Does self-help breed helplessness?

Jennifer Niesslein hired diet, financial and other gurus to help her perfect her life. She tells Salon what advice worked, and what drove her batty.

By Katy Read

Read more: Books, Oprah Winfrey, Life

July 5, 2007 | Jennifer Niesslein was living the kind of life people have in mind when they talk about the American dream. At age 32, she had a nice husband, a son, a big new house, a creative career and a growing business as co-editor and co-founder of the alternative parenting magazine Brain, Child -- and enough money that, well, her family didn't have to worry much about money.

Still, she wasn't quite satisfied. The house was a mess. She found herself overreacting to trivial things. Her kid had typical kid problems. She hadn't given much thought to retirement planning. She thought she could stand to lose a few pounds. It wasn't that she was unhappy, exactly -- but was she really, truly happy?

In search of an answer, Niesslein did what many Americans do when their lives need a few tweaks or an all-out overhaul: She turned to self-help experts. A slew of them, in fact, including personal-finance guru Suze Orman; natural health advocate Dr. Andrew Weil; relationship advisors Drs. Phil McGraw and Laura Schlessinger; and the granddaddy of self-help himself, Dale Carnegie, author of the 1936 "How to Win Friends and Influence People."

For two years, Niesslein followed her self-help advisors hoping to improve her housekeeping, financial security, marriage, parenting skills, emotional state, fitness -- and even her spiritual life. Her new book, "Practically Perfect in Every Way," is a part-critique, part-memoir account of that experiment.

The book's tone is conversational and funny (Orman, the author notes, "seems to blink less often than the average person," and Weil's distinctive white beard is "somewhere between Santa and Jerry Garcia") but also, at times, serious and contemplative. Niesslein recounts how one decluttering expert suggested she walk around her house clapping her hands in the corners of rooms to "disperse stagnant energy." And she gives special thanks to her remarkably cooperative husband, Brandon, who dutifully took part in the daily relationship exercises Dr. Phil prescribed -- though both parties admitted feeling silly. (Brandon on Day 11: "It seems like Dr. Phil doesn't really expect anyone to make it this far in the book. He's just making stuff up at this point.") In the end, Niesslein says, self-help made her life both a little more perfect, and a little less so.

Salon caught up with Niesslein in Evanston, Ill., where she was giving a bookstore reading. Sporting red Dr. Martens and an irreverent sense of humor, she's now cheerfully unapologetic about her own little flaws: a figure that's not model-skinny, a temper she can't always keep from flaring, a smoking habit she doesn't feel like giving up. Practically perfect, Niesslein seems to have decided, is close enough.

What inspired your experiment?

Well, my dog was dying -- isn't that how all good stories start out [laughs] -- and it was my first real brush with mortality. It's clichéd, but it made me think, "What sort of person am I? What am I doing with my life?" I felt like there was some serious room for improvement.

But it really came to a head when I was watching "Oprah" and she said something I didn't quite understand. She said, "The first thing about fixing your life is owning the truth about your life." I was like, "I don't know what that means." But everybody on the show seemed to be really grooving on it. So I thought, "Maybe this is what's wrong with me, that I'm so dismissive of things I haven't even tried." I figured: Self-help has worked for some people. I thought I'd be the guinea pig and do the experiments on myself.

So you suspended your skepticism about self-help for the sake of the project?

I didn't completely suspend it. I wasn't going to be a sponge and just take everything in. I went into it with two minds, so that I would still use my common sense, but also suspend my disbelief about the awfulness of the prose and things like that.

Had you tried any self-help before?

Not very much. Like everybody else, when I was pregnant I read "What to Expect When You're Expecting." But by the time Stephanie [Wilkinson, Niesslein's co-editor and co-founder] and I started Brain, Child, I had a bad attitude about being told what to do. It becomes apparent pretty quickly that it's difficult to separate regular, factual advice -- like how often you should feed a baby -- from larger philosophical things.

Still, as a writer, I thought self-help was full of interesting ideas. It sounds like a fluffy topic, but the whole idea of individualism, of luck, of happiness -- it is really rich subject matter. Things like: Can an individual really make significant changes all on her own? How much of anyone's success is a result of action and how much is just circumstance and dumb luck? In some ways, this project appealed to me in the same way that Brain, Child did when we started it: as a way to take a subject that, at the moment in our culture, is considered "lite" -- whether motherhood or self-help -- and see what else was there. And sure enough, some of the books I wound up disliking immensely, and others I wound up really liking and respecting.

What made the difference?

Well, my favorites are the ones that don't force you to navel-gaze so much. They focus on the inside and the outside. Martin Seligman [psychologist and author of "Authentic Happiness" and other books on "positive psychology"] does that. And Oprah -- I think that is actually one of the great things that she does, when you look at the balance of her show.

The thing is, even among the authors I really liked, there is still this underlying idea that, with enough get-up-and-go, you can fix things by yourself. And for some things, that's probably true. But there is also such a thing as luck. One of the big ideas in self-help right now is that there's no such thing as luck. Or as "The Secret" [Rhonda Byrne's recent bestseller] says: You put out positive thoughts and it will come back to you. It's a lovely idea, and I think it's a very American idea. But I don't think it makes it true.

Next page: Does self-help actually breed a sense of helplessness?