If, like me, you spent your 20s, 30s and maybe a bit more reading self-help manuals, then the titles that Marianne Power name-checks in this memoir will feel like dog-eared old familiars. There’s Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway, Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Paul McKenna’s I Can Make You Rich (although it was actually his companion text I Can Make You Thin that became my personal bible), Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret and Jack Canfield’s Chicken Soup for the Soul. Some were better than others, but one of the biggest challenges was trying to map a mostly American worldview on to another thousands of miles away. Should you put a picture of “your dream condo” on your vision board? Did it matter that you had never featured in a high school yearbook or flown across the country to celebrate Thanksgiving with your folks? And what about the whole business of “dating”, an elaborate etiquette of call and response that bore no relation to what actually went on in the UK in the 1990s, where lifelong relationships usually began in a mutual lunge after a long night in the pub?
Perhaps the greatest surprise of Power’s Help Me! is the revelation that, 20 years later, these are still among the books that worried thirtysomethings turn to for advice about how to change – for which read “improve” or even “rescue” – their love life, bank balance or body mass index. A few years ago, 36-year-old Power, chronically broke, single and hungover, created a blog in which she described her year-long experiment in living each month according to a different self-help manual. January would be Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, requiring her to pose naked for a life-drawing class and chat up strange men (not, mercifully, at the same time), while February would be all about Kate Northrup’s Money, a Love Story, which meant Power actually opening her bank statements and selling her unworn but still ticketed clothes. By the end of the year she planned to be solvent, healthy and loved by a handsome man.
Back in the 90s, Helen Fielding debuted Bridget Jones’s Diary in the Independent, before being asked by Picador to expand her pseudonymous column into a book. So it is no surprise that Picador has swooped on Power’s blog and is bringing it to market in expanded form. Indeed, its publicity makes much of the connection, hinting shamelessly that Help Me! will do the same cultural work that Bridget Jones performed so stunningly two decades ago.
But how can that be? Bridget Jones was telling a particular story about a specific time. In an era of “post-feminism” – how quaint that sounds now – “having it all” had become not so much an option as a tyrannical obligation for educated young women. Bridget’s failure to acquire simultaneously the thighs of a gazelle and a position as CEO of an international aid agency were not just a trigger for funny writing but also a sly commentary on the way that second-wave feminism of the 70s and early 80s had resulted not in women’s liberation from society’s hobbling expectations but capitulation to a whole new, sneakier, version of them.
Help Me!, by contrast, is a series of anecdotes about spending a “rollercoaster” year in which “every bit of me was turned inside out” (Power is not immune from using the cliches of the books she is trying to critique). She does some public speaking, walks on hot coals (literally, Tony Robbins, the American motivational speaker, is still making people do that, years after he first suggested it as a way to Unleash the Power Within), and almost auditions for The X Factor. What disrupts her plan to humiliate herself at Wembley stadium is the sudden death of her uncle at 59, a family catastrophe that requires her to fly to Ireland to be at her mother’s side. And, in fact, it is these lightning bolts of real-life experience, including what sounds like a painful breakdown three-quarters of the way through her experiment, that stops Help Me! floating off into inconsequence.
Still, the book retains a certain generic weightlessness. Making art, really funny art, out of the gap between how young women are and how they think they ought to be is still possible 20 years on from Bridget Jones: just think of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s darkly sublime Fleabag. Help Me! floats over the same territory but left me, just like the self-help texts it sets out to interrogate, hungry for something more. What’s missing, ultimately, is that sharp crack of insight that tells us what it feels like to be youngish and female here, now, at this very moment in history.
• Help Me! is published by Picador. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
