"A level-headed, laugh-out-loud tour of the loopy world of self-help. If you're somehow not perfect, sit down and read Jennifer Niesslein-she will make you feel better already."

-Ann Crittenden, author of THE PRICE OF MOTHERHOOD and IF YOU'VE RAISED KIDS, YOU CAN MANAGE ANYTHING

"In this delightfully witty and sometimes startlingly poignant memoir, Jennifer Niesslein takes the reader on a tour of her multiple exertions in the land of self-help. There are laughs in this book-lots of them-balanced by thoughtful observations about the possibilities and the limitations of the ordinary human."

-Kristin Ohlson, author of STALKING THE DIVINE

An Excerpt

Click here for an excerpt from the parenting chapter. Below is a little something extra: an essay about self-help, written just before PPIEW's release.

Caught in the Act

Many years ago, my husband, son, and I went to a used bookstore. It was a Saturday, and my son was still a baby. We looked, I bet, like a pleasant young family, Brandon in his flannel shirt and jeans holding our cooing, brown-eyed chubbutz. This was when I had shoulder-length hair, which I usually pulled back in a ponytail, like a lot of us with babies do. I'd lost my baby weight and then some, and my jeans were baggy. Both of us were twenty-six. I walked to the back of the store and pulled off the shelves all the parenting manuals I could find: Dr. Spock, Dr. Sears, the Babywise people, Penelope Leach, Brazelton, some experts I'd never heard of. The handles of the hand basket, now heavy with expert advice, cut into my palms.

At the register, the owner of the store, a bespectacled woman at the tail end of middle age, rang up the books. She smiled at us. "It's so nice to see young parents avail themselves of this information."

I remember this because, one, she used the word avail (who says that?), and, two, I was in no way going to be availing myself in the way she thought. My friend and I were starting up a magazine for mothers and we were planning on including a column called The (Un)Help Desk. The column would show how two well-respected parenting experts could offer two completely different pieces of advice on a given child-rearing issue (read: there’s not only one way to be a good parent). Although I would eventually use these books in times of real need--infant fever, say--I was also going to scour through them for ammo.

I blushed. I wasn't jerky enough to correct this woman who seemed so nice and approving of us. I mumbled something like, "Yeah, no need to reinvent the wheel." We beat out of there, but I hated, hated, that she thought I was clueless enough to need no less than ten parenting manuals.

I was very into Subverting Stereotypes then. Already, during my pregnancy and new motherhood, I was aware of a shift in attitude toward me: Strangers and acquaintances treated me as duller-witted, almost invisible, unable to think about anything other than the baby . The experts were, to me, the perfect epitome of what was wrong with how Americans see mothers. The patronizing prose. The certainty that they knew best for me, someone they'd never met. The scare tactics, not unlike those presented to pre-teens regarding crack, sex, or peer pressure. The chirpy presentation of what amounted to common sense, as if I had none of my own.

Consciously, this is what rankled. But subconsciously, I think I sensed I was on a precipice. I had a new baby and was helpless to the schedule of breastfeeding. I was relying on Brandon's salary to support us. I knew that half of all magazines fail in their first year. I needed to be in charge of something, independent in some way. One false move and I could wind up stripped of all my freedoms, even if it was just the freedom to learn how to childrear on my own. I was afraid, I think. Back then, I couldn't afford to be sincere in my reading of self-help--I couldn't afford to rely on anyone more than I had to already.

*

By 2004, I had scooted back a good distance from the precipice. The magazine took off, the baby grew into a school-ager. And I'd experienced a blossoming curiosity about self-help. My dog was dying and, in some odd cause-and-effect way, this translated to my deciding that I didn't have to be so dismissive of things in life I hadn't tried. I embarked on the project that eventually became Practically Perfect in Every Way.

But although I was totally committed to the project, there was still the knowledge of what other people thought of self-helpers. Sure, there was the specter of the dependent woman. But there was also the larger population who just didn't understand the need for outside help. I don't come from a honey-maybe-you-should-call-your-therapist people. I come from a it'll-all-work-out-in-the-end people. A you-just-do-what-you-have-to people. A Jesus-Christ-we're-trying-to-have-a-nice-dinner-here people. (This is the part of me that battles with whatever writerly, let's-analyze-it-to-death instincts I have.)

So, when I first started my experiments in self-help, I tried to keep the self-help books hidden if someone came over, as if they were something private and a little sad, like hemorrhoid cream.

I couldn't keep them hidden forever, though, and eventually, the jig was up when the mother of a child Caleb was playing with came to retrieve her boy. I invited her in. As we chatted our way into the kitchen, I remembered with a wince that, on the kitchen table, was my notebook and splayed next to it a book: One by Dr. Phil McGraw, grinning and posing in a particularly cheesy way. The words RELATIONSHIP RESCUE were emblazoned in capital letters across his forehead. I didn't know this other mother very well. But, I thought as I saw her glance at the book, she now thinks she knows a part of me. A weakness. A need to, let's say, turn to an abrasive Texan for "RESCUE" in my relationship with my husband.

I had an urge to tell her, "Oh, that's just for a project. I think my marriage is fine."

But I didn't because these self-help books, these admissions of weakness (even in the service of a project) are supposed to remain hidden. This other mother and I went about our business and pretended that no talk show host was grinning out from the kitchen table with an index finger pressed coyly at his cheekbone. To talk about it would be to whine, to admit too much dependence.

*

That was pretty early on in the project.

By the end, I'd come to a real impatience with the secrecy surrounding self-help. I could tell because I was spouting off to just anybody what I was doing. Why am I walking? Why, it's because I'm following Dr. Andrew Weil's My Optimum Health Plan! What am I reading? It's a little something called Why Bad Things Happen to Good People--maybe you've heard of it. Why am I doing these things? To become a better, happier person. I think the dermatologist I visited for the first time was a little taken aback at my forthcomingness.

Soon, the book will be published and anyone who cares to will be able to see just how much self-help I dove into. They'll be able to see how, even with the (usually) tough love of the experts, I was unable to change some of my flaws. They'll see my weaknesses, my vulnerabilities, right there in black and white. They'll see how I was unable to address certain problems all by myself.

I like to think that the project taught me once and for all that dependency is nothing to be ashamed of, that you don't have to do everything yourself. The irony, though, is that I'm not dependent in the way that I used to be. I wonder if it's possible to be so affirming about dependency if you're close to the precipice. I suppose if I'm lucky and live long enough--long enough to need my son's arm to steady me, long enough to lose the sharpness of my eyesight, long enough to require help bringing in my groceries--I'll find out.

The other irony is that now, having taken two years' worth of advice, I'm something of an expert in self-help myself. I can tell you that I was a little bit right back in that used bookstore: The experts can be patronizing and sweeping in judgment and drive you (read: me) a little crazy. But I was wrong, too: The experts can also be earnest and helpful and interesting. When someone asks me now, "What self-help works?" I freeze, not because I'm too chicken to admit anything but because self-help, like everything else, is messy and complicated and far from practically perfect in any way. — Jennifer Niesslein