What name did C.S. Lewis use for his memoir about childhood, imagination, and conversion?

C.S. Lewis used the title Surprised by Joy for his memoir about childhood, imagination, and conversion. The book was published in 1955 and describes the development of his intellectual and spiritual life.

Lewis traces his experiences from childhood reading and imaginative play through his education, service in the First World War, and growing interest in Christianity. In the book, “joy” is not simply ordinary happiness; Lewis uses the term for intense, fleeting experiences of longing that he associated with literature, nature, and the search for transcendence.

Surprised by Joy is not a complete account of every part of Lewis’s life. It ends before some of his best-known later writing and does not provide a full narrative of his marriage to Joy Davidman. Readers sometimes confuse it with A Grief Observed, his much later book about bereavement after Davidman’s death.