On New Year's Day 2006, Beth Lisick woke up with a hangover and decided to upgrade her existence. Like countless other Americans, she turned to self-help. "I chose 12 things that I wanted to improve about my life," she says.
The result: Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone (Morrow, $24.95).
Lisick, 39, is not the sort of person you typically see at Suze Orman's money seminars. She's known for her best-selling 2005 memoir, Everybody Into the Pool, in which she wrote about touring with a punk lesbian band and living illegally in a sewage-filled warehouse.
Today she is married and has a 6-year-old son, but the Berkeley, Calif., writer continues to "live in the alternative, fringe world." Her husband is a musician/freelance recording engineer. To supplement her writing income, she still regularly dresses up in a banana suit and hands out fruit for $25 an hour.
Two years ago, Lisick plunged into the world of mainstream self-help, expecting it would be filled with "cheesiness and slickness." But instead, "I am glad I did it. I stepped into a world that was completely outside my own."
Like when she and a friend went on Richard Simmons' week-long "Cruise to Lose." And loved it. Lisick was impressed with the fitness guru's connection to his fans. "It was cool," she says. "He knows their grandchildren's names."
Stephen Covey's Seven Habits, Deepak Chopra's spirituality seminar and Julie Morgenstern's organizing guidance all offered some help, Lisick says. She didn't understand Jack Canfield's (Chicken Soup for the Soul) fixation on success and big bucks. And attending a John Gray (Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus ) seminar creeped her out big-time. "I really, really didn't like the whole male/females-are-so-different thing."
Self-help's appeal? Says Lisick, "It's part of that American-dream thing, people trying to pursue happiness."
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