Joyful, Anyway

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A profound, funny, and deeply human case for joy that doesn’t depend on everything getting better, from the beloved author of Everything Happens for a Reason and No Cure for Being Human

“Joyful, Anyway is colorful and layered, unafraid of the occasional gut-punch of raw feeling and vulnerability—much like Kate Bowler herself. She suffers no fools, especially the toxic optimists.”—Jerry Seinfeld

“A book to take you through life’s aftermaths.”—Katherine May, New York Times bestselling author of Wintering

True joy—an unmistakable blend of gratitude, hope, and delight—will find you, even in the midst of sadness. Allowing yourself to receive this gift is what will get you through.

We are overwhelmed. Frightening headlines, illness, uncertainty, grief, and email. We are left wondering why, if we’re doing everything right, life still feels like an endless game of whack-a-mole. Joyful, Anway is bestselling author Kate Bowler’s bracingly honest exploration of this dilemma.

By sharing her personal experience and stories from some of our culture’s preeminent historians, philosophers, and religious scholars, Bowler presents an original and inspiring understanding of joy. This is a type of joy that is different from happiness, and it does not depend on resolving the things that make life difficult. Drawing on a decade of living with serious illness and a lifetime, as a divinity professor, studying America’s obsession with progress, she shows why the relentless pursuit of happiness may, in fact, keep us from experiencing true joy.

Joy isn’t something you can optimize or manufacture. It subverts our expectations, finding us when life rewrites our scripts. Joyful, Anyway offers language for the ache we all carry and practices—loosening control, introducing novelty, choosing charity—that will open us up to the surprising, technicolor moments that pull us back into life. Inspiring, funny, and soulful, Joyful, Anyway is a book you will turn to again and again.

Joy reminds us that no matter what, life is still worth loving. For every time we ask is this it?, joy will answer: There is more.

Kate Bowler, PhD is a four time New York Times bestselling author, podcast host, and a professor at Duke University. She studies the cultural stories we tell ourselves about success, suffering, and whether (or not) we’re capable of change. In her twenties, she became obsessed with writing the first history of the movement called the “prosperity gospel”—which promises that God will reward you with health and wealth if you have the right kind of faith. She researched and traveled across Canada and the United States interviewing megachurch leaders and televangelists and everyday believers about how they make spiritual meaning out of the good and bad in their lives. The result was the book, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, which received widespread media attention and a lot of puns about being #blessed.

At age 35, she was unexpectedly diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, causing her to think in different terms about the research and beliefs she had been studying. She penned the New York Times bestselling memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved), which tells the story of her struggle to understand the personal and intellectual dimensions of the American belief that all tragedies are tests of character.

Her third book, The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities follows the rise of celebrity Christian women in American evangelicalism. Whether they stand alone or beside their husbands, they are leading women who play many parts: faithful wife, spiritual authority, and Hollywood celebrity.

On her popular podcast, Everything Happens, Kate speaks with people like Malcolm Gladwell, Matthew McConaughey, and Anne Lamott about what wisdom and truth they’ve uncovered during difficult circumstances.

Her latest book, No Cure For Being Human (and Other Truths I Need to Hear), grapples with her diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith as she tries to come to terms with limitations in a culture that promises anything is possible.

Kate has written three bestselling books of spiritual reflections. Good Enough: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection (co-written with Jessica Richie) takes what she has learned about our self-help-obsessed culture and written daily reflections on what it would mean to embrace our imperfect lives. The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days (co-written with Jessica Richie) focuses on gratitude and hope while acknowledging our messy and imperfect lives. Her latest, Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day! Daily Meditations for the Ups, Downs, and In-Betweens, is packed with bite-sized reflections and action-oriented steps to help you get through the day—be it good, bad, or totally mediocre.

“With luminous clarity and unsentimental grace, Kate Bowler delivers a meditation on the sacred, vivid, heartbreaking absurdity of being alive. Her prose is both razor sharp and tender, avoiding easy answers (which never help us anyway) while extending a spirit of friendship to all who have suffered and who long to carry on. A deeply moving everyday masterpiece. I loved it.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“If it feels like joy is missing from your life, drop what you’re doing and read this book. Kate Bowler is a beacon—she radiates light even when the world seems dark. Her wisdom is perfectly timed for our tumultuous times.”—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential and Think Again, and host of the podcast Re:Thinking

“Bowler’s richest and wisest book yet, and if possible, the most charming. Absolutely lovely. It changed me.”—Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling author of Somehow

“A delight from start to finish, Joyful, Anyway embodies the mix of pleasure and aching that makes us human. A book to take you through life's aftermaths.”—Katherine May, New York Times bestselling author of Wintering

“A profoundly wise, hilarious, large-hearted and down-to-earth meditation on the fundamental unsolvability of being human—and how it’s in the very middle of the mess that joy is waiting to be found. I know I'll be returning to this book again and again.”—Oliver Burkeman, New York Times bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks

“Joyful, Anyway is colorful and layered, unafraid of the occasional gut-punch of raw feeling and vulnerability–much like Kate Bowler herself. She suffers no fools, especially the toxic optimists. With her signature mix of tenderness and ache, Bowler lingers comfortably in the strange terrain where joy and pain don't alternate, but constantly intertwine.”—Jerry Seinfeld