by Nadia Wassef
In Egypt Essentials, we’d provided at least thirteen ways of looking at our country. In the case of self-help, I hoped that the establishment of its philosophical lineage might restore to it some of its lost sophistication and nuance. In my mind, the awareness of its illustrious past, which focused on the transfer of wisdom and the lofty aspiration of assisting readers in their pursuit of meaning, might help balance the cheapening onslaught of TV adaptations, ridiculous spin-offs, and soulless franchises that plagued the modern self-help-book market.
Advice on living well seemed to have been a central project of most civilizations, once they managed to survive ice ages and ferocious beasts. Ancient Greek texts peddled meditations, aphorisms, and maxims on eudaemonia, “the good life.” From the fifth century BC to the Hellenistic period, Greek philosophers tackled issues pertaining to bettering the self in order to lead a worthier life. Plato emphasized man’s obligation to the common good. Socrates advocated for questioning one’s own existence. Aristotle believed that a virtuous person excels at being human. Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, suggested that we can live a virtuous life, a good life, by being in harmony with nature, with our surroundings. From highbrow to lowbrow, philosophy to self-help, the central concern of humans, once survival was guaranteed, was to thrive, to do and be better. Seeing the self-help genre as a continuation of this human quest began to attenuate my animosity toward it.
The mirror-of-princes genre, inspired by the writings of the ancient Greek historian Xenophon, told of the deeds of kings and notables for emulation, with a few cautionary tales. After the invention of the printing press, these texts found wider audiences. Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528) and Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo (1558) brought forth the era of savoir vivre books, which told people how to behave. Niccolò Machiavelli’s infamous political philosophy treatise from 1513, The Prince, to this day sells very well in Diwan—in the Philosophy section. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, an ancient Chinese military treatise written around 500 BC, became a bestseller among our business books. I always wondered what made these books popular at this particular time, in this particular corner of the world. I read that Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations was a bestseller in contemporary China. The promise of agency in these books must have been tantalizing to those of us who felt helpless, whether politically or personally. The ancient Romans transcribed multivalent self-help texts of their own. Cicero, the translator of Greek philosophy into Latin, and one of the most prolific authors of the age of Julius Caesar, wrote De Amicitia (On Friendship), De Senectute (On Old Age), and De Officiis (On Duty), advising Romans on how to live and be in different stages and contexts in their lives. These subjects are still pertinent. I worry about my friendships, my responsibilities, and how to deal with myself and others as I grow older. I know other people share these concerns because they buy books that promise to guide them.
It’s true that there is nothing new under the sun. Nor under the covers. Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) and Remedia Amoris (Remedies of Love) prove that our obsession with love, relationships, and sex is ancient history. Ars Amatoria, a didactic poem in three parts, took courtship and eroticism as its central themes. In the first part, Ovid tells men how to land a woman, and in the second, how to retain her. The third part addresses women directly, explaining how to find a guy and not lose him. Conscious that all in this world is transient, Ovid instructed his readers how to end love affairs in Remedia Amoris. These books received tremendous attention in Ovid’s lifetime and for many centuries after. And in these swatches of history, threads connected ancient Egypt’s sebayts, ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, and modern-day self-help, the target of my disdain. While the themes were consistent, the form shifted over time. As a bookseller, I learn from my customers. As a student of literature, I wasn’t sure I could cast aside my biases to learn anything. Then again, my friend Yasmin always says, “Why would life give you a gentle nudge if it can hit you over the head with a sledgehammer instead?”
* * *
“Take these. Once you’ve read them, we’ll need to discuss,” ordered Nehaya, our multimedia and stationery buyer, and (in typical Diwan fashion) Nihal’s younger cousin.
“What the fuck are these? And why are you handling books now?” I asked.
“I’m not. I bought these for you. You’re a disaster and you need help,” she said, placing two books on my desk and leaving the office. I examined her gifts: The Rules and Why Men Love Bitches. I skimmed the blurbs on the back, and then the tables of contents. Sure, I was a little out of my element, but to call me a disaster felt unfair. I just needed time. Number One and I had divorced a year ago. Shit! It was three years ago. Still, he was the last man I’d gone out with, and that had happened before I had a cell phone. Since then, I had wholly thrown myself into Diwan’s expansion. I worked constantly, my strategy for mending my broken heart and filling the gap left by my marriage—I had really become Mrs. Diwan. I dreamed about the bottom line. I saw red everywhere. In my waking life, I was busy brainstorming our annual marketing plan, overseeing the purchasing and restocking of English titles, and parenting a five- and a seven-year-old. Dating was beyond my bandwidth.
But there was no escape from Nehaya’s persistence. She took after Nihal in that way. Her name in Arabic literally means “the end” or “ending.” There was an appropriate finality, an impatience, in her affect. She was aggressive and unapologetic by nature, and she could outtalk anyone. She had wiry brown hair, a nose stud, and menacing eyes perfect for staring down suppliers and colleagues. She was mechanical in her efficiency and resilient in her life.
