The Nine Rooms of Happiness

The enlightening and empowering New York Times bestseller to help women gain perspective and rediscover the joy of living.

Ask any woman how she's feeling. Even when things look pretty darn great from the outside, chances are that at least one thing (and it may seem minor to others) is nagging at her, making her feel less than spectacular, bringing her down. Whether it's the size of our thighs or our bank accounts, there always seems to be something that isn't measuring up to our high standards—and we let the dissatisfaction spill over into other areas of our lives, distracting us from taking pleasure in everything that's going right.

In The Nine Rooms of Happiness, Lucy Danziger, former editor-in-chief of Self magazine, and women's-health psychiatrist Catherine Birndorf use the metaphor of a house to release us from this phenomenon. In this house, the living room revolves around friendships and our social life; the bedroom is for exploring intimacy, romance, relationships, and sex; the bathroom is for issues relating to health and body image; the kitchen is for nourishment and the division of chores; and so on. Our “inner house” can have eight beautifully designed, neat and tidy rooms, and one messy one, and still we focus on the mess.

Pinpointing common self-destructive patterns of behavior and offering key processes that will help readers clean up their emotional architecture, Danziger and Birndorf show us how we can spend time on ourselves figuring out what is most meaningful to us—finding larger passion and purpose that makes returning to the rest of our house a pleasure, no matter what calamity or mess awaits.