She sits, picking up her pen and opening the journal again. It’s pale green. She bought it at an airport newsstand during a layover on her way back from giving a talk at a women’s luncheon in Dallas last month. The trip had been a hit. They all were lately, which she attributed to how she had tailored the boilerplate talk she’d been giving since her book, Perfect Happiness, came out two years ago. She’d learned that it was important to play to your audience, that they warmed to you more quickly if they could relate to you. So when she went to Dallas, she hit Drybar first and had her white-blond bob blown out, and wore a hot pink dress she’d bought in Savannah, something she’d never wear to speak to a crowd in Chicago or the Northeast, where she wore charcoal and navy, and kept her hair simple and her nails neutral.
In Dallas, her nails matched her dress. During her talk, she’d improvised with some extra bullet points about the importance of self-care, and scanning the tables of well-preserved women, she made a quip about day spas: “I don’t know about y’all,” she said, her voice taking on the accent she’d almost completely shed since leaving the South nearly twenty years ago. “But the aesthetician I see does as much for my well-being as any antidepressant could.” She also squeezed in just the tiniest mention of her Baptist upbringing, although she hadn’t been a regular churchgoer in decades. Some people might think she was pandering, but to Charlotte, none of it was insincere. She just felt that it was far easier for people to digest her message if they were comfortable with her. And she meant every word she said.
She puts her pen down on the still-blank page and picks up her phone again. 3,452 likes.
She’s been studying positive psychology—the science of happiness—since she was an undergrad psych student at Emory, where she stayed for a PhD. After graduation, she moved to Washington to teach at Georgetown, a move made much easier by her then-fiancé’s decision to sleep with somebody else. She got a little studio just off campus, and when she got homesick, her sweet brother, Aaron, shipped her Tupperware containers of boiled peanuts and pimento cheese via Next Day Air. One afternoon, just months into her new life, she got trapped in a thunderstorm while out for a run on the National Mall. She sprinted up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, waiting out the rain under Abe’s solemn gaze, and then, while reading the words of the Gettysburg Address inscribed on the wall, she took a step back and bumped right into another runner who was doing the same thing. Two years later, she married him. Birdie, conceived on their honeymoon in Costa Rica, came just after her thirtieth birthday.
Home, at that early time in their family’s life, was everything she’d wanted it to be, almost too good to be true. At work, she hustled. She stood barely five feet tall, hardly a demanding presence, and when she first arrived at Georgetown, fellow faculty members often mistook her for a student. This only fueled her desire to outwork and outpublish them, which she did, building up a following of dedicated students who lapped up her theories about happiness and what she called “living a contented life.” She churned out research papers, publishing on her main area of focus: the idea that people can manifest positive emotions through deliberate action instead of letting their feelings be their guide. On the weekends, she and Jason drank beers on the back porch with their neighbors, the baby monitor on the table beside the chips and guacamole. They went for family bike rides, strapping Birdie into a little plastic seat on the back of Jason’s bike. Their little girl suddenly turned three, and then four, and then went off to kindergarten, her giant backpack dwarfing her as she climbed the steps onto the school bus. Jason told funny stories over dinner about the orangutans he cared for at the zoo. Charlotte was awarded tenure. Her mother continued to call and ask when she was coming home.
She sailed along for a while, doing her thing, juggling work and marriage and motherhood. She actually felt like she’d become the epitome of Susie Sunshine, which her father used to call her sometimes, because she really was the picture of happiness, always with a smile on her face, always doing her best to make the people around her feel good. People sometimes asked her, “Are you ever in a bad mood?” and she responded honestly—of course she got down sometimes. But from the time she was young, when her mother’s mercurial moods could change the tone of the house in an instant, her fake-it-till-you-make-it strategy had worked. Smile through the tears. Keep your focus forward.
And she had been tested. First, with her father’s death when she was in college. Then with Reese, her childhood sweetheart and fiancé, who’d been carrying on an entire relationship with another woman as he and Charlotte were brainstorming wedding venues and honeymoon destinations. And then, just when she’d built such a nice family, career, and life for herself in DC, she and Jason found they couldn’t conceive again. They tried and tried, racking up credit card debt on treatments, injecting Charlotte with an endless number of syringes. It was the hardest time in her life. She smiled at herself in the mirror and told herself it would be okay. To cope, she poured herself into work, and the outcome—her salvation, really—was the Intro to Happiness class she dreamt up during that time. It became a different sort of baby.
It is the most popular course in the university’s history. The Washington Post even ran a feature about it in the Sunday paper, with quotes from her students evangelizing about how much better they felt since taking the class, now that they’d learned strategies like unplugging for an hour every day, or getting more sleep, or spending face-to-face time with friends instead of just texting. And then, barely four years ago, she got the email that would change everything. It was from one of the organizers of the TEDxMidAtlantic conference, asking her if she’d like to speak.
At Georgetown, Charlotte had given a dizzying number of lectures over the years, but for some serendipitous reason, that TED talk sparked something. She started it the same way she started the Intro to Happiness class each semester, when she looked out at her lecture hall full of students—in hoodies, bedheads, and vegan leather sneakers—and said, “Rule Number One: If you want to be happier, you have to stop thinking so much.
“Stop wondering whether this is the life you should be living.
“Stop second-guessing your choices.
“Stop worrying about where you are or what you’re doing relative to those around you.
“Stop thinking so much about yourself.
“Stop thinking, period.
“Facts before feelings,” she said during the talk, which had just over four million views on YouTube the last time she checked. “You can soul-search, go deep with your vulnerability, spend your summer vacation at an ashram seeking out your higher calling, and sure, that stuff might work.” In the video, she pauses here, and flashes a conspiratorial smile. “Oprah and Gwyneth and Deepak will tell you that it works.” Chuckles erupt throughout the audience. “But that’s not for me.
“No, no,” she says. “I might look like Susie Sunshine,” she jokes, smiling a wide smile and tucking a lock of her hair behind her ear, and the crowd laughs because she really does, like a “human Tinker Bell,” her brother used to say, resting an elbow on the top of her head. “But I need hard facts. I need research. I don’t need more thinking and feeling. I don’t have time for more thinking and feeling.” More laughter. She waits for the crowd to quiet. “Listen, I’m not just being cheeky here,” she says, speaking slowly, thoughtfully. “Science is very clear about what makes people happy: time in nature, a daily gratitude practice, regular contact with close friends, exercise, more sleep. Et cetera . . . et cetera. We’ve all heard these things a million times. But do you do them?” She pauses. “Do you do them? Or do you sit around wondering why you feel how you feel?” She holds her hands out to her sides, the tips of her fingers pressed to her thumbs like those of a yogini, and closes her eyes for a moment in faux introspection. “Honestly, the why-you-feel-the-way-you-do is a waste of time. It doesn’t matter so much. What matters is that you do something. Action first, feelings later. Fake it till you make it. Follow the facts.”