Joyful, Anyway
Releases April 7, 2026
Bestselling author and Duke University professor Kate Bowler reveals the surprising magic of joy—and how we can access it even when happiness feels out of reach.
Joy won’t cure you, but it will carry you.
New York Times bestselling author and Duke University professor Kate Bowler offers a profound, funny, and deeply human case for joy that doesn’t depend on everything getting better.
You can’t always be happy, but you can be joyful, anyway.
We live in a culture convinced that chasing happiness will optimize our bodies, our minds, our relationships, our lives. But in the meantime, bad news usually stays bad: illness, chronic pain, grief, and disappointment don’t obey our timelines or vision boards. We are left wondering why, if we’re doing everything right, life still feels so hard.
Honest and bracingly tender, Joyful, Anyway proves that experiencing joy does not depend on everything getting better. Drawing on a decade of living with serious illness and a lifetime studying America’s obsession with progress, Kate Bowler shows why people so busy chasing happiness miss out on actual joy.
Joy isn’t something you can optimize or manufacture—it finds us at the edge of expectation, when life interrupts our scripts. Joyful, Anyway gives language for the ache we all carry and practices for “putting yourself in the way of joy:” loosening control, introducing novelty, choosing charity, and staying open to the surprising, technicolor moments that pull us back into life.
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.
Joy won’t cure you…
but it will carry you.
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“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) well 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 of EAT PRAY LOVE and BIG MAGIC, and speaker of one of the most-viewed TED Talks of all time
“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 and Sunday Times bestselling author of ENCHANTMENT and WINTERING, and host of the podcast How We Live Now
“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 HELP, THANKS, WOW and BIRD BY BIRD, and beloved voice on grace, writing, and the messiness of being human
“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 perfect for our turbulent times.”
—Adam Grant
#1 New York Times bestselling author of HIDDEN POTENTIAL and THINK AGAIN, and host of the podcast Re:Thinking
“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
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
Comedian
