Last month I wasn’t being totally honest about what I read in 2022. I left off, almost without thinking, all the self-help I inhale, things with “embarrassing” titles like How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships (listed under my January reads).
Self-help isn’t literary & I want to come across as literary. I’ve been methodically studying literature (a term that also makes me cringe & imagine some tweed-vested British professor) these last few years, trying to pinpoint where, exactly, my writing (my voice, my aesthetics, my joy) exists in our culture. Maybe it’s because I feel my position is precarious that I need to assert that I belong here, that I have “high” taste, that I should be trusted. Hence, hiding all those supposedly embarrassing feminized forms of reading.
But I read self-help because I was not taught how to talk to people, how to communicate with care, and how to work through conflict without running away. I was not taught how to love myself or trust myself or how to sit with difficulty or loneliness or sadness without rushing to numb myself via substances, unsuitable friendships, hemorrhaging money. I know I’m not alone in this.
Last night I dreamt there was a lion under my bed. I slipped out of my room and tried to lock the lion in but the door would not close, the lion would not be caged. No one was around to help me. But the lion wasn’t trying to attack me. I understand, I think, that the lion was some part of myself—strength, courage—I’m continuously tamping down, trying to conceal in order to be a feminine mirror, a warm source of comfort to everyone but myself.
Fuck that. Ok—but how? Alicia Mendez, in The Likeability Trap: How to Break Free and Succeed As You Are, speaks about how debilitating it can be for women, especially at work, to continuously contort to being placating &pleasing, even if we want to be more than footstools or support. I honestly don’t remember what Alicia’s “solutions” to this problem were, but it was validating to be told that this is, indeed, a mammoth & widely-shared catastrophe. I’ve also found all of Sarah Knight’s books (especially F*ck No!: How to Stop Saying Yes When You Can’t, You Shouldn’t, or You Just Don’t Want To) to be liberating, even if their suggestions aren’t particularly radical or mind-blowing (how do you quit your job? You tell your boss you’re quitting—but you do so without shame & with integrity). I got Sarah’s books from my mom’s bookshelves, this seems significant.
Another reason I may have been hesitant to share the self-help I’m reading is because their titles reveal psychological evolutions or subject matter I’m not ready to write or speak publicly about. Last year I read The Baby Decision: How to Make the Most Important Choice of Your Life by Merle Bombardieri, while my husband and I were in a month-long (actually years-long) process of negotiating whether or not we wanted to have a child. Speaking about this is much less emotionally volatile now that we’ve decided together that yes, we do want to try having one child, in a few years. Last year I also read Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson & The Body Never Lies by Alice Miller, aimed at adults who were punished corporeally as children.
And here I am, January 2023, reading (well, listening to in my car on the way to work) How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships by Leil Lowndes. Perhaps the most absurd self-help book I’ve ever read. Leil refers to men as “chaps” unironically, friends as “chums,” and people as “big cats and little cats.” The tagline for the book is “In the human jungle, big cats know a secret.” I don’t believe in social hierarchies or categorizing people as “good or bad,” esp not based off capitalist, colonialist ideals. I don’t believe in gender binaries and Leil’s “men are from mars, women are from venus” thinking. I don’t believe in applying one size fits all tricks to human development while ignoring systemized oppression & the unquantifiable complexity of human beings. And I will not, as Leil suggests, “say derriere instead of butt in polite company.” Girl, what??
But I’m listening to the end, because she continuously reiterates that everyone wants to feel special. Everyone wants to feel cared for and respected, and to hear that you’ve remembered their names and birthdays. All helpful advice as I navigate the challenging customer service elements of my day job, and as I continuously seek to cultivate &nurture genuine human connection.
I read self-help to band-aid the horrifying lack of care in our culture. How do I survive a world in which a woman who’s just received a double-mastectomy is kicked out of her hospital bed, oozing and burning and utterly devastated (Anne Boyer, The Undying). How do I deal when I’m hit with massive dental + car bills at the same time that I’m taking steroids for an earache and my neighbors with their 2am parties have returned and I’m supposed to be peppy and smiling the next morning at my day job? When I want to “winter,” to stay home in a blanket nest with my cat in my lap and a mug of tea that automatically refills and never goes cold?
In Olivia’s recent newsletter she wrote that in times of turmoil, when she cannot write, her life “feels most like a book, or at least the books I read—where the characters flop around aimlessly, thinking dark thoughts.” These are the books I read, too, more frequently than self-help. They mostly do not offer solutions, but they do show human beings thinking deeply about their lives and their larger world, and this act of attention is also a self-administration of care, as well as a vulnerable invitation to receive it.
For years I’ve been dreaming of starting a reading series, a space where writers (women, nonbinary& gender expansive) can share personal stories, a safe container in which these stories can be held, a community of care & deep listening. Personal Velocity aims to live up to this envisioning, and its second reading will be on January 28th at 8pm (I’ll be reading as well as hosting).
Follow us on Instagram & Substack for news & updates.
Love Me Tender by Constance Debré
The Undying by Anne Boyer
America’s Women by Gail Collins
The Subject Line Reads by Blanche Brown
The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison ed by Caits Meissner
A History of My Brief Body Billy-Ray Belcourt
How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships by Leil Lowndes
Cry Perfume by Sadie Dupuis
I loved this so much AND I also love reading self help books, not just books with contemplative and intellectual characters (though I too am guilty of omitting those titles from even my internal lists of read books- like they aren’t an accomplishment on my part somehow?) which is odd because reading them scratches some kind of productivity itch at the same time? Like I’m always in need of improvement? Wow there’s a lot to say on this topic. That Lorrie Moore was also, like, the #1 book for me and made writing about my actual life feel like it could be worth something. See? Even there I skirted sharing my own self help titles and dove into discussing fiction instead ...