One evening, a few days later, Nehaya invited me to meet for an ostensibly spontaneous drink.
“Tell me about your progress.” She launched into the subject without preliminaries, assuming I would understand her inquiry immediately, which, admittedly, I did.
“I’ve skimmed.”
“That’s not good enough. You have to really read them. And you have to obey them. You can’t be so skeptical or halfhearted. You have to play by their rules.”
“You, and your cousin, are unbelievable!” Nehaya looked unfazed. “The last time someone gave me a self-help book, I divorced him.” It’s true: I have never sought out self-help books, but for some reason they keep being thrust upon me. During the final years of our marriage, Number One bought me a copy of Richard Carlson’s Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … and It’s All Small Stuff, because he felt that Diwan was bringing too much stress into our marriage. At first, I was offended. Then I read it. It worked, and I was furious. I couldn’t pinpoint when I’d become such a control freak. I’d always been filled with dread about the utter uncertainty of life. Control was a useful fallacy. It allowed me to maintain a sense of agency. Carlson argued that controlling people, like me, become perfectionists due to our fragile egos. We can’t tolerate being wrong, criticized, or weak. We lose our sense of perspective in the process and everything takes on equal importance: from laundry to taxes to broken bones to burst pipes. Any deviation from our plans becomes catastrophic. The book advocated for simple changes, like doing one thing at a time. It provided mental tools for aggravating situations, like imagining people who annoyed you as babies in diapers. For the duration of time that I was conscious of my own thoughts and actions, the advice of not sweating the small stuff had worked. Then, as with most people and most self-help books, I stopped being mindful and the guidance stopped working. But it does work for long enough to convince us of its success and our potential.
“That’s not why you got divorced. And anyway, it’s been a few years,” said Nehaya unhelpfully.
“Nehaya, I’m a feminist. I can’t—”
“Shut up. I don’t care. I’m a feminist, too. And guess what? There’s not a fucking manifesto that says we can’t read books about landing guys.”
“I’m not one of these women who can’t live without a man.”
“I didn’t say you were. But the dating sc
ene has changed. Why don’t you read about it so you can better control it?” She forged ahead. “These books changed my life. They will interrupt your bad habits and bad behavior.”
“You know I’m suspicious of easy wisdom.”
“Get over it and help yourself.”
“What if this particular self is beyond help?” I semi-joked, getting up to refill our glasses. I couldn’t admit what I really feared: that I, and everyone else, was beyond redemption. That the self-help genre was created to assuage, and conceal, the deep-seated alienation of being alive under capitalism, under patriarchy, under all other broken systems. That individual self-improvement is a misguided antidote to our increasing isolation from nature, family, and community. Still, I’m not immune to the pleasure of buying something, even if I know it won’t fix my larger problem. My vitamin cabinet is full of supplements promising limber tendons, stronger nails, and improved immunity. I have yet to swallow one of those pills.
* * *
Diwan’s self-help customers flocked to titles that promised painless healing. I remember one interaction perfectly. “I am so happy that I don’t have to bring these books back from America anymore. My husband loves Diwan because he doesn’t have to pay excess baggage when we travel,” gushed a customer as she glossed over a selection of Chicken Soup for the Soul titles. Ahmed, still one of Diwan’s best booksellers, newly promoted to customer-service supervisor, stood two paces to her side, his hands clasped behind his back. I watched her eyes dart from cover to cover along the table. Finally, the veiled woman ventured: “I’ve read all these. What other titles do you have?”
“Excuse me while I check,” said Ahmed apologetically. He took it as a personal slight when a customer left Diwan empty-handed.
“I’ll try to make your life easier. I have everything they’ve published until 2008.”
“You’re a dedicated reader.”
“I am. I’ve always been a deep person. My husband says I have the best taste in books.”
“Your husband is a man of vision. But if you don’t mind me saying, I think you should share these books with more people. They’re restorative, and when we come upon something that heals, it’s our responsibility to spread the word.” I listened to Ahmed as he gently persuaded the customer that it was her civic duty to share the insights of Chicken Soup with her community. “Instead of going to someone’s house with sweets or flowers, you should gift them good vibes. They will be in your debt forever.” I felt vague awe from my hiding place behind an adjacent shelf. Once he had escorted the merry client to the cashier with her purchases, he returned to the main book area, giving me a mock salute.
As Diwan had grown, I’d been slowly replaced by a whole team of buyers. I wasn’t ordering or selling books so much as supervising. Ahmed was their filter and their feeder. He talked to customers in stores, gauged their needs, missing titles, new trends, fading fads, and he communicated his findings to the buyers. He suggested we increase our self-help orders. I snapped back, “Why don’t we just throw in the couch and the shrink, and change our license from bookstore to psychiatrist?”
