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Self-help books : why Americans keep reading them PDF

209 Pages·2005·1.578 MB·English
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Self-Help Books 00.Ftmtter.i-xiv/Dolby 1 2/7/05, 10:14 AM 00.Ftmtter.i-xiv/Dolby 2 2/7/05, 10:14 AM Self-Help Books Why Americans Keep Reading Them sandra k. dolby University of Illinois Press urbana and chicago 00.Ftmtter.i-xiv/Dolby 3 2/7/05, 10:14 AM First Illinois paperback, 2008 © 2005 by Sandra K. Dolby All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America ∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper. 1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1 The Library of Congress cataloged the cloth edition as follows: Dolby, Sandra K., 1946– Self-help books : why Americans keep reading them / Sandra K. Dolby. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-252-02974-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Self-help techniques—United States. 2. Psychological literature— United States. I. Title. bf632.d65 2005 646.7'00973—dc22 2005002017 paperback isbn 978-0-252-07518-6 00.FM.i-xiv_DOLBY.pmd 4 11/8/07, 3:14 PM Contents Preface vii Introduction: Self-Help Books and American Worldview 1 1. American Popular Self-Education 19 2. The Books, the Writers, and Metacommentary 35 3. The Critics, the Simple Self, and America’s Cultural Cringe 56 4. Giving Advice and Getting Wisdom 76 5. Memes, Themes, and Worldview 93 6. Stories 112 7. Proverbs, Quotes, and Insights 135 8. Finding a Use for Self-Help Testimonies 147 Epilogue 157 Notes 161 Bibliography 163 Index 183 00.Ftmtter.i-xiv/Dolby 5 2/7/05, 10:14 AM 00.Ftmtter.i-xiv/Dolby 6 2/7/05, 10:14 AM Preface In the pages that follow, I shall offer some conclusions that I have reached after surveying more than three hundred examples of popular nonfiction currently in print, all of which relate in some way to the American obsession with improving our practical and spiritual well-being. However, let me first say a little about why I have chosen to undertake this study. Recently my sis- ter, Carol, was sorting through some of the accumulated stuff from one of the rooms of my parents’ home when she found a box holding several years’ worth of drawings, paper dolls, handmade books, and assorted glued things evidently contributed by my youngest brother and me when we were around six and nine years old. The cache contained an item that intrigued me be- yond the expected nostalgia and reminiscence—a paper and pencil “news- paper” titled the Sandra Dolby Press (dated May 30, 1956) and bearing the headline “Mrs. Gertrude Dolby reads Bible through 5 and a half times.” There followed front, side, and back view drawings of my grandmother (Mrs. Ger- trude Dolby) and a short (very short) article announcing: “Every day Mrs. Dolby sits down and reads the Bible. She has never failed in reading it yet.” I’ve certainly seen far more impressive creations from nine-year-olds, but what intrigues me—beyond the perhaps interesting fact that indeed I did grow up to be something like a newspaper reporter—was the subject matter itself. I had forgotten how often I would go to my grandmother’s house (she lived alone in the house next to ours) and find her reading the Bible. The reading was a kind of morning ritual, as was writing in her diary. Years later, and some time after my grandmother died, I asked my aunt Ann if I could have the many diaries my grandmother had written. I have them now—skeletal and sugges- tive reminders of those years when I was growing up, those years when I as- 00.Ftmtter.i-xiv/Dolby 7 2/7/05, 10:14 AM viii Preface sumed that anyone who had the time must do that when they get older, must read and think and write. Not all people do read and think and write, of course, and some who do are in fact young rather than old. Nevertheless, the idea that this trio of ac- tivities was somehow a good thing stayed with me. My sense of its “good- ness” was fairly unsophisticated, tied as it was to my love and respect for my grandmother. Yet, increasingly, now as a scholar, a folklorist, with a wealth of tools and theories available to examine such things, I have continued to be intrigued by this process of self-education. This book is my indulgence of that abiding question: Why did my grandmother feel compelled to read and think and write about her own life? Why do humans find it necessary to educate themselves about life, about the spirit or soul, and then write about it? And what form has this urge taken now as one millennium has ended and another begun? For my grandmother, all three activities seemed to be equally important and intertwined. It is too late now for me to ask whether it was important that the reading be from the Bible, though I know she often read poetry as well. It is too late to ask what form her thinking