Visit theallusionist.org/self-help to listen to this episode and read more about it
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, read all the books about how to get language to love me back.
I had not planned this, but today’s episode is the third in an unintended - but welcome - miniseries about emotions; we had the episodes about cowardice and anxiety, then sentimentality and empathy, and today it’s self-help.
Content note: we discuss dieting for a bit, and there are fleeting mentions of rape and abuse. There are also category A and B swears - I’m really sorry to the person who left a very nice review of this show but did say there’s too much swearing for their taste; I’m not trying to test you, I promise! Sorry.
Before we get to that, I just wanted to tell you that I’m in a couple of live events coming up soon. My brother’s podcast the Bugle has just reached its 15th anniversary and is doing a live tour to celebrate, and I’m in one of those shows, on 27 October in Birmingham, and Robin Ince’s Nine Lessons and Carols for Curious People on 16 December in London. Links are at theallusionist.org/events.
On with the show.
HZ: I have absolutely no recollection of how or why I obtained this book, but I found on my bookshelves a dark green volume printed in 1876, of the new edition of Self-Help by Samuel Smiles, “Author of ‘Lives of the Engineers’.” The book was first published in 1859 - my updated edition has added perseverance - and it is, as far as we know, the first ever self-proclaimed self-help book. It was a huge success. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published the same year; Self-Help outsold it in its first year, and went on to sell a quarter of a million copies by the time of the author’s death in 1904.
According to the British Library, in the mid-1980s Margaret Thatcher’s government wanted to give a copy to every schoolchild in Britain, although that’s not how I, a British child of the 1980s, ended up with one. Not surprised they loved it though, as one of the themes is how you can’t rely on government to help you so you have to self-educate and pull yourself up. “The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual,” writes Smiles. “Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates.”
Though I don’t think modern writers would use words such as ‘enfeebling’, Smiles’s message is very similar to a lot of self-help literature now - and it’s a multibillion dollar genre of books. And wherever language is used to convince us to do things, I am there sniffing at it. This time with two self-made experts in the self-help genre.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: I am Jolenta Greenberg, I am a comedian and and a bit of a pop culture commentator, and I host the podcast By the Book, where myself and my dear friend Kristen, we live by self help books two weeks at a time to see whether or not the advice actually works. And we live by them pretty strictly.
KRISTEN MEINZER: And I am Kristen Meinzer, I am a culture critic. I also host By the Book, and Jolenta and I have had a couple of spinoff shows, including Romance Road Test where we live by questionable relationship hacks. We also wrote a book called How to Be Fine: What We Learned From Living by 50 Self-Help Books. We wrote that book a few years ago; at this point we have now lived by over 80 self-help books.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Self-help is the philosophy, the idea that we can improve ourselves - whether it's our romantic lives, our work lives, our relationship with ourselves, our sense of confidence our ability to make money, any of those things - by researching and applying that research to ourselves. Usually that research is through self-help books; sometimes it is through meditation, through mantras, through different practices that are done for the most part alone rather than with a professional, without the help of a therapist, without a professional coach or whatnot. So self-help: it's improvement of ourselves by ourselves.
HZ: Because no one else will do it?
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Apparently!
KRISTEN MEINZER: I think there are a few reasons behind it. One is, I think especially in the United States, there is this history of self determinism. Whether or not it's really true: that’s questionable. But this idea that you can arrive on the shores of the US as a pauper, and after a generation or two you can have a grandchild who is a captain of industry, or you yourself can become a captain of industry. You can be anything you want here. And a lot of that's not true, but the mythology of self-determination is one reason the US, and this idea that I really am not born into a caste, I’m not just born into a class, and have to stay there forever - even though a lot of us actually are, in the US.
HZ: Yeah, do you think these books work, in terms of upward mobility?
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Well, they really want you to think that.
HZ: I am interested to learn that the term ‘self-help’ first appears in the early 1800s, in a legal context, but then it is 1840s, where it is kind of what it means now, but it's people like Ralph Waldo Emerson writing about self help and and other eminent white dudes.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Benjamin Franklin, I believe.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Yep, he wrote a self-help book.
