The Joy Document: Creating a Midlife of Surprise and Delight

McGaha (Bushwhacking; Flat Broke with Two Goats) embraces dailiness and argues that, by seeking out beauty and wonder even in the harshest of contexts, people can intentionally build resiliency and live with a sense of gratitude for what is, rather than long for what no longer is or has never been. McGaha finds those moments at a Pentecostal church and times when she renewed her driver’s license, checked out at Trader Joe’s, and did all of the things that make her messily, beautifully human. The author’s influences—Zadie Smith’s “Joy,” Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders—are clear; however, her book is more conversational than Smith’s or Gay’s, lending it a less literary and more actionable tone that will inspire readers to consider their own lives as worthy of viewing with an awakened sense of curiosity.