Katrina Onstad

The Kaplan family has just won 10 million dollars in the lottery. The surprise windfall suddenly upends the family, allowing them all to dream a little bigger. The Kaplans navigate the notoriety that the lottery brings and try to adjust to their new lives in the upper class. Along with the truth come long-buried memories from Gwen's troubled youth, forcing her to confront her painful past - causing her meticulously constructed identity as the good wife and mother begins to crack. And when their changed circumstances place her family under threat, Gwen must wake up from her domestic slumber.

A Novel

Stay Where I Can See You

A well-lived weekend is the gateway to a well-lived life. The Weekend Effect shows us how by saving the weekend we can save ourselves. The weekend—the once-sacred forty-eight hours of leisure—has been lost to overbooked schedules, pinging devices and encroaching work demands. Many of us are working more hours than we did a decade ago, and worse, we allow those hours to slide over seven days a week, giving us no respite to tune out and recharge. We don’t need the research to tell us that this is hurting us. Our health is deteriorating, our social networks (the face-to-face kind) are weak and our productivity is down. It wasn’t long ago that working less and living more was considered a virtue. So what happened? In The Weekend Effect, journalist Katrina Onstad, herself suffering from Sunday-night letdown, digs into the history, the positive psychology and the cultural anthropology of the great missing weekend. She pushes back against the all-work, no-fun ethos and follows the trail of people, companies and countries who are vigilantly protecting their weekends for joy, for adventure and, most important, for meaning. Readers of The Happiness Project, All Joy and No Fun and Thrive will find personal and business inspiration in Onstad’s well-researched argument to re-frame our weekends.

The Life-Changing Benefits of Taking Time Off and Challenging the Cult of Overwork

The Weekend Effect

How Happy to Be captures the life of a disillusioned entertainment journalist as she heads into a downward spiral of ritual substance abuse and empty punditry. Along this path of self-destruction, her past on a West Coast commune, both comic and poignant, keeps intruding. It isn't until her indiscretions catch up with her that she realizes she must face that past if she is to have any chance of finding where her happiness lies. Onstad's ability to blend satire with a moving story of coming to terms with life's deepest wounds makes How Happy to Be a wholly satisfying and striking novel.

How Happy to Be

Does good fortune always change things for the better? The Kaplan family has just won 10 million dollars in the lottery. But haven’t they always been lucky? Gwen thought so. She’s carefully curated a perfect suburban existence with a loving husband and two children. For over a decade, she’s been a stay-at-home mom, devoted to giving her kids the quiet, protected adolescence she didn’t have. But the surprise windfall suddenly upends the family, allowing them all to dream a little bigger and catapulting them back to the city that Gwen fled years ago. As the Kaplans navigate the notoriety that the lottery brings and try to adjust to their new lives in the upper class—Seth launches a dubious start-up, Maddie falls headfirst in love at her elite prep school—a tightly held secret is unlocked. Along with the truth come long-buried memories from Gwen’s troubled youth, forcing her to confront her painful past and threatening to unravel the incredibly tight bond between her and Maddie. Her meticulously constructed identity as the good wife and mother begins to crack. And when their changed circumstances place her family under threat, Gwen must wake up from her domestic slumber. For readers of Meg Wolitzer, Liane Moriarty and Zoe Whittall, Katrina Onstad’s new novel explores whether our most intimate relationships can survive our most unforgivable actions. Stay Where I Can See You is a penetrating story about the pendulum swing of fortune, the ferocity of mother–daughter devotion and the stories we tell—and withhold—because of love.

Katrina Onstad

About

Books

Join the club