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The Bookseller
Those in crisis shouldn't turn to 'self-help' books, says author Janice Warman. All the help you need can be found in real literature
The self-help industry is growing exponentially; estimates for the US alone peg the market at $10bn, while a search for "self-help" on Amazon yields 41,138 titles. This is good news for self-appointed gurus, publishers and booksellers - but is it good news for the public?
I would argue that there is a far greater source of wisdom available to us all: books. Ordinary books - plays, poetry, novels and biographies - written by people who, like us, have been through the mill. Face it: there's nowhere you've been that someone more articulate hasn't been before. "We read to know we're not alone," said C S Lewis.
It's the sense of recognition we have when we read a poem or a passage that echoes our own experience that is therapeutic. Far more so than being told we can "change our life in seven days" or warned that we might be "a woman who loves too much". This is why we wrote The Hey Nonny Handbook - the literary survival guide for women.
We discovered that when you're in extremis, an Auden poem can console, a paragraph from Fay Weldon can have you howling with laughter - and a Sally Ann Lasson cartoon can convince you that she has a camcorder set on permanent record in your house. Before the book came the Hey Nonny Club: a loose affiliation of women with troubles in their lives. As Chekhov said, "Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day-to-day living that wears you out." Looking through the prism of our own lives - 40 - something women for whom things had just begun to go wrong - we found that our own shelves contained the answer: a medicine chest filled with potent remedies.
We shared jokes, cartoons, short stories, poems, novels and biographies; in fact anything that would shed light on our situation. Our point is not that all self-help books are useless, but that it's becoming increasingly hard to pick out those that are any good. We recommend a few: Lewis Wolpert's Malignant Sadness is excellent on depression, but then so is F Scott Fitzgerald in The Crack-Up. Kingsley Amis is unsurpassed on the curmudgeon's view of women, as are Ibsen and Shaw on marriage, and Gloria Steinem on activism.
We're unashamed advocates of poetry, which illuminates where other forms of writing merely inform, and perhaps provided the earliest form of selfhelp. Our title came from "Much Ado About Nothing", by arguably the greatest poet: "Then sigh not so, But let them go, And be you blithe and bonny, Converting all your sounds of woe, Into Hey nonny, nonny". You know it makes sense.