HZ: The term wasn’t even in use yet when Benjamin Franklin was writing his memoir of his life up to 1757. This is now held up as one of the early landmarks in the genre of self-help literature, containing steps for self-improvement that have inspired writers of self-help to this day, and Benjamin Franklin is held up as a golden example of the self-made man for other men who want to make themselves. The aforementioned Self-Help by Samuel Smiles is definitely aimed at men, too, full of inspiring gentlemen like Sir Francis Drake and Dr David Livingstone and Lord Wellington - it’s not all inspiring British gentlemen either, Napoleon Bonaparte is given as an example of a ‘first rate man of business’. But nowadays self-help is marketed far more at women than men.
KRISTEN MEINZER: There's an interesting stat which was Goodreads did a study that found that two thirds of self-help authors are men and two thirds of readers are women. So it really is an industry of men telling women what to do. And just knowing that stat I think can help readers to maybe take what they're reading with a grain of salt and keep in mind what the dynamics are.
HZ: And what the end goal is.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Go to seminars and buy their other book.
HZ: And keep it tight.
KRISTEN MEINZER: And lose weight.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Yeah, yeah, because, you know, why not?
HZ: And keep them from examining those systems that hurt them.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Rght, right: the things that actually make them feel bad.
HZ: Are certain things NOT going to be called ‘self-help’ because they're like, “Men aren't gonna buy that”?
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Oh totally. Lots of books about how to optimise yourself or better yourself in terms of your work life are touted as ‘business books’ or ‘money books’. Because if you're a bro in business, you don't want better self-esteem or believe yourself; you want that raise. So I think a lot of books about like how to get on and work or how to get ahead and work are just self-help books that are labelled business. And I think those are the ones that are, according to marketers, for male consumption, whereas I think the term self-help now skews much more towards implying a female readership.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Even though the books are frequently covering exactly the same ground.
HZ: Is it because men's personalities are already fully optimized?
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Of course!
KRISTEN MEINZER: Absolutely! Men, they are perfect and already completely self-actualized, totally optimized. No, but I do think that there has almost always been more of an expectation on men to tough it out - “don't seek help, don't go to a therapist. For god's sakes don't read a book that has the term ‘self-help’ on the cover anywhere. Don't do that!”
JOLENTA GREENBERG: “Internalize those feelings.”
KRISTEN MEINZER: “Don't be emotional.” And self-help - just the terminology itself can sound kind of emotional and touchy-feely to some people.
HZ: It's funny that the term is both quite maligned in that way, but also at the same time quite edified by the culture of “anyone could be anything.”
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Oh yeah. Right right.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Then also that whole DIY we love the idea of you know I built it with my own hands. At least in the US, we love that whole idea of like I'm a self-made millionaire I didn't inherit my money. So there's that DIY element to it as well.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Something we come across so so often, in self-help, are these authors saying "Look, if I did it, you can do it just be like me just wake up early and do these five steps," or "Just focus on these three things and swap them out every day," or whatever the formula is. And then you barely peek into that author's background, and they're Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, or they grew up wealthy, with generational wealth, went to Harvard Business School and now are writing a book. And these are all people who are essentially born on third base, as opposed to someone who may or may have been born on first or second. And to just, without any regard to circumstances, or the systems that are larger than individuals, to just say, "Be like me," when, without examining what ‘me’ is, or how privileged me, is - ugh, it's just depressing and a little damaging. And it instills that doubt of like, “Why am I not Mark Zuckerberg's sister?” Or “Why was I not born into a family that all went to Harvard, so I could go too and then just write a book?”
HZ: If you had thought of that before being born...
JOLENTA GREENBERG: If only I had the foresight!
HZ: Foolish embryo.
KRISTEN MEINZER: And some of the advice we just can't apply if we don't have some of those same privileges. We have read so many books that say, "meditate for an hour or two a day" - one author mediates for more than two hours a day. And how many people can do that while working their jobs and taking care of their children and doing everything else that needs to be done? Taking out two to four hours a day just to meditate is not going to work for everybody.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Or the amount of books that tell us, “Just hire a personal assistant, hire a housekeeper.” That's pretty niche advice. And it’s not very actionable, and it just reeks of privilege.
HZ: I guess there is a certain extent to which, or certain circumstances in which a positive attitude can help you in life more than a negative one. But it's not unnecessarily taking into account all the many factors contributing to the same situation
KRISTEN MEINZER: Yeah. A positive attitude can only do so much when you're dealing with structural racism. A positive attitude can only do so much when you're dealing with classism, or any other kind of -ism. It can be a nice way to go about your day, and I tend to be happier when I don't wake each day and think, “Oh everybody is out to get me,” and instead if I wake up and think, “I wonder if I'll have any interesting conversations today?” That's a nicer way to go throughout the day. But it's not going to take care of things like misogyny.
