Self-help books : why Americans keep reading them

209 Pages·2005·1.578 MB·English

by  Dolby, Sandra K.

Self-Help Books
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Self-Help Books
Why Americans Keep Reading Them
sandra k. dolby
University of Illinois Press
urbana and chicago
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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
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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
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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-
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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-
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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
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