by C. P. Boyko
The only way to do that was to speak in their idiom, to adopt the language of the self-help books themselves.
He would write a self-help book to end all self-help books—an anti-self-help book. He would write a satire.
The writing came easily. Almost too easily—for, as Nietzsche said, “The sum of the inner movements which a man finds easy, and as a consequence performs gracefully and with pleasure, one calls his soul.” Till now, Bird had taken it as axiomatic that writing was like giving birth: there had to be labor pains. In the past he had never been able to produce more than four or five hundred words a day, for he could not commit a single sentence to paper without becoming paralyzed by the thought that this one idea could be written a million different ways. Nietzsche said that the great writer could be recognized by how skillfully he avoided the words that every mediocre writer would have hit upon to express the same thing. Bird, who wanted only to be understood, would struggle desperately to hit upon those mediocre words; but everything he produced looked awkward, unnatural, flamboyantly recherché. Now, for the first time, the words suggested themselves. He turned out a thousand, fifteen hundred, two thousand words a day. He felt himself almost physically taken over by the project—much the same way (or so he imagined) that Nietzsche had been taken over by the writing of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It was as if this was what, and how, he had been meant to write all his life; and this thought, so damaging to his scholar’s ego, was the only dark spot on the otherwise ecstatic joy of composition.
He found that he could mimic the self-help books’ conventions almost effortlessly, and indeed with pleasure, for in this medium that he had no respect for he could let himself go completely. Like a patient playing a villain in a psychodrama, he was free to say and do things he would never have said or done in his own person. It was downright cathartic.
He easily mastered the loose (i.e., ungrammatical), chatty (i.e., slangy), chummy (i.e., badgering) prose style, and had a knack for turning out phrases that could have been self-help boilerplate: “If you don’t give in to your true self, your true self will give in to you.” “Smiling is not a panacea—but it is a good cure for a frown.” He managed to sustain the requisite tone of manic enthusiasm for over 300 pages through an unending barrage of italics, underscoring, boldface, capital letters, funny fonts, and other typographical tricks for signaling emphasis. He disguised his extended sermon as an interactive dialogue by putting a lot of obtuse questions into his reader’s mouth (“I know, I know, you’re thinking: But does this really apply to me?”) and then answering them (“You bet it does, buster! It applies to everyone”). He borrowed the authority of great thinkers of the past, quoting everyone from Milton to Emerson (especially Emerson). He capitalized dubious concepts and gave them Unnecessary But Impressive Abbreviations (e.g., UBIAs). He manufactured supportive anecdotes and testimonials as needed. He employed a sort of pietistic scientism, citing “recent scientific studies” to demonstrate anything he wanted to demonstrate. He adopted at times a plodding conscientiousness, making clear what was already clear, defining terms in no need of defining, providing several synonyms for commonplace words, as if combating not just the reader’s skepticism but their unfamiliarity with the English language. He was shamelessly repetitive, writing the same sentence several times in a single chapter, often verbatim. He summarized chapters in forewords and again in afterwords. He filled entire pages with synoptic tables and lists. (Self-help authors loved lists, especially lists with seven or ten items.) He created an outrageously transparent self-quiz which claimed to help the reader measure their “striving index,” that is, the degree to which they overexerted themselves. (Question number 47: “Do you exert yourself excessively? Never. Rarely. Sometimes. Often. Always. (Circle one.)” Question number 89: “Are you the kind of person who ‘overdoes’ it? Never. Rarely. Sometimes. Often. Always. (Circle one.)”) He drew beautifully absurd diagrams of abstract ideas or psychological entities that were simply not susceptible to pictorial representation, and chuckled happily over them:
So (some of my readers may be forgiven for wondering), if Letting Go was written as a parody, a joke—then Jim Bird is a fraud? All his bestselling books, and the lucrative seminars spun off from them, are just a big hoax?
Not so fast, buster.
It is true that, soon after Bird sent the manuscript off to his agent, the joyous inspiration of composition faded and he ceased to think very highly of the project. It had been a distraction when he had needed one. It had siphoned off some of the anger he felt towards his wife. It had been, he supposed, a kind of primal-scream therapy. But now, in the deafening silence with which his agent received the manuscript, Bird felt acutely embarrassed by his cathartic howls. A person’s respect for their own accomplishments is usually proportionate to their efforts; because Bird had not experienced any labor pains, he could not feel as though he had given birth. The manuscript was not his child, but something he had sloughed off. He had produced it as he grew hair, and once one’s hair becomes detached from one’s head, one tends to view it with disgust.
His agent, a broker of scholarly monographs to university presses, understandably did not know what to make of the manuscript. Whether or not it was intended as a joke, she did not think it was likely to help her client’s academic career. So she sat on it, and did nothing. When, a year later, Bird wrote to ask if he could shop it around to publishers himself, she readily consented. (Later still, when the book appeared and soon shot to the #1 spot on the New York Times “advice” bestseller list, where it would stay for seventeen weeks, she casually consulted her lawyer to find out if she might still be contractually entitled to some of the royalties. She was told that it would depend on whether or not Bird had kept a copy of her consenting letter. The agent decided not to pursue the matter; instead, to savor the delicious sense of having been wronged, she annulled her contract with Bird herself.)
