What makes you happy? Perhaps it’s something you’d like to share?

It’s been a hard year for most of us and that got Christine Manby thinking about the things that bring her joy. Here she launches a new series called Try This to discover what makes other people happy

(Illustration by Tom Ford)

There’s still three months to go but I don’t think anyone could contest that 2020 will go down in history as having been a “very bad year”.  There can’t be a person on the planet whose life hasn’t been impacted in a negative way by the dreaded Covid-19, even if that impact was nothing more serious than a long-awaited football match missed or a party postponed. 

But the cloudy skies of 2020 have offered small glimmers of silver too. For me, freed from the mad shuttling around London that characterised my pre-Covid life, it was suddenly having more time to read, to create and, whisper it, to watch some telly.

As we settled into lockdown, we were all looking for ways to amuse ourselves at home (stop smirking at the back) and my social media feeds were soon full of people asking for and offering recommendations for uplifting music, books, films and televisions series to pass the time. 

Having exchanged my 15-year-old TV for one that could pick up more than one channel, I was eager for some comfort watching. Succumbing to Netflix, I followed friends’ advice to binge on Call My Agent, the French comedy-drama series everyone else saw three years ago.  In turn I recommended it to my friend Christina. Our subsequent character crushes gave us something much more interesting than Covid-19 to discuss during our long lockdown telephone calls.

What single example of human creativity encourages you to hang on in there or up your game? What tune makes you turn up the volume?

On a recommendation from my nephew, I also finally watched, 22 years after its release, The Truman Show. Previously allergic to Jim Carey’s gurning, I’d assumed I would hate it but I loved it, finding it to be the perfect metaphor for the adoption experience. 

The Truman Show provided me with a jumping off point for a fruitful and comforting online discussion with a group of fellow adoptees, many of whom agreed that they too had experienced their own Truman-style moments in the dissonance between their inner feelings about who they were and the lines they were fed by the communities in which they’d been raised. How had I not seen that film before?

Thanks to an eye-catching Instagram post by novelist Kate Lord Brown, I picked up Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther by Elizabeth Von Arnim, best known as the author of The Enchanted April. Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther  is told entirely in the letters of Rose-Marie Schmidt to the English bachelor who has stolen and then discarded her heart. Though the novel was published in 1907, it has a freshness and gentle wit that seem thoroughly modern.  Turn the letters into emails and on many subjects Rose-Marie could be writing in 2020, reminding us that there are aspects of the human experience that are eternal: kindness, heartbreak and humour. There’s great comfort in that. I finished reading the book feeling I had made a new friend.

And all this got me wondering, if you could pass on just one piece of music, one film, one book, one poem or one painting that got you through a difficult time, helped you make sense of something, or just gives you a shot of pleasure every time you think about it, what would it be? 

What single example of human creativity encourages you to hang on in there or up your game? What tune makes you turn up the volume and insist that everyone in the room stops talking so they can listen? What book are you constantly pressing on your friends?

Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic – jealousy especially so – but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned

For me, it’s Bird By Bird by American novelist and memoirist Anne Lamott. Ostensibly a book on the process of writing, subtitled Instructions On Writing And Life, it’s much more than a “how to” guide to getting published, though it contains some very useful advice on that, namely, “Publication is not going to change your life or solve your problems”.

Reading Bird By Bird for the first time, I felt, as Lamott describes in the introduction, like “one lonely isolated social animal finally making contact”. I’d published a couple of novels by this point and I knew other published writers, some of whom were very successful. Perhaps it’s because they were so successful that they never shared the ugly parts of the experience, the self-doubt and the envy. 

In Bird by Bird Lamott does exactly that and to read her chapter on Radio KFKD (for K-F***ed), those inner voices that peddle self-aggrandisement and self-loathing, was to feel recognised at last. I have those voices!  

Likewise, her chapter on jealousy was the perfect kick up the arse.  Is the perfect kick up the arse. I reread it again and again to remind myself when nothing’s going right that “Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic – jealousy especially so – but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned”. Then I read the chapter about Shitty First Drafts and picked up my pen again.

I was given my first copy of Bird By Bird by my friend Jenn, who knew that it would appeal to my twisted writer’s heart.  Since then, I’ve passed it on to dozens of people, including most recently the plumber who came to fix a leak in my shower and admitted over a cup of tea that he’d like to be a writer. He caught me on a good day so I didn’t tell him that half the writers I know are considering retraining as gas engineers. 

Instead, I gave him my last copy of Bird By Bird (I’ve since ordered two more) and hoped he might agree with Lamott as I do when I’m not on a deadline that "writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation.  They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.”    

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be asking a variety of people of all ages, backgrounds and walks of life to talk about the gifts of consolation, inspiration and pleasure that have brightened their lives and which they in turn would like to offer the readers of the Independent. Perhaps there is something that you’d like to share too?