The Handbag of Happiness is a collection of rollicking, defiant, real-life stories where self-improvement is satire and life-changing moments are found in the absurdity of our mysterious little lives. From The Bathing Costume of Calamity to The Apron Strings of Lament and The Brassiere of Lovelessness, Alannah Hill shares hard-won wisdom from a career in the fashion world (along with the fine art of stickybeaking). Irreverent, provocative, self-depreciating and witty, Alannah tells us in her own imperfect way how she overcame adversity – and sometimes didn’t, despite her best intentions. In a world full of self-help clichés, contradictory messages and new-puritan rules, Alannah opens her bejewelled handbag of happiness, showing us how being a little bit wrong can sometimes be so very, very right.
After forty years of happy marriage, Leonard thought he knew his wife Rose as well as he knew himself. It's only after her sudden death that he finds her old handbag, which contains a mystery he can't ignore. Accompanied by Lily, his wife's childhood friend, Leonard becomes a reluctant detective as his whole life starts to unravel... 'The Blue Handbag' is steeped in a quiet poetry which reminds us to take pleasure from the ordinary details of life - reading stories to our children, sharing silence with our friend over a beer, enjoying the plants Leonard tends for a living - and never to take anything for granted.
Don’t waste another day feeling unfulfilled—a guide to mastering the habits of happiness by the Wall Street Journal-bestselling author of Unlimited Memory. Happiness is more than just a feeling—it’s a learned skill. When you master the habits of happiness, your life will be filled with more peace, purpose, and passion. The answers lie within the depths of your mind. The Happy Mind offers valuable insights for building lasting happiness instead of being driven by short-term pleasure seeking. When you look at all the scientific research, religious teachings, and philosophical insights surrounding the topic of happiness, one thing becomes clear: We all experience happiness differently. What makes one person happy may make another miserable. This book is about customizing your happiness—and finding your own unique roadmap. You’ll learn: How people search for happiness in all the wrong places, and how you can avoid these “happiness traps” that keep you stuck and unfulfilled Why most people mistake pleasure for happiness, and how this simple mistake causes you to lose sight of what really matters to you The nine common qualities that super happy people share (and how you can apply them to brighten up your life) The key traits of unhappiness (and the most important behaviors you should avoid) Easy changes you can make that will create more long-term happiness for you and your loved ones
In December 2008, my worst nightmare came true . . . How do you pick yourself up after the one thing you most feared happens to you? Alexandra Penney's revealing, spirited, and ultimately redemptive true story shows us how. Throughout her life, Alexandra Penney's worst fear was of becoming a bag lady. Even as she worked several jobs while raising a son as a single mother, wrote a bestselling advice book, and became editor in chief of Self magazine, she was haunted by the image of herself alone, bankrupt, and living on the street. She even went to therapy in an attempt to alleviate the worry that all she had worked for could crumble. And then, one day, that's exactly what happened. Penney had taken a friend's advice and invested nearly everything she had ever earned--all of her savings--with Bernie Madoff. One day she was successful and wealthy; the next she had almost nothing. Suddenly, at an age when many Americans retire, Penney saw her worst nightmares coming true. Based on her popular blog posts on The Daily Beast, this memoir chronicles Penney's struggle to cope with the devastating financial and emotional fallout of being cheated out of her life savings and illuminates her journey back to sanity, solvency, and security. "I will work harder than I ever have before--which was pretty hard indeed--and see what happens. I have the feeling something good will come of it: tough, challenging work and laserlike focus have always paid off for me. . . . Was it better to have it and then lose it? Yes, yes, yes! Even though I lived with horrible bag lady fears of losing it all, now that those financial fears have materialized, I'm in pretty good shape and looking to what's next. Experiences -- good and bad, exciting and boring, tragic and absurd -- make up a life. Not to have lived to the fullest is the saddest, most irresponsible life I can think of." --- from The Bag Lady Papers
'Raw and real and funny and sad – I could not put this book down' – Jane Kennedy 'You might expect fluff and fashion ... what you get is harrowing, full-strength, funny and deeply satisfying' – Zoë Foster Blake Unflinching, funny, shocking, inspiring and tender: this is a story like no other. Alannah Hill, one of Australia’s most successful fashion designers, created an international fashion brand that defied trends with ornamental, sophisticated elegance, beads, bows and vintage florals. But growing up in a milk bar in Tasmania, Alannah’s childhood was one of hardship, fear and abuse. At an early age she ran away from home with eight suitcases of costumes and a fierce determination to succeed, haunted by her mother’s refrain of ‘You’ll never amount to anything, you can’t sew, nobody likes you and you’re going to end up in a shallow grave, dear!’ At the height of her success, Alannah walked the razor’s edge between two identities – the ‘good’ Alannah and the ‘mongrel bastard’ Alannah. Who was the real Alannah Hill? Reprieve came in the form of a baby boy and the realisation that becoming a mother not only changes your life, but completely refurbishes it, forever. Yet 'having it all' turned out to be another illusion. In 2013 Alannah walked away from her eponymous brand, a departure that left her coming apart at the seams. She slowly came to understand the only way she could move forward was to go back. At the heart of it all was her mother, whose loveless marriage and disappointment in life had a powerful and long-lasting effect on her daughter. It was finally time to call a truce with the past. This extraordinary book is the fierce and intelligent account of how a freckle-faced teenage runaway metamorphosed into a trailblazer and true original.