HZ: Maybe you weren't trying it hard enough. And that's why we still have misogyny, Kristen. Manifest it harder!
KRISTEN MEINZER: I clearly wasn't. I clearly wasn't. And that's why there's a wage gap.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: If you didn't manifest it, you didn't believe hard enough somewhere.
HZ: Can the books make you worse?
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Totally.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Oh absolutely. Oh yeah.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Kristen has a lot of experience of that, more than I do.
KRISTEN MEINZER: I do, I do!
JOLENTA GREENBERG: I give up quicker, that’s the issue.
HZ: Oh, you’re not saying “Kristen was so nice when we began the show”?
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Pretty much!
KRISTEN MEINZER: Ha, I was and I'm not anymore. No - a lot of the books blame the reader: “It is time for you to take responsibility for everything you did wrong to get yourself in this position where you're picking up this book in the first place. Let's talk about accountability and what you did to put yourself here.” A lot of the books have that mindset. "It is time that you take ownership over things. Circumstances can't be changed, only your reaction to them. Why are you being so overly emotional about this thing? What did you do to ask your dad to hit you?" There are actually books that say things like this. "What did you do to lead him on, that man who did that thing to you?"
HZ: That's a neat cocktail of victim blaming and also ignoring the fact that people don't start with the same situation and resources.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Right.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Yes.
HZ: Thanks, books.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: One of the main things a lot of these books like to do is remind you how bad you are at the beginning. Just like a pickup artist, there will be a chapter or two sort of negging you, or being like, “You know you're lazy about this.” A lot of books make you admit - some even make you write down all the areas like you're failing in or not putting 100% into, and so you literally will have a list sometimes of reasons why you suck. And then they're like, “And now I have the answers!” And it's like, “But you made me make up these problems in the first place.” So they like to dig you in a hole and then be like, “I can dig you out, too.”
HZ: That’s a classic technique, like Listerine inventing halitosis to sell product.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Yes, yes.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: A lot of the books we come across point out a perceived personality deficit or flaw and harp on it, give you some general wishy washy advice, but it's always advice that leaves you with a bit of self doubt, or a bit wanting more: usually so you'll buy their next book, or go to that seminar, or maybe buy their journal that you should fill out, too. So just reading it can often make you start doubting things you didn't doubt before, in order to entrap you into becoming an audience member that returns to whichever author is writing.
HZ: It's a fairly obvious tactic for a book to bring you down, so they can bring you up; you're not going to buy a cure if you don't feel like you have the ailment. But do you find there are some books which are sort of trying to embrace you a bit more, like, “You're okay as you are, but here's some additional stuff to enrich you as a human”? Or do they not play that way?
KRISTEN MEINZER: Oh, yeah, some books do that: be a little kinder to yourself, don't constantly treat yourself like the enemy. There are definitely books like that, like, you don't have to necessarily treat your thought processes like they're the wrong one. There are definitely books that are saying “Embrace your uniqueness.” Not a lot of them. But they do exist.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: There's a book called What to Say When You Talk To Yourself by a real doctor, Dr Shad Helmstetter. And he talks about how our brains make the pathways that they do and how we get sort of stuck in thinking patterns, and ways to adjust that so we aren't always talking down to ourself or classifying ourself in negative ways. We love when books acknowledge that the world's a shitshow, so you might as well be nice to yourself and not talk to yourself like a bully on the side, you know? So I do love that book.
KRISTEN MEINZER: There are a few that do deal in community care, which Jolenta and I like quite a bit. These are books that are essentially saying, “Maybe you're depressed not because you're saying the wrong mantras, but maybe you're depressed because the world is a shitstorm, and we can do things to maybe make the world less of a shitstorm. Here are some things you can do to be a more active community member, to take better care of the environment, to take better care of people, and changing the systems of oppression,” and so on. And Jolenta and I tend to like those books a lot. They are few and far between in the self-help genre, by the way,
JOLENTA GREENBERG: But there are more and more of them lately. So keep them coming, people; keep writing about like how to infiltrate local government. So, yes, all of those.
KRISTEN MEINZER: One book, an old classic called How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, is very dated in some ways, but there are certain things in that book that I still think about. And the main one is “Be the dog”: when your loved one comes home from work, be excited to see them don't just like, start off complaining, you know, don't enter the room with complaints, enter with the joy of a dog.
