Success -- Psychological aspects |
Self-acceptance in women |
Character |
Electronic books. |
Ethology |
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Summary
Summary
"Consistently entertaining . . . she writes with unflinching honesty . . . Bridget Jones meets Buddha in this plucky, heartwarming, comical debut memoir." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
For years journalist Marianne Power lined her bookshelves with dog-eared copies of definitive guides on how to live your best life, dipping in and out of self-help books when she needed them most. Then, one day, she woke up to find that the life she hoped for and the life she was living were worlds apart--and she set out to make some big changes.
Marianne decided to finally find out if her elusive "perfect existence" --the one without debt, anxiety, or hangover Netflix marathons, the one where she healthily bounced around town and met the cashmere-sweater-wearing man of her dreams--really did lie in the pages of our best known and acclaimed self-help books. She vowed to test a book a month for one year, following its advice to the letter, taking what she hoped would be the surest path to a flawless new her. But as the months passed and Marianne's reality was turned upside down, she found herself confronted with a different question: Self-help can change your life, but is it for the better?
With humor, audacity, disarming candor and unassuming wisdom, in Help Me Marianne Power plumbs the trials and tests of being a modern woman in a "have it all" culture, and what it really means to be our very best selves.
"Equal parts touching and hilarious, Power's account of the year she spent following the tenets of self-help books will make you feel better about your own flawed life." -- People
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this frank, funny, and occasionally heartbreaking debut, journalist Power ably lays bare her yearlong quest to live by the tenets of a different self-help book every month. Power reads Rhonda Burns's The Secret, Get the Guy by Matthew Hussey, and Tony Robbins's Unleash the Power Within. Taking a retreat based on John C. Parkin's F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way, Power travels to Italy with other self-help junkies. None of the ideas changed her life, but Power's book itself becomes her key to self-help. She ruminates on the endless quest to be the best person possible, and the many detours it has inspired. She believes that continually setting the bar higher has made her feel like a failure, and that "perfection comes not from getting what you think you want but from opening your eyes and recognizing that you have everything you could possibly need right now." Already a bestseller in Power's native England, the book will surely find a welcoming American readership. Power's total honesty and openness will make readers realize that, at heart, everyone has similar secret fears and insecurities. Agent: Rachel Mills, Furniss Lawton. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Can there be such a thing as too much help? Freelance British journalist Power decides to focus on one self-help book per month for a year to finally get her life into shape. She not only reads each book but also religiously adopts the advice and attends seminars (when available) sponsored by the authors. Inspired by Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (1987), by Susan Jeffers, Power spends her first month posing nude for an art class, jumping out of an airplane, and doing a stand-up comedy routine. Power taps into such major gurus as Tony Robbins (Unleash the Power Within, 1999), Rhonda Byrne (The Secret, 2006), Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, 1989), and Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now, 1997), with variable success. Along the way, Power falls out with one of her oldest friends, finds herself buried in debt, and becomes depressed by her single status. She is brutally honest about her shortcomings and way too hard on herself. Her journey takes months longer than planned, but she has moments of true enlightenment when she realizes that digging deep can be painful. Some of her plights are hilarious; others are almost unbearably poignant. Self-help seekers will be moved and entertained by Power's over-the-top exploits.--Candace Smith Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SINCE I STARTED writing about self-help books, I've been forced to out myself - I love them. Not to improve myself, of course, since other than my looks and personality and value system, I'm perfect. No, I love them because the good ones can give you a little life jolt that's as useful as a double espresso. The trick to reading these books is to heed one of the primary tenets of the recovery movement: "Take what you need and leave the rest." Alas, Marianne Power didn't get the memo. Power, a British freelance journalist and blogger, believed everything about herself needed overhauling. She knew she was a good person, but she was, to use that wonderful expression, crap at daily life. The book jacket shows an adorable slim redhead. But she hated her thighs and her teeth and her unwashed ginger hair. ("So wash it!" I think, about 20 times, reading along.) She hated her drinking and debt; she hated the fact that she was in her mid-30s and still didn't have a serious relationship. Power had been a self-help junkie for more than a decade: "Like eating chocolate cake or watching old episodes of 'Friends,' I read self-help for comfort. These books acknowledged the insecurities and anxieties I felt but was always too ashamed to talk about. They made my personal angst seem like a normal part of being human. Reading them made me feel less alone." There was also the fantasy element, the promise of being more confident and efficient, richer, more successful, even taller. (Really. Amazon lists a surprising number of books on how to grow taller.) In those years of reading self-help books, did