Chapter 3 considers the self-help of time management, productivity, and creative timeflow in conversation with the work of Tao Lin and Myriam Gurba. First, I examine Lin’s autofictional novels, especially Taipei (2013), exploring how his relationship with time management evolves through ideas of micromanaged self-control, a self-tracking ‘virtual self’, and psychedelic, aleatory, and New Age temporalities. Then, by attending to Gurba’s memoir, Mean (2017), as well as the self-help advice podcast she co-hosted, I look at how her sense of therapeutic ‘trauma time’ and queer Chicanx asynchronic time combine to produce a form of ‘writer’s block’ that challenges the notion of literary production as a rational activity. The chapter argues that both authors play with diverse self-help discourses to explore agency and control in the processes of writing and life, illuminating broader tensions in contemporary culture between ideas of writers as disciplined, entrepreneurial craftspeople or as recalcitrant, romantic artists.

The introduction sets up the book’s exploration of the complex relationship between contemporary North American fiction and self-help culture over the past 25 years, arguing that recent writers stage encounters between diverse self-help practices to interrogate changing conceptions of authorship, selfhood, and society. Specifically, I position literary engagements with self-help as a way for writers to negotiate anxieties around individual, social, and writerly agency in a moment when traditional sovereign accounts of selfhood are under pressure from poststructuralist critiques of subjecthood and the shaping forces of systemic power, new technologies, and planetary crisis. I begin with an analysis of Deb Olin Unferth’s graphic novel, I, Parrot, then provide context on self-help in America, from long-standing advice, conduct, and wisdom traditions to today’s diversified, commercialized landscape of guidance literature and practices across the three central themes of the book: authority and public address, time management and productivity, and body and brain improvement. I argue that fiction writers can capture the nuanced sociopolitical paradoxes and multiplicities within self-help culture by bringing critical and creative energies to bear on deconstructing and reimaging its tropes and practices.

Chapter 5 offers a comparative reading of novels by Benjamin Kunkel (Indecision), Miranda July (The First Bad Man), and Alexandra Kleeman (You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine). From distinct perspectives, each of these writers engage with material discourses of body–brain improvement to critique contemporary demands for biomedicalized self-transformation while imagining more expansive forms of embodied subjectivity. Drawing on competing narratives of neuroplasticity, psychedelic transformation, New Age practices, cults, and makeover cultures, these authors stage unconventional coming-of-age stories in which protagonists cultivate new relationships with their physical selves and the wider networks of bodies in their societies. Their visions of embodied psychology and nervous feeling seek to decentre humanist verities and transcend the limits of identity as they grapple with bodily particularity and ‘universal’ corporealities.

The Coda explores contexts of speculative fictional responses to environmental crises as a way of bringing together the varied dialogues between literature, self-help, and agency at the heart of this study. It begins by surveying narratives of climate apocalypse and speculative possibility by Alexandra Kleeman, Margaret Atwood, Lidia Yuknavitch, and others before turning to consider in more depth Ben Lerner’s autofiction trilogy (Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, and The Topeka School) and his dialogic textual interactions with the work of his mother, bestselling feminist self-help author Harriet Lerner. These final reflections illuminate the submerged utopian and dystopian fantasies around personal and political change evident throughout the book and consider how self-help both enables and forecloses potentials for individual and collective authorship and agency in contemporary writing. The Coda argues that by pushing self-help to its limits – sometimes beyond the bounds of the human self – contemporary authors offer nuanced perspectives on what it means to ‘be better’, ethically, personally, ecologically, and socially, in a world of ongoing crisis.

David Foster Wallace’s work is soaked through with self-help practices – from Infinite Jest’s satirical-yet-serious portrayals of recovery culture to the critiques of self-absorbed personal growth cultures in his novels and stories and his more positive accounts of intergenerational advice transmission. Chapter 1 considers Wallace as writer and public advice giver, focusing on his posthumously published novel, The Pale King (2011), his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, and manuscripts from the Wallace archives, including an unpublished and unstudied letter composed in 1990 for James Harmon’s edited collection, Take My Advice: Recommendations for the Next Generation. I focus on Wallace’s lifelong engagement with self-help as a troubled but productive space through which to explore his concerns around public and private life, generational and gendered communications, and the transition to adult citizenship, and suggest that Wallace’s fantasies of advisory authority emerge, in part, as a response to the social fragmentation and individualism he attributes to post-1960s self-help.

