Back before the Peloponnesian Wars, when I still believed that men were kinder than horses and that other people held the instruction book to life, I had an encounter with the little gods of the self-help genre -- call it an anti-epiphany -- that I now regard as formative. I was in my mid-30s, old enough to be smart but young enough not to bother, and someone had dashed my heart upon the well-worn rocks of betrayal. I was nonetheless pretending to carry on, and so one morning found me sitting in a heap on my living room floor, surrounded by piles of damp tissue and stacks of incoming books from publishers. Usually the self-help review copies went straightaway to my favorite retirement home (where no one needed them any longer) or neighborhood library (where at least the advice would be free). But that day I was an easy mark for fortune-cookie insights. That day I would have believed the UPS guy if he'd been willing to listen -- he wasn't; I tried -- so I opened one up and began.
Happiness for dummies
It's a cold kind of comfort on the self-help shelves
There was my cad, a mere foot soldier in the war between the sexes! He had many thrilling names and diagnoses: the cruel narcissist, the avoidant male, the emotional predator. So, for that matter, did I, the female lurking in her own little glen of neurosis. I was the intimacy-fearing drama queen, the woman who loved too much or not enough, the perpetrator or victim of myriad offenses: dances of anger, foxtrots of regret, long waltzes of ennui. I gasped in recognition and plowed ahead, burying myself in bad fonts and the kindness of strangers. Years passed, or perhaps 20 minutes. And as my beleaguered cognitive processes struggled to rally, blinking on and off like Tinkerbell, I had my shock of comprehension: Everything I was reading was true.
Well, hey. My tears stopped as abruptly as a park fountain the week after Labor Day. If necessity is the mother of invention, reality is the Grim Reaper for excess sentimentality. What I had glimpsed in my sorry state was the kernel of genius that both fuels the self-help movement and renders it largely useless: that its palliative wisdoms apply to everyone, all of us (at least in the modern bourgeois West) in every possible application of suffering. Late that evening, my chosen library and retirement home each enjoyed an anonymous donation of a couple of boxes of books. And I returned to the age-old poultices for a sprained heart: friends, Kleenex, and time.