We Need Heart-Touching, Soul-Penetrating Stories!

If every one would see

To his own reformation

How very easily

You might reform a nation

—Nineteenth-century rhyme

A BRIEF TIMELINE OF SOME SEMINAL SELF-HELP BOOKS

• The Bible
• The Bhagavad-Gita
• Meditations (Marcus Aurelius, second century)
• The Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius, sixth century)
• Autobiography (Ben Franklin, 1790)
• Self-Reliance (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841)
• Walden (Henry David Thoreau, 1848)
• Self-Help (Samuel Smiles, 1859)
• How to Win Friends and Influence People (Dale Carnegie, 1936)
• The Phenomenon of Man (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 1949)
• The Power of Positive Thinking (Norman Vincent Peale, 1952)
• I’m OK, You’re OK (Thomas Harris, 1967)
• Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (Walker Percy, 1983)
• Self-Help (Lorrie Moore, 1985)
• The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield, 1993)
• Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff (Richard Carlson, 1997–2005)
• Chicken Soup for the Soul (Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield, 1995–2005)

WE ARE HERE TO HELP EACH OTHER, TO HELP OURSELVES

I first learned about the self-help authors’ conference from my father, a child psychologist who writes parenting books. Weeks later, Dad and I sit among six hundred enrolled “students” in the Atlanta Hilton Grand Conference Room, eagerly awaiting the appearance of Mark Victor Hansen with a glassy-eyed expectancy that indicates either excitement or fatigue (it is 7 a.m.). Hansen, who calls himself “The Authority on Human Potential,” co-created the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, and runs fifty to seventy-five seminars a year all over North America. My father, having also written several books of this type, is curious to learn why Mark Victor Hansen is a Mega-Millionaire and he is not. One reason becomes automatically clear: the conference costs $1,000 per attendee, which does not include the cost of transportation and hotel rooms. But most attendees profess not to mind spending the money; as in a real university, they believe the cost will bring them the education necessary for success. Unlike a real university, success here is measured by the number of books sold. In this way, the hopeful self-help magnate is a paradoxical breed, at once altruistically believing himself to be invested in society’s greater good while desiring to secure a personal shitload of cash.

The hotel conference room looks exactly how a hotel conference room should look: chandeliered, windowless, blighted. We sit at long white-clothed tables facing a black stage flanked by gold balloons; each place setting has a glass of water, a Hilton notebook, a Hilton pen, and a doggy bone (we later find out the bone represents our dreams). It doesn’t...