In “Happier Far,” Diane Mehta guides her audience through the peculiarities and challenges of becoming a writer, illustrating how family can occasionally provide support or hinder progress.

Mehta delves into the significant experiences of her life, from a lively upbringing in India to her youth spent in an inhospitable New Jersey neighborhood, along with the complexities of marriage, separation, and life as a single caregiver. Throughout these chapters, she narrates her quest for a familial narrative that may clarify her identity and what holds the greatest significance.

Transitioning between concert arenas, art exhibitions, parks, burial sites, and medical facilities, Mehta allows her inquisitiveness to creatively broaden her surrounding environment. With a voice that is both compelling and sardonic, clever and introspective, she reflects on these moments captured from her existence.

She grapples with a personal sorrow in a correspondence to a turtle and exposes the surreal turbulence of migraines through her encounters with a dog-walking organization. By listening to Beethoven’s later sonatas, she forges a connection with her mother. She investigates familial records in an attempt to articulate the narratives of her Indian-Jain and Jewish-American lineage. She discovers what is needed to communicate herself effectively while striving to fulfill the expectations tied to love, marriage, separation, and parenting.

An inventive and spirited narrator, Mehta demonstrates to her readers that even if the life they envisioned becomes out of reach, they can still reconstruct it and achieve, as Milton remarked in “Paradise Lost,” “happier far.”

The article Collection of essays explores family and belonging first appeared on UGA Today.