How To Give Up Your Obsession With Self-Help

Last night on the train home I sat opposite a large woman, not necessarily fat, but one of those very tall women whose weight is in proportion with their frame. She was wearing a dowdy grey woolen suit of the variety that no-one sells anymore, nor indeed have they done so for the last half a century, and the kind of brown flat-soled shoes worn by ageing members of the church. Her entire appearance suggested a frumpy, late-middle-aged civil servant, but far be it from me to judge a person on their appearances. She also reminded me, oddly, of Christopher Biggins. In fact, if Biggins had been a woman, went shopping for a suit and shoes - in the Second World War - and then worked ceaselessly as a lowly civil servant for fifty years, then he basically would have been sat opposite me last night.

(Incidentally, I do tend to assume that the majority of my fellow commuters are civil servants. I don't know why. After all I've never even met a civil servant. Do they even exist?)

The woman was reading a book entitled 'Now, Discover Your Hidden Strengths'. It makes a change to see someone reading something other than 'The Da Vinci Code' or Harry Potter, I'll admit. (Surely someone must by now have seen the potential for 'The Harry Potter Code' with a foreword by John Grisham and Tom Clancy. That way no-one would need to buy another book again. It would be like a new bible for commuting civil servants. Or what about inventing a piece of software that auto-writes Chick Lit? You'd just load in which great job the central character has (but hates), the name of the good-looking but unreliable ex-boyfriend-slash-love of her life, some amusing scenes where the main character, despite working in PR or marketing and clearly being in possession of a not unsubstantial intellect, shows how ditsy she is. Throw in some pre-programmed mini-break locations and a pivotal one night stand and I think you've got yourself a reliable formula to produce a lifetime's supply of similar but subtly different trash fiction.)

I think self-help texts have their own formula too. You just have to take a look at their covers to see that. They generally have a lot of white, with the title emblazoned in red or blue boldly at the centre. They're not very exciting covers, as if making these books look like medical journals will somehow subtly enhance the book's accuracy; but then, just like the latest Dan Brown, they go and stick a load of praise on the front and back covers from some doctor or society that you've never heard of and suspect may not actually exist but is designed to make you think that This Book Really Knows Its Stuff. Sometimes you might even get praise from individual readers of the sweetly sycophantic 'This book changed my life' variety, usually attributed to things like 'Mr A, Sheffield'. Another formulaic feature would be their titles, which editors and publishers and marketing types must spend ages deliberating over, perhaps even longer than some of the books took to cobble together. The titles all have bold aspirations encapsulated within them, usually including phrases starting with 'beat', 'banish' or 'say goodbye to', or they try to appear practical with things like 'how to' at the start. Using a word like 'understand' or 'discover' makes the reader think they're on a road to self-discovery. Other formulaic inclusions may appear as black and white cartoon illustrations (trivialising a problem always helps), an abundance of exercises designed to encourage inward-looking thinking (and the ultimate conclusion that even if your parents didn't directly screw you up, they certainly wanted to) and a higher price than a similarly-sized work of fiction, perhaps to make you think the author knows his subject and thus commands a higher fee.

Here are my observations:

1. No-one reads them all the way through

Ask anyone whether they've read each of their no doubt large collection of self-help manuals all the way to the end and they'll look sheepish and admit they haven't. Not one. You'll see them look uncomfortable as they mentally assess just how much they've spent over the years. (For irony alone, surely, their collection will include Alvin Hall's 'What Not To Spend'). I swear no-one gets past chapter three. They give up, frustrated that they're not instantly healed after reading fifty pages of cognitive behavioural clap-trap that hasn't told them anything beyond it actually being socially acceptable to be overweight / shy / in debt etc, and those exercises which take time and are often quite painful. Thus they give up. Take a look at chapters four onward - there's nothing there but blank pages. They know you'll give up.

2. There's never just one book

Like oxygen molecules, these books have to come in pairs. The author will typically have written another book, curiously published at precisely the same time, on a subject so similar to the book you're reading that he feels it justifies a text and title all of its own. And yet 90% of the content will be the same as the one you're currently reading, and it will still try and tell you that it's okay to be flawed and that your parents are to blame. You know that they are just trying to sell more books by seizing on your insecurities. You know this. But you'll buy the other book too. And read neither.

Take this no doubt seminal text that my fellow rail traveller was reading - 'Now, Discover Your Hidden Strengths'. Doesn't that title sound a little like it's an isolated tome from a much larger series of books? It's full title is actually 'Now You Have Unsuccessfully Read The Three Previous Books In This Series, And If You Have Any Self-Worth Left At All, Let's Discover Your Hidden Strengths And Give Up On This Halfway Through Too, Before Tackling The Next Three Books In My Lucrative Series, Concluding With "Now, Learn How To Swindle Cash Out Of People With Low Self-Esteem".

3. You can't get rid of them

You'll never, ever give one of these books away to a charity shop or sell it on eBay. You can't : what if you were to go through the same problem again? You'll keep it, just in case (even though you never finished it). And secondly, you've written all over it in the sections they leave blank in the exercises. What if the old volunteer in the charity shop or the purchaser on eBay could read what you've written, even when you wrote in pencil and then were really careful to thoroughly rub it out? They'll think you're messed up won't they? Strange that you didn't feel this way when you boldly handed your cash to the spotty student cashier in Books Etc to buy it in the first place.

4. They don't work

This is the saddest thing of all. They promise so much but don't do anything. But that's because they rely on your self-discipline and your commitment. When you cast the book aside and claim it's just not working, it's never your fault though is it? At the very least you will attempt to blame the author, while those who have read far enough will have learned enough to realise that their dear parents, who spent so long tirelessly providing for them during the reader's formative years, are in fact to blame. Yes, they are to blame for your lack of commitment to really making a serious effort at looking inside yourself. That said, a self-help text is no substitute for a counsellor, which is the real reason they don't work.

My companion's book sounds to me like the book equivalent of those careers advice chats you have at school where you complete a questionnaire with your qualities, and end up being told you're perfectly suited to a) working in a shop or b) being on the dole. And how does this book expect to teach me, for example, that my great hidden strength might be a natural excellence in skydiving or singing lead in a Norweigan Death Metal band?

This has all gone far enough. Too many innocent individuals are buying book after book in the misguided belief that it will genuinely cure them of their various insecurities. There is only one solution, and that is my new book 'How To Give Up Your Obsession With Self-Help', which esteemed professor types are already claiming to be the definitive work on the subject, and 'The best tenner I ever spent!' by a Mrs C Biggins (Civil Servant).