It’s hard to begrudge Beth Lisick the book deal that led to the
publication of the mediocre Helping Me Help Myself. She had an
idea, and while she didn’t strike precisely while the
personality-driven “Dare me to do something wacky for a year?” iron was
red hot, she managed to smack it before it had cooled entirely.
Helping Me details Lisick’s attempt to suspend her (perfectly
natural, understandable, healthy) skepticism toward the self-help
world, and to devote a year to fixing the problems in her life by
following the advice laid out by “experts” in the fields where her
problems lie. And Lisick has problems—loads of ’em (for the
purposes of this book, anyway)—which she tackles at the rate of
one per month. She hires a professional organizer to help clean her
house, attends a Seven Habits of Highly Effective People workshop, seeks parenting and budgeting advice, gets in touch with her
creative side, and finds a better interest rate on her credit card.
The problem is that when Lisick unleashes her inner snark, she’s
laugh-out-loud funny (as in the chapter where she is unable to suppress
her disdain for Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus); when
she toes the book’s tagline and earnestly tries to “fix” herself, she’s
boring, kind of annoying, and—this probably goes without
saying—self-indulgent. Her account of Richard Simmons’ fitness
cruise is perceptive and hilarious, probably because Lisick can’t seem
to take the idea of getting in shape very seriously (she’s already
skinny, thanks to one of those freak metabolisms). The chapter on
parenting, concerning the antics of her bratty four-year-old, is
equally sharp, proving that Lisick is an entertaining writer, so long
as her subject is something other than the interior of her own neurotic
little head.
Most of the book, though, finds Lisick describing her experiences
with various gurus, and it’s hard to say what the reader is supposed to
get from it all. As a primer to some of the bigger concepts in
self-help, it’s vaguely useful (I just might just check out Seven
Habits) but as a work of pop-nonfiction, it’s far too self-obsessed
and cloying to be anything more than just passably entertaining.