Fuck seems to have been the word we’ve all needed to hear. As in, stop giving a fuck, calm the fuck down, say “fuck, no”: all sentiments at the heart of every self-help book published since the genre exploded. But where these books were once determinedly optimistic and outwardly focused on goals such as making money and influencing people, they now assume the voice of your bluntest friend, one who is not afraid to curse while telling you how it is.
Self-help has turned sweary, and no one has made being blue a bigger part of their brand than Sarah Knight, author of the five “No Fucks Given Guides”, most recently Fuck No!. The series, which started with the 2015 bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck, has sold more than 2m copies worldwide and ushered in a new wave of tough-love tomes, such as The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson and Gary John Bishop’s Unfuck Yourself – each bestsellers themselves.
Pragmatic, profane, irreverent, it is self-help for people who don’t like self-help, says Knight, 41, a former book editor who credits Jen Sincero with starting the trend with You Are a Badass back in 2013. The appeal, Knight suggests, is “because readers have these pent-up feelings that they felt they couldn’t express, and we are helping them channel them”.
Knight’s debut was intended as an affectionate parody of Marie Kondo’s 2011 tidying bible, persuasively subtitled, “How to stop spending time you don’t have with people you don’t like doing things you don’t want to do”. (Baby showers, for Knight, are a particular sticking point.)
The desire to say no – to care less – is already there, says Knight; her books just give readers permission to act on it, like throwing a lit match on gasoline. “That’s been the catalyst for them to go forth and feel liberated, and live lives that they want to live … I’m really preaching what I consider to be common sense, as someone who has done it – and I’m here to tell them that it works.”
In 2009, Knight was a senior editor at Random House in New York and had just signed Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl when she suffered her first panic attack, passing out in front of her coworkers. It spurred what she remembers now as “a watershed time” of re-evaluation and reckoning, and a clinical diagnosis of anxiety, which eventually led to her giving up her 15-year career in publishing and relocating with her husband to the Caribbean.
“There was this very stark contrast between the success that I was having on paper, and the nadir of my emotional, mental and physical health and wellbeing,” Knight says now, via Skype from her new home in the Dominican Republic. “The fact that they were happening at the same time [gave] me clarity: ‘OK, obviously this really hardcore pursuit of success is damaging me in other ways. How do I balance it out?’”
The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck, bringing together the lessons of what Knight terms her “great personal and professional meltdown”, was published just six months after Knight finally quit her job. The book has since sold more than half a million copies, with Knight’s own trade of the rat race for a tropical island a big selling point. Such literal escape may not be possible for everyone – both Knight and her husband Judd can work remotely, and they are happily child-free – but the spirit of “no fucks given” behind it is, she says.
“I’m getting messages daily from people as young as 14, 15 years old, saying ‘I loved your book, it’s making me think about what I want to do with my life’, and from people in their 60s and 70s saying ‘I wish I’d adopted this life philosophy sooner’,” she says.
She summarises her philosophy, explored over five books, as “take care of yourself first”: granting yourself permission to say no, free from anxiety or guilt. Her method works to reduce mental clutter in the same way that Kondo’s removed it from the home, creating space for joy. Policing one’s personal boundaries gets easier with practice, she says. “I do not agree that selfish is a four-letter word, even though it gets treated like that in our society – and I know quite a bit about four-letter words.”
Some people do need to be told to prioritise their health and happiness as much as they do their career or, in the case of caregivers, other people’s, says Knight. “And for an older generation, they just didn’t ever know it was allowed – they weren’t raised in a culture that promoted personal wellbeing.”
Today we have arguably over-corrected, with the modern preoccupation with “wellness” – which Knight agrees her work taps into – reflecting widespread unease with the impact of technology, work-life imbalance and unstable employment on our health. But she suggests that anxiety and burnout may not be more prevalent today than in the past – we might just understand them better. “At the very least, we’re talking about them more, so it may make them feel more present.”
Knight is upfront that she is not a doctor or therapist, but even a strategy as simple as what she terms the “no-and-switch” (politely declining, with a preferred alternative) might still help some. “Having the opportunity to read a $20 book and get some really good suggestions, if you can’t afford $2,000 in therapy, can only help.” She readily admits that many of the techniques in her books are “just cognitive behavioural therapy, dressed up in sweary language – but I also take medication, and I’m not ashamed of that.”
But Knight’s advice, while sensible at the individual level, sits uneasily against a global backdrop of inequality and climate change that can only be tackled collectively. Are more people thinking only of themselves really what the world needs?
“I’m not trying to raise a generation of sociopaths, or say that all you should do is look out for number one, because you won’t have a good life that way either,” she says. It is possible to prioritise one’s own needs without hurting others, “or at least without it hurting someone else more than it helps you”.
Say you refuse an invitation to a dinner party: “Yes, you are disappointing your friend. However, if you have terrible social anxiety or a really demanding job, and you simply cannot be out until 10 at night, guzzling white wine on a Wednesday – it would hurt you more to say yes, than it hurts them for you to say no,” Knight says. She calls it being “self-ish”: a kind of risk-benefit analysis that takes others’ needs into account – to an extent. “On the flipside, I think that other people have to be a little bit less sensitive about me not coming to their dinner party.”
She puts down the failures of political leaders in the US and the UK to greed. “To me, that’s not what being selfish is … that’s the root of all evil.” Knight is unequivocal in her disgust at the egocentrism on display among politicians; in Fuck No!, she writes that her aim is to “destigmatise the act of saying nyet … as in, ‘No, I won’t accept foreign interference in this election.’”
There is also a “mini-chapter” in Fuck No! on sexual consent, empowering women to say no for any reason they like. It took Knight 30 years to learn this lesson herself, in which time she had sex with “awful” people, wasted time and compromised her individual ethics with “regrettable yeses”.
Noes beget noes, with more positive consequences than negative. “You have to be able to communicate your boundaries. Otherwise, you are not going to be happy. It’s not just ‘no, I don’t want to come to your open mic night’, it’s no to your parents, your siblings, your lover, your children,” Knight says. “We all have to be able to do it a little bit better. There’s no point in walking around feeling resentful, obligated and guilty while doing things we don’t want to do.”
It is a reminder that the personal is political. Though Knight’s philosophy may seem obvious, women – still socialised to put others first – are more likely to benefit from it. She agrees that her books have “a feminist bent”, but says that her imagined reader is her younger self.
“Don’t wait as long as I did. I just wish I had known all this stuff 20 years ago … I’m constantly reminding myself of my own advice,” says Knight. Does she swear at herself, too? “I do.”
• Fuck No! by Sarah Knight is published by Quercus.