HZ: Maybe with a tennis ball in your mouth.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Yes. Wagging that tail.
KRISTEN MEINZER: I also tore apart all your socks today.
HZ: Out of love!
KRISTEN MEINZER: The idea: why not be like the dog, be excited to see people enter with joy, don't enter with the complaint first. And I think that's a really great way to treat each other. And when I do it, I tend to be happier myself. And the people I'm greeting tend to be happier as well. So it works for everybody.
HZ: I was reading something the other day about when you smile even when you don't mean it it is sending a signal to your brain that then makes you feel like you mean it, and I thought, “We are really just simple creatures in certain ways.”
KRISTEN MEINZER: We are like dogs, yes!
JOLENTA GREENBERG: We are just chemical reactions inside an organic blob, aren’t we.
HZ: How close do these books make self-improvement seem? Is the reader one step away from whatever it is? Or do the books treat them like they’re much further away than that? I know that they're not all the same, but how tantalising do the books make self-improvement seem?
KRISTEN MEINZER: I’ll let Jolenta answer this, because she actually is sometimes tantalised by self-help books.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: I do get sucked in. And I have to say, the ones about manifesting to me are the most tantalising, because they make such big promises, but then their advice is so vague. But they do get me intrigued. And they put in those studies that you’ve all heard about, about talking positively to yourself when being treated for cancer had better outcomes than not, and stuff like that. And you're like, “Wait, I'm falling for it!” They do a good job studies or sort of alluding to studies without really using them, without citing them properly - just using them to their benefit.
HZ: Who's funding those studies? Which journals are they in?
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Yeah. But I do get sucked in a bit by the flashy promises, which always makes the actual theory behind the book more disappointing when you realise it's just another “Manifest it!” book where I'm like, “Oh, I thought this one would actually help me like acquire wealth or actually help me in the workplace, but it's just another ‘believe in yourself’ book.”
KRISTEN MEINZER: Another kind of book that is, in my opinion, part of the self-help industry is the weight loss book, and a lot of self-help books claimed to be about weight loss that just claimed to be about “living your best life” -
HZ: “Wellness.”
JOLENTA GREENBERG: “Optimising yourself.”
KRISTEN MEINZER: - will still ultimately have chapters on losing weight. We'll find it again and again in books. And we've only officially live by one book that claims to be a weight loss book, which is French Women Don't Get Fat. But we keep coming across it again and again and again in other books. And I think that is so tantalising that promise for a lot of people in a world that rewards thinness, in a world that gives thin people more money, and gives thin people the benefit of the doubt in so many situations, that it is tantalising to be thin. And the idea that I can do it all in two weeks or one month, and lose an obscene amount of weight that probably is not sustainable for anybody, you know, “:ose 30 pounds in 30 days,” that kind of thing: of course that's tantalising to people, because that is a way to say I can escape sizeism, right? I can somehow equal the playing field and be treated with more kindness. When the real problem is sizeism; it's not the size of your body that's the issue here. But that particular genre of self-help book never goes out of style. There are hundreds of new weight loss books every year, and Jolenta and I get pitched to them all the time from publicists.
HZ: Does the pitch change? Because I grew up in a very diet culture time where it was about deprivation. And I've had a fat body ever since I was aware of having a body, so I was very much in the firing line for those, and it was like, “Oh, your value doesn't matter because of your fat body - but it's alright! Because maybe you won't be disgusting if you just eat half a boiled egg a day.” But I feel like in recent years, it's been a lot more about - I mean, about the same thing, but they'll be like, “It's not a diet book!” but then it is about restricted eating or calorie counting.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: No. It's very much painted in the terms of optimization and health and not restriction the way it was when I was coming up as a young woman with Weight Watchers just straight up calorie counting, that sort of stuff. It's moved past, “You don't have to count calories but if you just care about yourself and think about yourself the right way and maybe try this exercise schedule I'm gonna toss in, you know, for health reasons. It's all for health and because you want to feel good inside of you,” but also within the societal constraints that say thinness equals beauty, which the book doesn’t say.
HZ: And moral betterness.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Oh, yes, moral superiority, like an ability to “restrain yourself.”
KRISTEN MEINZER: “Don't be lazy, don't be a glutton.” All those qualities of decency and goodness are imposed on that too.
HZ: Are there any fact checkers for these books? Or any kind of body which is like, “Actually, this isn’t a healthy lifestyle that they’re preaching”?
