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Back in 1991 when she started writing Abundance, Ban Breathnach was angry and envious. She had survived a freak but serious accident--a ceiling tile had fallen on her head in a restaurant. The thought of continuing to write books about Victorian doilies and manners filled her with dread. She turned to a survey of philosophy, religion, history and poetry, and one day made a list of 100 things that were good in her life. The way to jump-start happiness, she decided, was to stop looking for what she didn't have and look instead at what she did have: breathing the same crisp spring morning air as the richest person in town, loving your kids as much. Just because that's what all the major religions preach and your mother told you a hundred times doesn't mean it doesn't bear repeating. She'd found the topic for her next book.
Ban Breathnach began to chart the journey from resentful to contented. She filled her writing with references to Buddha and the Bible, Rebecca West and Zsa Zsa Gabor, the humbling nature of hair, the joys of sleep as opposed to sex and how to compensate when you have neither. Paramount is the importance of simplicity and order: If you take it out, put it back.
Her sensibility is feminine, not feminist. Few of her quick fixes involve gross motor skills--perfume, crayon drawings and a hot bath are her nostrums of choice. She honors work, even if she doesn't grapple with the crushing choices that face women whose childbearing years and peak career years coincide. She doesn't say how you can stop for the pot of tea when the car pool, the grocery store and the new ad campaign all beckon at once. Nevertheless, women read Abundance--an engaging, well-written book--then give the book to 10 friends because it rings so true.
Success was not immediate. Ban Breathnach got 30 rejection slips before an editor at Warner Books suggested she restructure the book into 365 daily essays. It worked, and Warner printed 24,000 copies in November 1995. The book juxtaposed the sacred and the silly, pointing out the joy in the full hamper and the empty refrigerator as well as the light at the end of a long night of worry, all in digestible bites. And it sold steadily by word of mouth for months before it found the one reader who counts more than any other--Oprah Winfrey. She invited Ban Breathnach to be on her "People I'd Like to Have Dinner With" show that aired March 21, 1996. Two weeks later, the book leaped onto the New York Times best-seller list, and landed the No. 1 spot a week later. In November 1996, as behooves an author whose animating principle is being grateful, Ban Breathnach produced a sequel, The Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude, dedicated "For Oprah with Love. Thank You." And Oprah kicked in again three weeks ago, featuring the Journal on a follow-up program in which she pointed to a bin of 8,000 letters she had received from viewers about Ban Breathnach's latest project. "We're going to fill this studio [with letters]. What we've started is a national movement, honey," she whooped. She showed celebrities like Roseanne and Bill Cosby in the act of being grateful, listing their blessings in their journals. "If you begin to look at what you have in your life every day...and not on what you don't have, you will begin to see that you have more. I'm telling you it will change your life forever."