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My Journey through America's Self-Help Culture
Simon & Schuster
January 2014
On Sale: January 7, 2014
240 pages
ISBN: 1439100195
EAN: 9781439100196
Kindle: B00BS9XXSI
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
“In writing this book I walked on hot coals, met a man
making a weight-loss robot, joined a Healing Circle, and
faced my debilitating fear of flying. Of all of these
things, talking to my father about my mother’s death was by
far the hardest.” The daughter of a widowed child psychologist and parenting
author, Jessica Lamb-Shapiro grew up immersed in the culture
of self-help, of books and pamphlets and board games and
gadgets and endless jargon-filled conversations about
feelings. It wasn’t until she hit her thirties that Jessica
began to wonder: if all this self-improvement arcana was as
helpful as it promised to be, why wasn’t she better
adjusted? She had a flying phobia, hadn’t settled down, and
didn’t like to talk about her feelings. Thus began Jessica’s fascination with the eccentric and
labyrinthine world of self-help. She read hundreds of books
and articles, attended dating seminars, walked on hot coals,
and attempted to conquer her fear of flying. But even as she
made light of the sometimes dubious effectiveness of these
as-seen-on-TV treatments, she slowly began to realize she
was circling a much larger problem: her mother’s death when
she was a toddler, and the almost complete silence that she
and her father had always observed on the subject. In the tradition of Augusten Burroughs, Jessica Lamb-Shapiro
illuminates the peculiar neuroses and inalterable truths
that bind families together, whether they choose to confront
them or not. Promise Land is a tender, witty, and wise
account of a young woman’s journey through her own psyche
toward the most difficult stage of grown-up emotional life:
acceptance.
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