took, though I do know that until her very last years, she served as a teacher for the older adult Sunday school class at her church. Her thinking must have taken some form that could be adapted and discussed in a weekly class. And though I have her di- aries, it is too late to ask how the events of her life and the lives of her friends and family affected her sense of how life is best lived. But my grandmother was in many ways a part of the fin de siècle. She was born in 1879. Her cultural frame of reference included the introduction of the motorcar, World War I, the Jazz Age, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and finally World War II. The 1960s and everything since were not a part of her worldview, and this change-filled era of the 1960s has had a decided in- fluence on the form and direction such introspective self-education has as- sumed among much of the American population during the last part of the twentieth century. It is my aim in this book to examine what I see as the late- twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century answer to this need for self-edu- cation: the popular nonfiction paperback, the self-help book. My argument is that, for many contemporary educated Americans, self-help books provide a welcome resource in the individual effort to grow in wisdom and lead a satisfying life. Furthermore, there are many writers of varying talent and insight willing to provide that accessible wisdom. Self-help books, whether we like it or not, are part of the continuing process of constructing and as- sessing an American worldview. And I admit here at the beginning that my particular slant in the exam- 00.Ftmtter.i-xiv/Dolby 8 2/7/05, 10:14 AM Preface ix ination of this phenomenon—the rise of this body of popular nonfiction literature—is influenced by my own longtime interest in writers or story- tellers as “bearers of tradition,” as we say in the discipline of folklore study. One effect of this slant, combined with my interest in written literature, is greater attention to the texts themselves and their writers rather than to the readers of such books. Thus I have not interviewed people who have read these books, as one would do in a typical ethnography, nor have I compiled statistics about the typical readers, as one might do in a sociological study. Instead, I have addressed a preliminary question, one that seeks to describe the content of these books, and I have aimed my discussion primarily at the general reader, anyone who might find the phenomenon of self-help books in America intriguing, either intellectually or personally. As I have brought my thoughts on the subject to some sort of closure—at least enough to create a title and send off a manuscript—I have come back repeatedly to three books that have recently been published and now lie pro- vocatively on my table, tempting me toward three entirely different ways of treating the subject. One is fairly obvious—Tom Tiede’s Self-Help Nation, published in 2001 with the telling subtitle The Long Overdue, Entirely Justified, Delightfully Hostile Guide to the Snake-Oil Peddlers Who Are Sapping Our Nation’s Soul. Tiede’s book, like Wendy Kaminer’s I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional published ten years earlier, heaps contempt upon the writers— and in fact the readers—of self-help books, gleefully airing all of the worst literary and conceptual sins of the writers and righteously outlining the char- acter weaknesses of the readers who would eagerly take in such rubbish. I will have more to say later about why it might seem tempting to simply pan the whole self-help movement as opportunistic on the part of writers and sheep- like and wimpish on the part of readers, but, in fact, the dismissive tone of Tiede’s diatribe forcefully reminds me of what I, in contrast to Tiede, am about in writing this book. I am, above all, prepared to see the writers and the readers of self-help books as sincere and intelligent people who partici- pate in the formation and articulation of an American worldview. Writing and reading self-help books is part of that process, and the books at the cen- ter of that process need to be taken seriously rather than simply dismissed as modern-day “snake-oil” remedies. My aim is to examine those books care- fully and fairly, using the tools of folkloristics, my academic discipline. I intend, then, not to write a popular critique such as Tiede’s Self-Help Nation. A second book on my table is Douglas V. Porpora’s Landscapes of the Soul, published in 2001. Unlike Tiede’s book, Porpora’s volume has two ap- pendices, copious endnotes, a large bibliography, and an index. This is clearly an academic work, and its subtitle, The Loss of Moral Meaning in American 00.Ftmtter.i-xiv/Dolby 9 2/7/05, 10:14 AM

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