For a year, Bird was content to leave the book alone. But when he finally picked it up and read through it again, he was surprised. Because he had had time to forget much of it, and because it was not written in his usual labored style, he found that he could almost read it as the work of someone else—which is, of course, the best possible way to read one’s own work.
It was undeniably silly, and dumb, and sloppily written—but then, he thought, so were all self-help books. And this was undeniably a self-help book.
But this one was different. This one said something he agreed with. This author, he felt, had gotten something right.
You are (this author wrote) a piece of fate. Your body and your mind are governed by physical laws and necessities. That means you yourself are a law and a necessity. To improve yourself—to change yourself—it would be necessary to change the laws and necessities of the physical universe!
Because you think you should be able to improve yourself, you feel pain and anguish when you fail to do so. You beat yourself up for not being better, for not being different. But NO ONE is to blame for who they are or who they are not!
Hating yourself for not being someone else is like hating a rock for being a rock. It’s not being you that makes you unhappy, it’s wanting to be someone else.
You are who you are. You can’t be anyone else. Why would you want to be?
This, to Jim Bird, sounded familiar, and true. He had, it seemed, almost despite himself, written something of value. It was not a spoof, but an antidote.
When he sent the manuscript to several of the most prominent publishers of self-help books, he did so with some lingering shame (which was not much alleviated by signing his cover letters “Jim Bird” instead of “James R. Bird, Ph.D.”). He still feared, at this point, that someone would see through him, would see that he was only joking. This fear finally began to diminish when the book was enthusiastically accepted by a large and powerful publishing house. It diminished further when the book was launched, and still further when it began to sell in astounding numbers. No one called him a fraud. No one said, “
But you’re just a philosophy professor at a cut-rate university. What do you know?” On the contrary, letters began to pour in from across the country assuring him that he had said something true, something of value. He began, naturally enough, to believe it. He resigned his tenure at the university. He began to receive, and then to accept invitations to speak in public, to sign books, to be interviewed on television. He started to plan a second book, one that would rectify the flaws of the first, clear up some of his readers’ misconceptions, and forestall further misreadings. By the time his ex-wife accosted him after one of his sold-out lectures, the feeling that he would be exposed as a sham had been almost completely extinguished.
“You’re looking well,” he said, sincerely and with a lack of malice that astonished himself. He noticed that she wasn’t holding a copy of his book.
“You,” she said, “are looking like you’re making a tremendous fool of yourself.”
After that, the self-help guru took his new career very seriously indeed.
MONDAY.
“Hi everybody, I’m—”
“Could you stand up for us?”
The girl stood awkwardly. “Well, I’m Sonja, and one thing about me is that I’m a waitress and a single mom.” She got it out in one breath and sat back down. Margo smiled and clapped softly, but no one joined in.
Be quiet, she told herself.
“Now Sonja,” said Ethan, pressing the tips of his index fingers against his lower lip, “is waitressing something you are, or something you do?”
Not sure whether to stand again to answer, she hovered briefly, half-crouched, above her chair. “Something I do?”
And so it went. “Tell us, John, are your grandchildren something you are, or something you have?” “Now Lottie, do you think jogging is something you are, or something you like?” Everyone sheepishly agreed that what they’d thought they were was actually just something they did or had or felt or liked.
At first Margo didn’t understand; surely “single mom” was not just something you did? But then she was reminded of an activity they’d done at Personal Pursuit, the “rock-bottoming” exercise. The instructor kept asking variations on the same question; the idea was to dig deeper, to evaluate your stock responses, to unearth what you really meant or really felt about something. This in turn reminded her of the Martian exercise they’d done at Best You: “I’m sorry, I’m from Mars, what do you mean by ‘single mom’? … What do you mean by ‘not married’? … What do you mean by ‘relationship’?” There, the point had been to peel away the layers of assumptions and conventions, to strip away the veneer of the self you presented to the world, and reveal the precious, if perhaps unlovely, self as you saw it. Maybe this was like that.
By the time Ethan pointed his praying hands at her, Margo had prepared and mentally recited what she felt was an unobjectionable introduction.
“Well Ethan, and everybody, hi. I’m Margo, though mostly folk call me Mar. In order of personal importance, I am … the proud mother of two wonderful and successful grown daughters, I am the co-owner and part-time manager of a flower arrangement and delivery business, I am an actor and a playwright, I am a novice watercolor painter, I am a hobby gardener, I am a former—”
Ethan cut her off: “Now, Margo, is painting something you are, or something you do?”
She’d known it was coming, but still the question perplexed her. “Well Ethan, painting is certainly something I do, but painter, I think, is something I am …”
“Are you a painter, or someone who paints?”
She saw his point, or thought she did: she was just a dabbler. But she hadn’t claimed to be a professional. “Someone who paints, I guess.”
He accepted this as conclusively damning and shifted his attention to the next woman.
