Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin
Rubin at the 2014 Brooklyn Book Festival
Born	Gretchen Anne Craft (1965-12-15) December 15, 1965 Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.
Occupation	Author blogger speaker
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Yale University (BA, JD)
Notable works	The Happiness Project Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill Forty Ways to Look at JFK
Spouse	Jamie Rubin (m. 1994)
Website
Official website

Gretchen Craft Rubin (born December 14, 1965) is an American author, blogger and speaker.

Early life and education

Born Gretchen Anne Craft, Gretchen Rubin grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, where her father was a lawyer at the firm of Craft, Fridkin & Rhyne.^[1] She attended The Pembroke Hill School.^[2][3] She received her undergraduate and law degrees from Yale University, was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal and won the Edgar M. Cullen Prize.^[4] She clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then on the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor from 1995 to 1996. After her clerkships, she served as a chief adviser to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt.^[1] She has also been a lecturer at the Yale Law School and the Yale School of Management.

Career

Rubin is a writer on subjects of habits, happiness, and human nature.^[5] She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Better Than Before, Happier at Home, and The Happiness Project.^[6] Rubin's books have sold more than two million print and online copies worldwide in over thirty languages.^[7][8] On her daily blog, GretchenRubin.com, she reports on her adventures in pursuit of habits and happiness. On August 10, 2003, Brian Lamb interviewed her on the television show, Booknotes.

She is author of The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun, along with the follow-up Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life.^[9] Her first book, Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide, parodied self-help books by analyzing and exposing the techniques used to exploit those who strive for those worldly ambitions.^[10][11]

Her book Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life recommends setting manageable goals, and breaking up tasks into small steps.^{[12][13][14][15]}

On her weekly podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin, she discusses good habits and happiness with her sister Elizabeth Craft, a Los Angeles-based television writer.^[16]

Her follow-up to The Happiness Project, Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life, was published on September 4, 2012.

Her two biographies, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill and Forty Ways to Look at JFK uses the "forty ways" structure to explore the complexities of these two great figures and to demonstrate the limits of biography.^[17][18][19]

Personal life

Rubin lives on Manhattan's Upper East Side with her husband, James ("Jamie") Rubin (son of former Clinton-administration Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin),^[20][21] a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and their daughters, Eliza and Eleanor.^[3][22]

Writings

• Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill: A Brief Account of a Long Life. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003. ISBN 978-0-345-45047-0
• Forty Ways to Look at JFK. New York: Ballantine Books, 2005. ISBN 978-0345450494
• Power Money Fame Sex: A User's Guide. Atria, 2005. ISBN 978-0671041298
• Profane Waste. Gregory R. Miller & Company, 2006. ISBN 978-0974364834
• The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. New York, NY: Harper, 2009. ISBN 978-0-06-158325-4
• Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life. New York, NY: Harper, 2012. ISBN 978-0307886781
• Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life. New York, NY: Crown, 2015. ISBN 978-0385348614

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Gretchen Rubin.

• Official website
• Gretchen Rubin on IMDb
• Better Than Before book review via New York Times
• Habit expert, Gretchen Rubin on the Today Show.
• Craft, Gretchen A. (1992). "The Persistence of Dread in Law and Literature.". The Yale Law Journal. 102 (2): 521–546.