JOLENTA GREENBERG: That's partially why we started doing what we're doing.
HZ: It’s you, you’re the watchdog!
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Kristen and I met working at a news programme where you get pitched every book under the sun, including self-help books. I was the assistant at the show working three other jobs, desperate to get her life together. So I stole all the self-help books, because no one was going to cover them for the news anyway. And then I started going through them, started buying into every one, and then I was like, “They can't all work.” And also, “Who is trying out all this shit? We just have to trust the author who is a self appointed expert in this.” So I roped Kristen in to try this with me because she gets a little less carried away with promises, is a little less apt to join a cult, because we wanted to see is this actually something one could adhere to, where one can actually apply all of these suggestions? And would one end up the way the author is, or in a similar situation? Usually not, is the answer.
KRISTEN MEINZER: As for the fact-checking question: one thing that we've come across again and again is: every episode of By the Book, we provide a short bio of the author - a short biography, a short summary of the book, and then the actual steps as we see them. And it happens over and over and over again that as we're researching the biography of the author, we'll find out things like, oh yeah, they got sued for this at some point, they were charlatans, they graduated from a university that actually doesn't exist.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: The number of PhDs that aren't actual PhDs when you look into it! If you do one thing when you read a self-help book, just make sure you know where that PhD comes from, at the end of the author's name, if there is one there, and just see: are they actually a doctor in something? Or is it an honorary doctorate? Is it from a mailaway programme that gives doctorates to everyone? Just look into it, because so many things go unchecked.
HZ: It's funny how trusting we are of the term ‘doctor’. You could just change your name legally to Doctor and get around it that way.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Oh my gosh, you could. No accreditation needed.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Helen, you are so smart!
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Wow, wow. Wow.
HZ: Are there certain common factors that start to become evident over time, since you have absorbed quite a large sample now?
JOLENTA GREENBERG: We can quickly sort of parse out what kind. There are a few different kinds, like Kristen said, there's the diet, then there's like, you will read a bit and be like, Oh, this is self-optimization, not like community building. So there tend to be a few main genres. And then of the self-optimization ones, you have to find: is it just people who think hard work is all you need, like prosperity gospel-style? Or is it prosperity gospel plus manifesting, and there's magic in the universe?
KRISTEN MEINZER: Yes.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Books love to swear in their titles now. Unfuck Yourself.
KRISTEN MEINZER: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: They love swearing and they love like being casual and cool, ike Girl Wash Your Face. Girl, Unfuck Yourself.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Bitch, Do This Thing.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Bitch, Please. Queen, Manifest That. So yeah, they love glomming onto popular vernacular, often a hint late, so it'll feel a bit clunky. Or you can tell the popular vernacular has just been inserted everywhere into a work that didn't originally have it. But yeah, we love swear words right now. Those are the cool, edgy self help books! They get it! But it's just a lot of the same self optimization and manifesting.
KRISTEN MEINZER: There's also a lot of books in the past few years that are kind of like: “Toughen up, cookie! Stop being such a baby!” There are a lot of things like that, too. And not just targeting men, by the way, targeting both men and women, saying, “Be stoic. Don't be a baby. Get your shit together.”
HZ: Just like the ancient Greek stoics used to put it.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Yes, I think I quoted that verbatim from one of them.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: “Wah Wah Boo Boo”. That’s what it said, right?
KRISTEN MEINZER: And a lot of books also push an unrelenting focus on forgiveness, where it's not in everybody's best interests to absolve those who have harmed them. And a lot of the self-help books can cause a lot of guilt and shame over the fact that people feel genuinely hurt and never received an apology from that rapist, or from that abuser, or from somebody who stole their money, or whatever it is.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Even from like that systemic oppression.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Yes, yes.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: Know what I mean?
KRISTEN MEINZER: Maybe the relentless focus on forgiveness is actually going to make a person feel worse and not help them move on.
HZ: How are the writers writing about forgiveness?
KRISTEN MEINZER: A lot of them are saying that when you choose not to forgive, you're not punishing the person who did you wrong; you're punishing yourself with bitterness. You are now carrying the burden of whatever hurts you emotionally in a much larger way than what that actual transgression on its own was. And so they are urging us - most authors in the self-help world are urging us - to let that burden go. And when you choose to forgive, you're letting that burden go, you're choosing not to live in the past anymore. And I don't see it that way. I'm not a very forgiving person. And I'm okay with not forgiving. When I don't forgive, I don't necessarily feel that I'm living in the past. I'm just choosing not to absolve that person. I'm choosing not to say, “That's alright! It's totally fine that you did that thing.”
