![]() ![]() Heti argued that we have been conditioned to find reading for advice déclassé, that “browsing the self-help section of a bookstore seems as shameful as picking up a porn magazine at 7-Eleven.” The same year she wrote that list, she published her second novel, How Should a Person Be? and began a long experiment with her own kind of self-help, borrowing the genre’s favored rhetorical devices in a way that was playful but never mocking. ![]() ![]() “Furstenberg’s conviction,” writes Heti, “that the desire to look great is not a patriarchal illness, but a natural and fine longing, allows me to, guiltlessly, fuss with my hair.” Among her most reassuring suggestions was The Patient Who Cured His Therapist (1992), co-authored by a psychotherapist named Stanley Siegel who, according to Heti, claims we only feel dysfunctional when we insist on trying to function in the first place. Another was Diane von Furstenberg’s Book of Beauty (1976), a memoir that doubles as a lifestyle guide, offering tips on skin care and diet. Twelve years ago, the writer Sheila Heti published a short list of her favorite “secret self-help” books, offering only the criteria that each book had “actually helped me-they’re both precious and practical.” There was Audition (1978), a manual for aspiring actors by the casting director Michael Shurtleff, who claimed to have “discovered” Barbra Streisand singing in a Greenwich Village dive bar among other things, the book teaches you how to create a sense of mystery around yourself where there may be none. ![]()
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