Gretchen Rubin is one of America’s best known and best-loved writers on how to be happy. She published her evergreen classic The Happiness Project in 2009, and it was an instant hit. She’s followed it with many more books on the habits of happiness, and she’s also co-host of a hit podcast Happier, which she hosts with her sister, the writer Elizabeth Craft.

Today we’re talking about Gretchen’s take on Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s only novel, which is packed with sometimes brilliant and sometimes merely glib aphorisms and witticisms. We talk about why pithy sayings are so appealing, whether they are ever really true, and why Wilde was so obsessed with this kind of writing. A companion episode to episode 63 on the book itself.

Mentioned on this episode:

Gretchen Rubin: The Happiness Project, Life in Five Senses, Happier and Home and Secrets of Adulthood.

Gretchen Rubin and Elizabeth Craft: Happier the podcast.

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray.

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In this episode - the last in our series on Oscar Wilde - we tell the story of the melodramatic, mediagenic, mad, melancholy end of Oscar Wilde's writing life and glittering career as the cleverest man in Britain, after his string of smash hit plays, culminating in "The Importance of Being Earnest." Almost as the curtain went up on his masterpiece he filed a libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Alfred Douglass, Wilde's lover. It was the beginning of a series of legal, emotional and financial disasters for Oscar Wilde, and led to the last of his great works: The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

In previous episodes we looked at Wilde's break-out collection of fairy tales (the Happy Prince), a novel (Dorian Gray) and his greatest play. With The Ballad of Reading Gaol Wilde's career culminated, and ended, with a long poem. It tells the story of Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards, who murdered his girlfriend and was executed at Reading Gaol, where Wilde was also incarcerated, in July 1896. With "Reading Goal," Wilde's most distinctive literary device, the paradox, stops being a force of subversive delight, and becomes a grim, philosophical reflection on the impossibility of happiness.

The poem was published in 1898 under the name C33, which was Wilde’s prison name. It seemed to herald a new beginning for Wilde - the work of a reflective, penitent and compassionate artist - but it was actually his swan song. He was unable to write anything else before his death at the age of 46 in 1900.

Works referred to in this episode:

Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” (1898) De profundis (pub. 1905)

John Betjeman, The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel (1937)

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)

Anon. Newgate Calendar, or The Malefactors' Bloody Register, (1774)

Susan Fletcher, Twelve Months in an English Prison, (1883)

Marcus Clark, For the Term of His Natural Life, (1872)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798)

William Wordsworth, the “Lucy” poems (1798-1801)

Ballads by Keats, Byron and the Border poets (18C)

John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695)

John Milton, De doctrina christiana (written 17C, pub 1825) and the Divorce Tracts (1643-45)

William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1896)

Edward Carpenter, “Civilization, Its Cause and Cure” and other essays (1889)

D.H. Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s Lover, (1828)

E.M. Forster Maurice, (written 1913-14, pub. 1972)

Charlotte Wilson and Peter Kropotkin, Freedom Magazine (founded 1886)

-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org

-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast

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youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts

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Published in 2018, Lisa Genova’s Every Note Played follows the experiences of renowned concert pianist Richard Evans from the moment he is diagnosed with a form of Motor Neurone Disease, or MND, to his death less than two years later. It is a confronting, blow-by-blow account of the physical deterioration caused by MND, but also a testament to humanity’s capacity for empathy, love and redemption.

In this special episode, recorded in support of MotorOn (which raises funding for MND research), Jonty talks to Professor Dominic Rowe - director of the Macquarie University Centre for MND and one of the world’s leading experts in MND.

When Every Note Played begins, Richard is recently divorced from his wife Karina, but neither have been able to move on from their anger and endless emotional ruminating. But when Richard is diagnosed, Karina becomes his primary carer. Over the last months of his life, they learn to forgive one another and move on - one towards death, the other towards creative rebirth.

Every Note Played is the fifth novel by Lisa Genova, who made her debut with the bestselling Still Alice in 2007. Still Alice was adapted into a film, with Julianne Moore giving an Oscar winning performance in the title role as the 50 year old Alice who develops onset dementia. Richard Glatzer directed the film while suffering from advanced MND - and he died a few months after release. Inspired by Glatzer, and their friendship, Genova wrote Every Note Played.

Content warning: this episode is a frank conversation about a subject some may find disturbing.

For more information about MND, please go to:

Macquarie Centre for MND Research - www.mndnsw.org.au - the site has links to info lines and information packs

If you are interested in donating to MotorOn and supporting the work of the Macqueries Centre for MND Research, please go to www.motoron.org

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