JOLENTA GREENBERG: You’re choosing to learn actual lessons from that experience that you can't unlearn. You know what I mean? Even if it's about a certain person's character, or what you won't stand for.
KRISTEN MEINZER: And if you're somebody who loves forgiving, and that's your jam, go for it. I'm not telling you to be like me. I'm just saying the way I am: I personally don't get a lot out of forgiveness when it comes to extreme situations. And I think that's okay, that I don't want to forgive certain people. And it hasn't made my life worse. And Jolenta always says that I'm one of the happier people she knows.
JOLENTA GREENBERG: It’s true.
KRISTEN MEINZER: So it definitely hasn't turned me into an ugly bitter person choosing not to forgive certain folks out there.
HZ: Also, sometimes you have those feelings as a useful safeguard for yourself, against the same thing happening with them or similar people in future.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Yeah. And so I'm fine with that. Yeah. Well, I'm not saying to go out there and like, burn their house down at night while they're sleeping. But, you know, maybe I don't need to just let it go either.
HZ: It's also weird how you are being held responsible for your own happiness, but they're not being held responsible for what they did in this equation.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Most of the things that self-help authors want us to forgive our transgressions that the perpetrator has never acknowledged or asked forgiveness for. If they don't see it as an issue, why should I forgive them? Why should I forgive this person who has never once thought about what they did as a bad thing anyway?
HZ: This sort of intersects a little bit, I think, with the concept of gratitude. That seems to be a big one as well, where it's like, “What doesn't kill you makes you stronger” - no, it sometimes makes you weaker, it's just you're still alive.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Yes. Oh, that's such a good way to put it. And there's also, in a lot of self-help books, this worldview of “We should all be grateful for everything that happened to us, because those things made us who we are.” And it's like, oh, somebody who's paranoid and constantly walks in fear, like, you know, what, should I be grateful for all of these things? Really? I don't think we have to be grateful for everything bad that's happened to us.
HZ: I'm not saying this has happened to you by following these books, but there's a scenario in which you follow these books and what you end up with is like a sociopathic disregard for your own feelings and other people's, where it's like all emotions are are things to be overcome.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
HZ: How British.
KRISTEN MEINZER: Along with that, a lot of these books are saying, “Move past that feeling, but also, stop worrying so much about what other people think” - which on the one hand, I totally agree with that. I don't want to live imprisoned by constant concern of, “What are people going to say? What are people going to think about me if I do that?” But to a certain extent, we do have to care about what other people think? And say, “Am I doing things that are frankly unkind?” And some of the self help books kind of are telling people to behave in ways that are not necessarily the kindest, that are teaching us to play games with our romantic partners, or to take people for granted. And it's like, maybe I should be thinking about other people besides myself.
HZ: If ‘self-help’ leads to ‘helping others’, what happens to the term ‘self-help’ - has it eaten itself? Well, what a way to go!
Kristen Meinzer and Jolenta Greenberg are the hosts of By The Book podcast, one of my favourite shows to listen to - and I’m always very relieved I don’t have to do what they do. Hear it in the podplaces and at bythebookpod.com. And you can hear their new show Romance Road Test over on Audible.
The Allusionist is an independent podcast, and the reason I can make this show by myself and how I want is thanks to you listeners, for giving me your time and recommending the show to people and for supporting it financially when you have the wherewithal at theallusionist.org/donate. For your contributions you get behind the scenes info about the show and regular livestreams with me and my dictionaries - during the most recent one Ambrose was knitting socks and I felt very proud of Ambrose when he finished them a few days later and shared pictures of them in the Allusioverse Discord, which is a community for you donors. So if you have spare funds, take yourself to theallusionist.org/donate and join us.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
spitchcock, noun: an eel that has been split and grilled or fried. Verb: (to spitchcock) prepare (an eel or other fish) this way.
It’s from the 15th century, whereas spatchcock is probably from 18th century and maybe unrelated; they don’t know.
Anyway, try using ‘spitchcock’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Thanks to Martin Austwick for the music. Hear his compositions via palebirdmusic.com and as Pale Bird on Bandcamp. Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor an episode of the show in 2023, contact them at multitude.productions/ads.
Find me @allusionistshow on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And find every episode of the podcast in audio and transcript form, and the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, and links to the guests plus more information about the episode topics, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
