down the drain into a wet underworld of nefarious Disney characters. Read More

Cancer Doesn't Make People Happy

The idea for the happiness journal came from a little book called A Life of One's Own written by the British psychoanalyst Marion Milner and published under the pseudonym Joanna Field in the 1930s. Milner's idea was that if she recorded the best moments in her daily life, she might begin to trace patterns from those moments and discover the conditions for lasting happiness. Read More

Are We Happy Yet?

Are not women of the harem more happy than women voters? Is not the housekeeper happier than the working-woman? It is not too clear what the word happy really means and still less what true values it may mask.

--Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex Read More

Ariel Gore

Ariel Gore is an award-winning journalist and the author of Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness.

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Books by Ariel Gore

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Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness