The Self-Help Compulsion

To begin, they cite self-help’s contribution to our culture of anxiety and overwork, which leads to what McGee calls the “belabored self” of modernity

These books are not overtly marketed as self-help, but on the sly that is what they are: they are manuals on how to live your life, and how not

In recent self-help works, modernism has become an unlikely mascot for the embrace of resilience in the place of perfectionism, realism rather than “cruel optimism.”

that modernism is now experiencing a revival as a source of useful countercounsel in our advice-saturated culture

It is because authors such as Proust, Kafka, Joyce, and Woolf refused to supply readers with the easy solutions the self-industry thought that they wanted (whether readers really wanted such facile answers is a question I address in later chapters)

rich or winning friends but about how and why people read

Self-help’s most valuable secrets are not about getting

reading nonsequentially for personal use offers a window onto the way that reading and writing once “belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things