Are You Happy?: A Childhood Remembered

An elegant dissection of how youthful happiness is lost, by a memoirist of great style and insight.

"The happiness of childhood is existential, not psychological," writes Emily Fox Gordon.

Gordon's early life was, as she puts it, "a succession of moments of radiant apprehension." In a later age she might have been medicated and counseled and ferried from one appointment to another. But growing up in the college town of Williamstown, Massachusetts, in the fifties, she was free to be alone wit...