Explains how and why money that is wisely spent can promote a healthier, happier, more satisfactory life, with guidelines on how to reevaluate one's priorities and reallocate one's wealth to buy more time and peace of mind.
When Sina, Maya, Ingrid, and Lisbeth each receive a letter in the mail with the same proposal, the answer is obvious. Their old high school friend Kat—Kat the adventurer, Kat who ran away to travel the world as soon as they graduated—has extended the invitation of a lifetime: Come live with me on my cocoa farm in Fiji. Come spend the days eating chocolate and gabbing like teenagers once again, free from men, worries, and bad weather. Come grow old in paradise, together, as sisters. Who could say no? Now in their sixties, the friends have all but resigned themselves to the cards they’ve been dealt. But surrounded by an azure-blue ocean, cocoa trees, and a vibrant local culture, they begin the process of coming to terms with the lives they left behind—and reinventing themselves for the future that still lies ahead.
Find Your Inner Superhero: Selene (Water)...Nexus (Wood)...Avior (Fire)...Talitha (Earth)...Alcor (Metal) and Master Your Superpowers to meet life's challenges. Alice Inoue has done it again-created a new system from an ancient framework to offer you personal guidance on how to deal with life like the Superhero you have within you-in command of your life and more confident every step of the way. Take the exclusive Archetype Quiz to discover your Superhero and your Integrated Archetype to reveal your natural elemental nature. Who are you? Calm Connector? Masterful Ally? Efficient Producer? Or another of the twenty Integrated Archetypes?What do you need in life? What is your purpose? What are the beliefs that shape your decisions? What are your weaknesses and how do you bolster them? And your superpowers-discover how to identify them and use them. Master Your Superpowers is designed to help you wake up your inner superpowers so you can make the very most of your journey through life.
International Bestseller All places are not created equal. In this groundbreaking book, Richard Florida shows that where we live is increasingly a crucial factor in our lives, one that fundamentally affects our professional and personal prospects. As well as explaining why place matters now more than ever, Who’s Your City? provides indispensable tools to help you choose the right place for you. It’s a cliché of the information age that globalization has made place irrelevant, that one can telecommute as effectively from New Zealand as New York. But it’s not true, Richard Florida argues, relying on twenty years of innovative research in urban studies, creativity, and demographic trends. In fact, as new units of economic growth called mega-regions become increasingly specialized, the world is becoming more and more “spiky” — divided between flourishing clusters of talent, education and competitiveness, and moribund “valleys.” All these places have personalities, Richard Florida explains in the second half of Who’s Your City?, and happiness depends on finding the city in which you can balance your personal and career goals to thrive. More people than ever before now have the opportunity to choose where to live, but at different points in our lives we need different kinds of places, he points out — what a couple of recent college graduates want from their city isn’t necessarily what a retiree is looking for. You have to find the place that suits you best: a boho-burb neighbourhood isn’t likely to be the best fit for patio man. So, for the first time, Who’s Your City? ranks cities by their fitness for various life stages, rating the best places for singles, young families, and empty nesters. It summarizes the key factors that make place matter to different kinds of people, from professional opportunities to the closeness of family to how well it matches their lifestyle, and provides an in-depth series of steps to help you choose the right place wisely. Sparkling with Richard Florida’s signature intellectual originality, Who’s Your City? moves from insights to studies to personal anecdotes, from a startling “Singles Map” of the United States to surprising data on the difference aesthetics makes to people’s sense of place. A perceptive and transformative book, it is both a brilliant exploration of the fundamental importance of place and an essential guide to making what may be the most important decision of your life.
Learn how to achieve the happiness you deserve "A guide to sustaining your newfound contentment." —Psychology Today "Lyubomirsky's central point is clear: a significant portion of what is called happiness . . . is up for grabs. Taking some pages out of the positive psychology playbook, she coaches readers on how to snag it." —The New York Review of Books You see here a different kind of happiness book. The How of Happiness is a comprehensive guide to understanding the elements of happiness based on years of groundbreaking scientific research. It is also a practical, empowering, and easy-to-follow workbook, incorporating happiness strategies, excercises in new ways of thinking, and quizzes for understanding our individuality, all in an effort to help us realize our innate potential for joy and ways to sustain it in our lives. Drawing upon years of pioneering research with thousands of men and women, The How of Happiness is both a powerful contribution to the field of positive psychology and a gift to people who have sought to take their happiness into their own hands.
