Publishers Weekly - 14.10.2019

Comedian Jolenta Greenberg loved crystals,

monitored her chakras, and wanted to

believe self-help books could “fix” her. Her

friend Kristen Meinzer, a broadcast producer,

equated self-help with snake oil. So Greenberg

asked Meinzer to join her on a project: for two

weeks at a time, they lived by the rules of a

different self-help guide, and recorded their

experiences for what became the podcast By

the Book. Fifty guides later, Greenberg and

Meinzer share what they’ve learned in How to

Be Fine (Morrow, Mar. 2020).

After all this time, is self-help

finally cool?

Meinzer: It’s become a very popular thing to discuss. Like, “Oh, I steam my

vagina!” or “I use this face mask!”—by the way, I’m using a face mask right

now—but more people are owning up to the fact that it’s okay to take care of

ourselves. In a different era, it was shameful to seek a therapist or a self-help book,

but the fact is that a lot of the mainstream medical establishment ignores women,

who are the main readers of self-help, so they go looking for answers elsewhere.

You’ve delved into three decades’ worth of advice.

How has self-help evolved?

Greenberg: I’ve really enjoyed the influx of books about the greater

good. In A Girl’s Guide to Joining the Resistance by Emma Gray [Morrow], there

are different levels of involvement in your day-to-day life, like the TV you

choose to watch, thinking about the message you get, and maybe getting more

involved politically. These books on how to take care of yourself and how to

take those changes out to the world—I love that trend.

Meinzer: It’s been great to see more books that touch on things that made

us angry in past books. Intersectionalism is something we’ve seen in books re-

cently that we hadn’t seen before. That’s not to say that some of the old

tropes—“Men are like this, women are like that” or “If you’re not happy that’s

your own fault”—don’t continue to come up.

Greenberg: A lot of the personal growth or “how to be optimal” stuff is

like, “Don’t take shit personally” blah, blah, blah. That’s easy if you’re a white

dude, but if society is set up to make your life harder, then you’re allowed to

take it personally and want to change things.

Which books have stuck with you the most?

Greenberg: Right now our favorite is What to Say When You Talk to Your-

self by Shad Helmstetter [Gallery]. It’s a book about self-talk, the messaging

PW talks with Jolenta Greenberg

and Kristen Meinzer

Self-Help Test Kitchen

Self-Help

32 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ OCTOBER 14, 2019

“Writing the Big Book

is the most important

work on the history

of A.A. since Ernie

Kurtz’s Not-God.”

—William L. White,

Author of Slaying the Dragon

Historian Bill Schaberg

reveals the iconic origins

of Alcoholics Anonymous

Distributed to the trade by

centralrecoverypress.com

NOVEMBER 2019

Hardcover: 978-1-949481-28-0

E-Book: 978-1-949481-29-7

History / Addiction

800 pages | 6.5 x 9.5 | $40.00