What title did C.S. Lewis use for his 1956 memoir about discovering joy?

C.S. Lewis used the title Surprised by Joy for his 1956 memoir about discovering joy.

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life recounts Lewis’s childhood, education, military service, intellectual development, and movement from atheism toward Christianity. The “joy” in the title is not simply ordinary happiness. Lewis uses the term for intense, fleeting experiences of longing that he associated with imaginative and spiritual desire.

The memoir includes his early love of mythology and literature, his friendship with Owen Barfield, and his return to Christian belief. Lewis describes becoming a theist in 1930 and a Christian in 1931, although the book is a selective autobiography rather than a complete day-by-day record.

The title is sometimes confused with Lewis’s writings on grief or love. A Grief Observed concerns the death of Joy Davidman, while The Four Loves is a separate study of types of love. Surprised by Joy focuses primarily on the formation of Lewis’s mind and faith before his major public success.