Later, back at my desk, I looked up Chicken Soup for the Soul titles. I realized it was more than a book series. It was an empire. There were 250 titles that had sold more than 110 million combined copies in the U.S. and Canada alone. I learned that it was the most successful trade paperback series of all time. This empire had humble origins. In 1993, its founders, two motivational speakers, had set out to gather and publish tales of everyday people overcoming adversity. This project would mutate and expand over time, encompassing a slew of branded products generating more than two billion dollars in retail sales, including, in 2004, a pet food.
The books themselves seemed harmless enough: preachy and ingratiating, sure, but anodyne. But the exponential growth of branded content disturbed me. It seemed in direct contradiction to the folksy, soothing stories the books sold. Flashback to the franchiser who wouldn’t shake my female hand. He’d painted a picture of mini-Diwans, stand-alone cafés, flagships in malls, university stores, and seasonal outlets. We’d rejected him, but maybe we’d fulfilled his vision. Chicken Soup for the Soul seemed to symbolize the perverse, but profitable, end result of such an expansion. Despite targeting myriad audiences—beach lovers, NASCAR watchers, menopausal women, golfers, and followers of pri- marily Western religions—they have never published a collection for Hindus, Buddhists, or Muslims. I wonder if the veiled customer knew, or cared.
* * *
Sometimes, walking through the aisles of Diwan, I would look at all our books through the self-help lens. Pride and Prejudice becomes a quirky how-to-land-a-guy manual. The Iliad is a mirror-of-princes morality tale. The Arabian Nights is a literal survival guide. Context is everything. Take one of Diwan’s bestselling titles, a crossover from fiction to self-help: Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. I found the author annoying. His books—à la Chicken Soup—were constantly propagating into branded goods and knickknacks, from calendars to diaries to mini-hardbacks of soulful quotations that besieged every holiday season. Of course Nihal loved him. Of course that made me despise him more. Customers kept buying him, which forced me to increase my order quantities and suggested that maybe I didn’t know my customers and my market as well as I thought. In the spirit of learning from others and wanting to know what all the fuss was about, I decided to read him.
As with my previous purchase of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, I disavowed any link to The Alchemist, protesting my personal shopper status to the cashier once more. When I got home that evening, I had dinner with Zein and Layla, reread their favorite installment of Captain Underpants to them, tucked them in amid repeated cries for an encore, and then settled down to my own required reading for the night. I turned the cover and flipped through the first pages, debating whether to skip the preface. I settled on a quick skim, pausing at the words “In the course of this book I pass on everything I have learned.” I panicked at what sounded like oversharing. I just wanted to get through the book, to understand what the hype was all about. No one warned me about seismic revelations and soulful excavation.
The Alchemist tells the story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who has a recurring dream. A gypsy fortune-teller interprets the dream, telling him that a treasure awaits him at the ancient pyramids of Egypt. The book chronicles his physical and spiritual journey, at the end of which he realizes that his dream, or his Personal Legend, belongs to something far greater: the soul of the universe.
In the spirit of confessions inscribed on the walls of tombs—famously written as negations—I was not displeased by the book. It is instructive and undemanding, simple and repetitive. Coelho’s copious use of maktub, the belief in fate and determinism, which literally translates to it is written, delighted me, as did the endgame: Santiago’s treasure would be found at the ancient Egyptian pyramids of Giza. And like the khamaseen winds of the Sahara, my customers’ pride in all things Egyptian blew over me, sweeping away my skepticism.
I’d arrived at the book with a set of beliefs that I’d begun to develop in childhood. My parents had drilled in me the conviction that the harder I worked, the better I would be, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, physically, and financially. I developed a disdain for things that came easily. For a moment, the book undid this mindset completely, describing “the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something believed in and desired.” I’d never encountered a better explanation for Diwan. The secret to Hind’s, Nihal’s, and my success was our love and passion, the essential truth of our shared desire to create something sincere that spoke to us. I had hardly even noticed that passion at the time, as I perused shop floors, stacked books, and introduced customers to their new favorite authors. Now, I noticed it because it was no longer there. It was subsumed by the manic urgency to grow, to multiply. Inevitably, the essence had become diluted. But in the midst of this upheaval, I’d begun to realize how creati
ve and gutsy our commitment to spreading culture in its broadest sense had been. We’d tried so many different formats in so many different locations. We didn’t give up until we had to.
By the time I finished the book, the spell had faded. I’d read it to better understand Diwan’s readers, and the market, but I finished it still feeling alienated from both. Good books, I feel, should inquire, suggest, and probe our fixed notions, without giving us new ones. As a student of literature, I had feasted on Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Literature of sustenance and nourishment. Self-help was like Pringles. It required no work to enjoy. This made it popular. Another one of our bestsellers, Steven W. Anderson’s Passing Time in the Loo, a collection of summaries of classics, also let readers cheat, and sacrificed nuance for ease. But in that case, I didn’t mind—because it didn’t promise spiritual healing or guidance; it didn’t conceal its own reason for being. As a bookseller, I had a duty to challenge and broaden readers’ horizons. As a business owner, I owed my partners the deepest margins and the highest sales volumes that I could generate. As a passionate reader, I was allowed to inhabit the latitudes of love and hate.