Power turn her life around? No, she did not. Being human, she read and read and did nothing. But, she thought, what if she actually gave herself over to one solid year of self-improvement, following the tenets of a variety of her favorite books to the letter? Each month, she would follow a different book. So, while reading Susan Jeffers's "Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway," she skydived, posed naked for a life-art class and tried stand-up comedy, arguably more terrifying than jumping out of a plane. With Kate Northrup's "Money: A Love Story," she decided to face her debt head on and get to the root of why she had overdrafts on all her credit cards. Trying to be serious about money was so difficult she then decided to follow "The Secret," a book by Rhonda Byrne whose basic principle is that you don't need to do anything but wish and visualize to make great things happen. So she goes from watching every penny to writing herself fake ?100,000 checks and eating whatever she wants because, if you really believe, money (and men and houses and weight loss) will come your way. It's surprising to discover that "The Secret" wasn't written by a 5-year-old, but maybe not surprising to learn that it has sold millions of copies. And so it goes. Walking on hot coal with Tony Robbins. Rejection therapy. Something something with Eckhart Toile that I, personally, will never understand, but it was good enough for Oprah and Paris Hilton, so what do I know? Still. The misery. "I started to see how self-help can be dangerous for someone like me," Power writes. "I was too busy reading books, spouting affirmations and dreaming big to get on with silly stuff like earning enough money to pay the bills." Power occasionally brings the funny; her description of one bad date was a genuine Bridget Jones moment. ("He sounded interesting. He thought so too. I spent two hours being run over by his voice.") But the navel gazing and the guilt about the navel gazing make her go a bit mad about halfway through her journey; she pushes friends and family away, drinks excessively, bolts from perfectly lovely men and continues to avoid washing her hair. Some of those closest to her begin to avoid her. But all have an annoying way of showing up again to tell her that, despite her selfloathing, the rest of the world doesn't see her the way she sees herself. As a writerly contrivance, you can do this once or twice; when you do it over and over the reader begins to think, Maybe she skimped on the self-help books about writing. The contradiction at the heart of many self-help books is that you're supposed to accept yourself more while simultaneously changing to create a better you. I say: Pick one. If you're making daily vision boards and writing yourself fake checks, then the chances of embracing the life you have are kind of slim. If you're doing daily affirmations to yourself in the mirror, naked, learning to love your cottage cheese thighs, that's great; but the chances of losing those thighs aren't so great. Either takeaway from self-help is fine, but instead, Power pingpongs between the two. "Help Me!" is filled with epiphanies that are unceremoniously discarded a few pages later. Perhaps that's the point of the book, but this can be a little exhausting. Diverting and often amusing as it can be to join Power on her George Plimpton-like adventure through some of the classics of self-help, readers won't have trouble anticipating the happy ending. It involves nature and friends and a baby (not her own). Lesson learned: Happiness comes from appreciating the little things. "Now it was time to stop thinking about myself, to look out rather than in. To live life rather than analyze it." Unless there's an offer for a sequel. Then all bets are off. She hated her drinking and debt; she hated the fact that she didn't have a serious relationship. Judith newman writes the Help Desk column for the Book Review. She is the author of "To Siri With Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son and the Kindness of Machines."
Guardian Review
Powers expanded blog on living each month according to a different manual floats over Bridget Jones and Fleabag territory If, like me, you spent your 20s, 30s and maybe a bit more reading self-help manuals, then the titles that Marianne Power name-checks in this memoir will feel like dog-eared old familiars. Theres Susan Jeffers Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway, Stephen Coveys The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Paul McKenna s I Can Make You Rich (although it was actually his companion text I Can Make You Thin that became my personal bible), Rhonda Byrnes The Secret and Jack Canfield s Chicken Soup for the Soul. Some were better than others, but one of the biggest challenges was trying to map a mostly American worldview on to another thousands of miles away. Should you put a picture of your dream condo on your vision board? Did it matter that you had never featured in a high school yearbook or flown across the country to celebrate Thanksgiving with your folks? And what about the whole business of dating, an elaborate etiquette of call and response that bore no relation to what actually went on in the UK in the 1990s, where lifelong relationships usually began in a mutual lunge after a long night in the pub? By the end of the year she planned to be solvent, healthy and loved by a handsome man Perhaps the greatest surprise of Powers Help Me! is the revelation that, 20 years later, these are still among the books that worried thirtysomethings turn to for advice about how to change for which read improve or even rescue their love life, bank balance or body mass index. A few years ago, 36-year-old Power, chronically broke, single and hungover, created a blog in which she described her year-long experiment in living each month according to a different self-help manual. January would be Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, requiring her to pose naked for a