Chapter 4 extends my exploration of time management by looking at Sheila Heti’s novel-from-life, Motherhood (2018), interrogating how Heti’s engagement with contrasting models of time management allows her to consider questions of everyday time use within broader negotiations of socially normative lifecycles and the ‘infinity’ time she associates with art-making. Through close readings of Heti’s texts alongside self-help works by David Allen, Stephen Covey, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, it argues that Heti’s writing dramatizes tensions between conflicting temporalities, from the linear, future-oriented time of productivity guides to the expansive time of creative flow, fate, and chance.

Chapter 2 continues to focus on self-help public speech and cultural authority but turns to the work of Paul Beatty, in particular his early novel, Tuff (2000), and later work, The Sellout, published in 2015, the same year Beatty also gave a commencement address. I explore Beatty’s ambivalent engagement with multiple discourses of self-help, from his burlesques of assimilationist ‘racial uplift’ leadership to his depictions of Black women’s empowerment cultures and descriptions of African-American social psychology frameworks. I argue that while Beatty satirizes the booming voices of self-help speakers, the reductiveness of self-help mottos, and the individualizing effects of ‘self esteem’ culture, he also finds aesthetically and ethically generative possibilities in grassroots self-help praxis and the clash of lived, communitarian forms of wisdom.

Judge Carolyn Kuhl (L.A. Superior Court), until recently the chief judge of the nation’s largest trial court system, offers an important contribution to the debate about whether and how to relax “courthouse UPL” – the possibility that judges, court clerks, other court staff, and AI-enabled chatbots might plausibly narrow the justice gap by providing self-represented litigants with necessary assistance. At once a history lesson and an in-the-trenches look at a decade of L.A. court reforms, Judge Kuhl shows how the anxieties about judicial and court neutrality have given way to a rich array of reform options that are producing concrete lessons for other judicial reformers looking for alternatives to conventional forms of legal help.

The Introduction focuses on the experiences of victims of the Holocaust rather than perpetrators. It addresses victims’ perceptions, understandings, reactions, self-help and varied attempts at resistance. It also concerns Roma, mentally and physically challenged individuals, Slavs and Soviet POWs, and homosexuals. Finally, it addresses historiography, as do most of the chapters in this volume.

Examining rescue during 1940–1945, this chapter asks what possibilities of self-help were available and what strategies were developed to take action? Could Jewish organizations continue to operate under the Nazi regime? What forms of cooperation were forged with non-Jewish organizations and individuals, such as members of the Christian churches, and did these raise chances of survival?

In this chapter we examine how people with Hoarding disorder can help themselves. This is not a “quick fix” and does take time, commitment, and courage to face up to your problems. We will start by looking at how a ban on new items coming into the property is the first “golden rule” of treatment. We will examine how it can be useful but not essential to have a friend or family member also involved in the process. The principles of discarding objects are discussed with the idea of holding on to objects for the shortest time possible, making an immediate decision and then sticking with it and not going back on that decision. Finally, we will then list helpful resources and groups who may be able to assist you.

How was the British imperial state transformed from an ancien régime in 1819 to a liberal one that depended upon a new science of government?

Muslim leaders of the UOIF further cement their claim to respectability through an elite project of community-building. This project consists of forming a respectable class of Muslims who embody the petit bourgeois values of hard work, politeness, and individual responsibility. This is concretely enacted through various institutions, starting with private Muslim schools, and implemented through a range of regular activities, such as reading groups, diploma ceremonies, and self-development workshops. This chapter draws on comparisons made with Black elites in the US and upper-class Jews in nineteenth-century Europe to show that French Muslim leaders’ uplift ideology is also scripted into bodies. Physical exercise, hygienic practices, and appropriate outfits comprise the primary medium of perfectionist politics seeking dignity. These politics are articulated using the language of Islamic virtues – the centrality of education is predicated upon the Quranic injunction iqrāʾ (“read”), the search for professional accomplishment is understood as a duty of iḥsān (excellence), and the importance of behavioral exemplarity is reasoned in reference to ādāb (good manners) and akhlāq (ethical conduct). These moral principles, however, are also consistent with neoliberal definitions of social worth and rely on the continuous erection of boundaries against lower-class, “undeserving” coreligionists.