“Wait a second,” she said. (Shut up, her mind barked at her.) “Isn’t what you do part of what makes you who you are?” She looked around the room for support, and found it: everyone was smiling mildly and nodding at her.
“Let me turn that around and give the question back to you, Margo. If driving home one night you—God forbid—ran someone over, would that make you a ‘murderer’?”
She was too flabbergasted to say anything more than “I guess not.” After a moment’s reflection she wanted to ask if she’d run over this person on purpose, then realized that this was not the crux of the matter. Yes, she thought, if I killed someone, that would make me a killer—wouldn’t it? But it was too late to argue. Everyone was already smiling and nodding at the woman next to her, whose name Margo had missed.
TUESDAY.
He was fortyish, he smelled good, and his name was Bread.
She smiled her two-thirds amused smile. “Bread?”
“Bread,” he repeated.
She felt the smile going stale. “Brett?”
“Bread,” he said. “With a D.”
Finally it dawned on her. He had an accent.
“Oh, Brad!” she almost shouted, then felt stupid: she sounded like she was correcting his pronunciation of his own name.
“Two minutes,” called Ethan, “starting … now.”
She had offered to go first. So she started talking.
One of the problems with self-help books is their smug, apodictic tone—the way they make sweeping declarations, as if these were established facts applicable to everyone at all times. But anyone who has cultivated the moral belief that we are all unique individuals with unique needs will bridle at the notion that one size of advice fits all. Reading these books’ prescriptions, we quite naturally and instinctively start to imagine scenarios in which, or people for whom, this advice would be laughably inappropriate—or even disastrous. For example, I found myself, when reading John Gray’s really quite harmless “101 ways to score points with a woman,” picturing all the women I knew who would be somewhat less than swept off their feet by your “offering to sharpen her knives in the kitchen” (#63), showing her that you are interested in what she is saying “by making little noises like ah ha, uh-huh, oh, mm-huh, and hmmmm” (#80), or “letting her know when you are planning to take a nap” (#23). It was also good cynical fun to dream up men for whom “treating her in ways you did at the beginning of the relationship” (#61) or “touching her with your hand sometimes when you talk to her” (#78) would be bad advice. Try it yourself.
This is just what William Gaddis does in his novel, The Recognitions. He lampoons the cult of Carnegie through one overearnest disciple, Mr. Pivner, who applies the principles of winning friends and influencing people even when being accosted by a crazy man on a New York City bus. Even “at this critical instant,” his training does not fail him: he recalls chapter six, “How to Make People Like You Instantly,” which advises him to find something about the other person that he can honestly admire.
—What a wonderful head of hair you have, said Mr. Pivner. The man beside him looked at the thin hair on Mr. Pivner’s head, and then clutched a handful of his own. —Lotsa people like it, he said. Then he sat back and looked at Mr. Pivner carefully. —Say what is this, are you a queer or something?
Mr. Pivner’s eyes widened. —I … I …
This is funny, if not exactly convincing. Why, for instance, does Mr. Pivner want to make this man like him instantly? To blame Dale Carnegie or his book for this silly exchange is not quite fair.
Most of the criticisms of Jim Bird suffer from the same sort of straw-man irrelevance. It is all too easy to imagine people (serial killers and pedophiles are most commonly adduced) who perhaps should not be encouraged to accept themselves, or to stop striving to change who they are. But what about the average person? What does someone of average intelligence with average-sized problems get, or not get, out of a Healthy Self seminar?
What Margo had hoped to get was a little inspiration. This was her fourth self-improvement seminar. The first one, which she had attended nearly ten years ago, had helped her get over, or “get past,” her husband Bill’s death. The second one had given he
r the courage to change careers—to give up acting. The third one, three years ago, had revealed to her that her daughters no longer depended on her and that she had the right to pursue her own happiness; that is, it had helped her to move out and remarry without guilt. Now, having left Bertie, her second husband, and moved back home, she knew only that she needed to change her life again. She was 55 and didn’t know who she was or what she should be doing. She felt as though she had forgotten her lines, misplaced her script. At night, in bed, she couldn’t sleep, because she didn’t know what to do with her teeth: if she held them together, she felt as though she were clenching her jaw; if she held them apart, she felt as though she were gawping. Nothing felt natural anymore. Nothing felt normal.
She told some of this to Brad, but found it difficult to concentrate with him staring at her. When it was his turn to speak, she found it even more difficult to listen. They were sitting, as instructed, facing each other, with feet flat on the floor, hands on knees, and backs straight. This posture did not make her feel “open,” “receptive,” or “attentive,” but stiff and ridiculous, and this sense of her own ridiculousness acted as a far greater barrier to receptivity than crossed arms or slouching ever could have. She was also not supposed to speak while he talked, but it took a conscious effort of will to suppress every syllable of encouragement or simple acknowledgement—every ah ha, uh-huh, oh, mm-huh, and hmmmm. But the worst was the enforced eye contact. It was simply not natural to stare steadily into someone’s eyes while you talked at them. It was faintly aggressive, a sort of challenge: What do you think of this, hey?