Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone

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Description

Beth Lisick has had a lifelong phobia of anything slick, cheesy, or that remotely claims to provide self-empowerment. But on New Year's Day 2006, she wakes up finally able to admit that something has to change. Determined to confront her fears head-on, Beth sets out to fix her life by consulting the multimillion-dollar-earning experts. In Chicago, she gets proactive with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In Atlanta, she struggles to understand why "women are from Venus." She gamely sweats to the oldies on a weeklong Cruise to Lose with Richard Simmons on the high seas of the Caribbean. Throughout this yearlong experiment, Beth tries extremely hard to maintain her wry sense of humor and easygoing nature, even as she starts to fall prey to some of the experts' ideas-ideas she thought she'd spent her whole life rejecting.

Reviews

"Lisick has created a hilarious, knowing tale of a year of willing ridiculousness." -- San Francisco Chronicle "A witty, disarmingly earnest account of the year [Lisick] spent test-driving renowned self-help franchises." -- Entertainment Weekly not only hilarious but enlightening... Readers will be inspired: If a woman in a banana suit can clean her closet and pay off her credit card debt, surely you can, too." -- People "sweetly neurotic, funny and occasionally insightful." -- Los Angeles Times "wildly funny" and "a cross between David Sedaris and Susan Orlean." -- Seattle Times "Beth Lisick's latest book is a wildly fun read that falls somewhere in between memoir and a Cliffs Notes guide to the self-help genre." -- Bust Magazine "A delightful, Plimptonesque exercise in immersive journalism...sharp, irreverent and endearingly screwed-up." -- Kirkus Reviews

Author Bio

Beth Lisick, author of the New York Times bestseller Everybody into the Pool, is also a performer and an odd-jobs enthusiast. She has contributed to public radio's This American Life and is the cofounder of the monthly Porchlight storytelling series in San Francisco.