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One girl, 10 mentors

By Scott C. Yates , Special to the Rocky

Published January 4, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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It's the time of year when many of us look in the mirror and see an improvement project waiting to happen. No surprise, most will let the feeling pass and, by February, be blissfully back in our comfortable, well-worn groove. But what would happen if we armed ourselves with a library of self-help books and jumped into the fixer-upper project with real determination?

In 2006, author Beth Lisick did just that, spending an entire year under the guidance of high-profile self-help books and gurus. She sought organizational tips from Oprah's mentor, Julie Morgenstern; nurtured her "inner artist child" by reading The Artist's Way; took aim at her bank account with financial help from Suze Orman; and more.

The result is the funny, touching book Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone. Ahead of appearances in Boulder and Denver next week, she spoke with the Rocky from Berkeley, Calif., where she lives with her husband and son.

Your book reminded me of the movie Adaptation. You had this funny, ironic detachment from taking advice while at the same time sincerely trying to take the advice to heart.

It was the most difficult project I've ever done, because I didn't want to just make fun of all of it, but there was so much there to make fun of that it was hard not to do that all the time. So I kept going back and forth between actually doing it and then saying, "God, I'm so sick of myself. Why am I doing this?"

The thing is, I think if I were going to be totally ironic about all of this, it would be a really boring book. I feel like I've read that kind of thing a million times. . . . So at first I really thought, "OK, I'm going in!" But as soon as I dipped my toe in I thought, "Oh no! What have I done?"

What stays with you nearly a year later?

The thing that I still use every day is what I learned from Jack Canfield and later from Deepak Chopra: how to go to sleep at the end of the day. I've had insomnia my entire adult life, and this really works - it's totally cured my insomnia.

You wrote openly about your precarious financial situation and your lack of organization around the house. Have things improved?

The organizational people (Morgenstern's consultants) really did help a lot because they gave me a plan to organize our kitchen and our house. Some of the stuff made a lot of sense, like just taking one day to pay bills, but for us it just doesn't work because we don't know how much money we have coming in. There's some things we can't do. It was the same with Suze Orman. We could figure out how much money we are spending every month, but we never know when we are going to have money coming in. It's feast or famine with us. That remains a total mystery that we may never solve.

You talked briefly about your grandfather, a coal miner, noting that he would probably have mocked our generation's constant self-analysis. What do you think he would have said to help you with the challenges you face?

I think he would have been supportive of me going out and trying something different, but I don't think he would have understood this idea of shelling out all this money to have people tell me how to live. He followed more of the Emersonian idea of just taking things into your own hands . . . just take a look at what you want to do and go do it. The funny thing is that that is the message of a lot of these self-help books.

You're a poet, but there were no poetic pretensions about this book. Still, every once in a while a phrase slipped in. One I underlined is "agenbite of inwit," related to your confession about how you secretly enjoy being a jerk.

It's funny - I went back and forth about leaving that in. It basically is about your own inner conscience and torturing yourself by going into your brain and analyzing everything. I've always liked it, and I've never found a better way of describing how we torture ourselves, so I just left it in there. I almost axed it a bunch of times.

I thought it was fine, but it made me curious about your writing process, because this book was almost more like journaling.

My friends who have read it have told me that this book is the most "me" I've ever written. My last book was a collection of short stories, but each one was very tightly constructed, and I paid a lot more attention to the language, and I guess this just wasn't that kind of book. A couple of times I thought, "Well, I guess I'm letting it all hang out here."

Was there any part of reading all these self-help books that changed your views about politics or world affairs?

The only thing really was that this genre just feels so American. In one way, that's positive: You can do anything! - that's the positive. The negative is that people really equate being a better person with conspicuous consumerism.

Part of that I suppose is the indomitable American spirit, but the other part is that there's so much money in our economy it's possible to make money on things like self-help books.

Some of the books have these success stories, but they are mostly about people who took a course and then went on to become "empowerment coaches" and whatever, so it starts to look like a big Ponzi scheme. That got me thinking, "Maybe I can be an inspiration to people who previously doubted self-help, and then I can be one of those big success stories."

The guru to the ironically self-detached. I like it, but the problem is your followers are going to have a hard time attaching.

Yeah, it will be like, "Hey, I'm over at the bar, come on over if you want."

Scott C. Yates is a Denver entrepreneur and freelance writer.

Beth Lisick

* What: Appears at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Tattered Cover at Colfax Avenue and Elizabeth Street, and 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Boulder Book Store, 1107 Pearl St., Boulder.

* Cost: Free

* Information: 303-322-7727 for Tattered Cover; 303-447-2074 for Boulder Book Store

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

* Nonfiction. By Beth Lisick. HarperCollins, 288 pages, $24.95. Grade: A-

Book in a nutshell: In the opening lines of her book, Lisick makes it clear she's not a go-getter. The stains she swore she would deal with years ago remain on her ceiling. Her finances are a mess, and despite the fact that she's written some well-received books and articles and is a spoken-word artist in San Francisco, her career hasn't taken off - unless you count the fact that she's regularly able to get work dressing up as a banana.

Still, she has what sounds like a terrific and supportive family and a healthy dose of skepticism about life. In other words, she's not the typical customer you expect to see roaming the self- help aisle of the big-box bookstore. Even more unexpected would be for her to fly around the country attending seminars on success, relationships, fulfillment and more success.

But she did all this and more - even going on a cruise with Richard Simmons - not to mock the self-help genre, but to actually try to improve herself. Truthfully, she couldn't help but do a little mocking, but she's much harsher on herself than she ever is on the Chopras or Suzes in this book that's by turns funny and inspirational without being maudlin.

Best tidbit: The most laugh- out-loud moments come on her cruise with legendary fitness guru Simmons. Nothing can prepare readers for the visual image of the man with the Chia-Pet hair lifting up his trademark running shorts to moon his acolytes.

Pros: I was worried there would be a chapter on sex, and there was. Luckily it was only one paragraph long. Whew. Lisick was disarmingly revealing, but she also knew when to keep private information private.

Cons: I was disappointed that Lisick's life didn't improve more. She so earnestly tried to follow her mentors' advice, but by the end of her year she's about the same - only with a little more love and appreciation for those around her. It would have been fun to see her transform the San Francisco art scene, get a doctorate or do so well financially that she buys a second home - or at least cleans out the basement of the one she has now.

Final word: There's a boom in books by people who do something weird or wacky for a year, then write about it. Most are schlock, but not this one. It's great to welcome Lisick to the club of people who have lived interesting years and written great books about their experiences.

Comments

  • January 5, 2008

    8:13 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    JohnSWren writes:

    Thanks, Scott, for a very interesting interview and book review.

    Years ago a wise friend of mine, who is now a multi-millionaire by the way, told me a book similar to this would never sell. He told me that people are interested in books about what works, not cynical observations about what doesn't work. He was right then, it will be interesting to see if his prediction holds with Lisick. Who wants to guess how many will join her next Wednesday at the Tattered Cover?