Are self-help books ever helpful? We think these ones may well be ...
Ten books we love that could change your life for the better plus authors, old and new, who may inspire you
Lorraine writes: It seems to me that most women are on a lifelong quest for self-improvement, a journey to ‘be better’ that starts in our teens. This drive makes us susceptible to ideas that promise to ‘fix’ us or our lives and to correct what we see as our flaws or improve us in some way. It’s emotionally dangerous, in my opinion, to sit for a long time, decades even, with the feeling of not being quite right, maybe it gently nibbles away at your confidence and self-worth?
I have been reflecting on this a lot lately as I’ve reached my mid-fifties – an era of reckoning, awakening, and retrospective introspection. It’s not fixing I feel I need, more fine tuning and reassuring but for a long time I bought into the idea I wasn’t quite there physically or mentally. And I was the editor-in-chief of Cosmo in the late nineties: self-help HQ. I can’t tell you how many cover lines I wrote based on new self-help trends (Gen X’s version of ‘wellness’) promising women ‘7 ways to be more successful in work, in love, in marriage, in bed, in a bikini’. I regret some of this heavy-handed self-improvement advice now of course but I also know we helped many women find their voice through these features and indeed learn to put themselves first or take more care of themselves. We empowered them, as young editors would say today, with information, but did we deliver it in the right language and with the right goal? It’s a confusing conundrum for me because something about buying into or promoting the feeling that women must fix themselves goes against the grain; probably because I suspect many may feel they have to do this to please others, that it’s a quest to be a better version for society, rather than because it is good for themselves or makes them personally happy.
Anyway I am still musing on all this, and will write more soon but Trish and I are constantly chatting about the ways we can improve women’s lives by giving them more information and taking care to do it in the kindest, calmest way possible nowadays. We have after all lived through the Bridget Jones calorie counting, man pleasing era which still discombobulates us frankly and between us we have read every self-help book on offer from “Who Moved My Cheese?” via “Surrounded by Idiots” to “The Power of Now”. We’ve also been nurtured by women like Oprah in the noughties towards a softer self-help era which feels more welcoming, less judgemental and complicated. Today it’s all about manifesting, healing, gratitude, and journaling, whereas we faced a lot more ‘man-up’ and ‘harness your inner wonder woman’, ‘my way or the highway’ type of advice. And I notice that today there is much more science - or neuroscience - involved in self-help which can only be a good thing.
As we’ve been pondering the legacy of the changing self-help narrative Trish and I thought we’d pull together recommendations for inspirational books which have genuinely helped us reframe our personal thinking without making us feel ‘less than’, books that changed our lives or minds on things.
A sort of ‘learning & loving’ list of books for you this summer before that back-to-school feeling hits later down the line. Some are new, some are retro and some inspirational rather than pure self-help. Enjoy!