Literary therapy

Is there anyone left who’d still be mortified to have it known that they’d purchased, or maybe even benefited from, a self-help book? In recent years, the genre’s gone mainstream: Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life bestrides the bestseller lists, alongside titles on the Danish, Finnish and Japanese secrets to health and happiness, and the life-changing magic of tidying up; Alain de Botton embraces the label, while most ‘big ideas’ books, from Malcolm Gladwell to Yuval Noah Harari, are at least partly self-help in disguise. This is all to the good: we shouldn’t mourn the era when the key signifier of a book’s merit was that it should be impossible to extract anything useful from it. (That attitude would have been alien, incidentally, to the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, who intended their work to be therapeutic.) Moreover, we talk more freely these days about mental health. Admitting that you might want to be happier or more fulfilled than you currently are no longer defines you as a hopeless loser, or an American.

In this context, Help Me!, a debut memoir by the journalist Marianne Power, recounting a year spent attempting to live by the dictates of self-help, risks feeling slightly anachronistic. She presents her plan as a madcap scheme — yet it’s a philosophy already embraced, surely, by anyone who attends a weekly yoga class, tries to meditate, or keeps a journal. What sets Power apart, and makes her book an entertaining read, is the energy she brings to the project: one book a month, from Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway to You Can Heal Your Life via The Secret and Daring Greatly and F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way. The intensity with which she implements their instructions ensures she’ll uncover the worthwhile guidance in each — but more enlightening for herself and the reader, it also brings her to an encounter with the intrinsic limits of such an approach to self-change.