life-drawing class and chat up strange men (not, mercifully, at the same time), while February would be all about Kate Northrups Money, a Love Story, which meant Power actually opening her bank statements and selling her unworn but still ticketed clothes. By the end of the year she planned to be solvent, healthy and loved by a handsome man. Back in the 90s, Helen Fielding debuted Bridget Joness Diary in the Independent, before being asked by Picador to expand her pseudonymous column into a book. So it is no surprise that Picador has swooped on Powers blog and is bringing it to market in expanded form. Indeed, its publicity makes much of the connection, hinting shamelessly that Help Me! will do the same cultural work that Bridget Jones performed so stunningly two decades ago. But how can that be? Bridget Jones was telling a particular story about a specific time. In an era of post-feminism how quaint that sounds now having it all had become not so much an option as a tyrannical obligation for educated young women. Bridgets failure to acquire simultaneously the thighs of a gazelle and a position as CEO of an international aid agency were not just a trigger for funny writing but also a sly commentary on the way that second-wave feminism of the 70s and early 80s had resulted not in womens liberation from societys hobbling expectations but capitulation to a whole new, sneakier, version of them. Help Me!, by contrast, is a series of anecdotes about spending a rollercoaster year in which every bit of me was turned inside out (Power is not immune from using the cliches of the books she is trying to critique). She does some public speaking, walks on hot coals (literally, Tony Robbins, the American motivational speaker, is still making people do that, years after he first suggested it as a way to Unleash the Power Within), and almost auditions for The X Factor. What disrupts her plan to humiliate herself at Wembley stadium is the sudden death of her uncle at 59, a family catastrophe that requires her to fly to Ireland to be at her mothers side. And, in fact, it is these lightning bolts of real-life experience, including what sounds like a painful breakdown three-quarters of the way through her experiment, that stops Help Me! floating off into inconsequence. Still, the book retains a certain generic weightlessness. Making art, really funny art, out of the gap between how young women are and how they think they ought to be is still possible 20 years on from Bridget Jones : just think of Phoebe Waller-Bridge s darkly sublime Fleabag. Help Me! floats over the same territory but left me, just like the self-help texts it sets out to interrogate, hungry for something more. Whats missing, ultimately, is that sharp crack of insight that tells us what it feels like to be youngish and female here, now, at this very moment in history. - Kathryn Hughes.
Kirkus Review
London-based journalist Power chronicles the harrowing, often side-splitting adventures she embarked on while pursuing happiness and inner peace."At thirty-six," writes the author, "my friends were ticking off the various life stages while I was stuck in the same life I'd had since my twenties. I was always single, I didn't own a house, and I didn't have a plan." One weekend, while suffering through a particularly wicked hangover, Power decided to undertake an extended safari through the wilds of the self-help aisle. For years, the author had turned to self-help books for "comfort," affirming the commonality of her "insecurities and anxieties." Now, she hit on "an idea that would stop me from being a depressed, hungover mess and turn me into a happy, highly functioning person: I wasn't just going to read self-help, I was going to DO self-help." Power set out to act on "every single bit of advice" offered by a different self-help book each month for a year in hopes of "systematically" tackling her flaws "one book at a time." What began as a 12-month "plan" slowly morphed into a 16-month "roller coaster" as the author torturously plumbed the recesses of her psyche at the behest of self-help and spiritual behemoths like Susan Jeffers (Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway), Tony Robbins, Stephen R. Covey (Power gave up at Habit 2 of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People), and Eckhart Tolle, all in hopes of achieving "some sort of profoundly moving (but neat and tidy) epiphany." During her grand inner tour, Power faced down some of her darkest demons. Throughout this consistently entertaining book, she writes with unflinching honestyand bald hilarity, especially as she encountered deadpan reality checks from her mother, sisters, and skeptical friendsabout the throes of facing her fears, tackling money issues, living in the present, opening herself up to rejection, and getting over her hang-ups with men ("all Power of Now zen vanished in the face of dating").A winner. Bridget Jones meets Buddha in this plucky, heartwarming, comical debut memoir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A New Year's resolution turns into a soul-searching nightmare as journalist Power vows to read and adhere to a new self-help book every month. From rejection therapy to finances to fighting fear to talking to men, Power pushes herself to the limits and discovers that self-help is no joke. Over the course of the year she finds herself jumping from planes, chatting up strangers on the subway, asking a room full of businessmen for a date, doing naked yoga, and walking over hot coals. But has any of it made her a better woman? It's a year of change and discovery but, as Power discovers, sometimes too much looking inward can make us more self-centered and desensitized to what truly matters. Narrated brilliantly by the author and her mother, the wit and candor shines through even the darkest moments. VERDICT Readers will be charmed by this thought-provoking quest on what it takes to be the best version of ourselves.--Erin Cataldi, Johnson Cty. P.L., Franklin, IN