A Self-Help Guide to STOP Reading Self-Help Guides
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Book Overview
A man is writing the last self-help guide anyone will ever need. So far, he has two pages. He worries about tetanus, lockjaw, brain tumors, and an alarming assortment of other possible disasters. His wife, Appalachia, has agreed to answer five questions about his health each day, but no more. When she discovers his unfinished guide on a bookstore shelf, she laughs so hard that a doctor, a reading expert, and store security get involved.
In J. Bradley Minnick's inventive and darkly funny collection, the search for guidance takes stranger and more moving forms. Charles Entry, confined to a convalescent home since childhood, writes lists on walls, floors, furniture, and his own skin, desperate to preserve what he keeps forgetting. When the staff scrub his lists away, a dispute unexpectedly gives rise to a literary magazine. Two longtime friends struggle to understand each other just as one begins losing the words he needs to make amends. A professor approaching retirement confronts thirty-nine years of handwritten notes and the question of what his teaching has meant. Around a campfire, a gathering of dead writers turns a storytelling competition into a battle of literary egos.
Elsewhere, an elderly woman tries to explain the mysterious black fog that overtakes her; a young girl cares for a displaced horned toad that seems to be fading before her eyes; and a high school student who would rather write stories than study finds unexpected company in the writers he admires.
Moving between satire, literary play, and moments of startling tenderness, a self-help guide to STOP reading self-help guides explores our attempts to make sense of lives that refuse to follow instructions. Its characters collect advice, construct theories, make lists, and turn to books for answers. Yet the most meaningful discoveries often emerge from the very experiences they cannot explain or control.
Funny, poignant, and deeply concerned with the limits of language, this is a collection about the help we seek, the stories we tell ourselves, and the surprising ways people still manage to find one another.
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