I occasionally indulge in reading self-help books, especially the really meaningless, trashy ones that appear in places like GOOP. Normally that's not the kind of thing I would include in the blog, which is generally focused on higher-brow stuff (I'm -so-fan-cay), but my beloved sister asked me to summarize a recently-read self-help book to save her the trouble of reading it and satiate her curiosity, which led to a long phone conversation about all the popular and trashy self-help books I've read recently. So for the curious and the genuinely interested, here is a round-up (if you're here for the literary fiction, see you tomorrow):
French Women Don't Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano; This was amusing enough, but certainly don't read it if you actually need to diet, because in that sense it is useless and full of completely trivial and arbitrary advice like, "Don't weigh yourself -- you should judge your ideal size by how you feel." Also, this veers a bit into the erratic, starvation-as-cleanse territory with this disgusting leek soup you consume for 48 hours, which sounds more like an eating disorder to me. The positive take-away was an emphasis on treating yo'self in small doses and making meals more ritualistic and slower, a lesson I've tried to apply at work, where I've starting keeping real dishes and silverware, as well as all my favorite condiments on-hand.
Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman; This was utterly amusing and ludicrous. Whatever Pamela Druckerman has learned about parenting from the French really can't be applied in America, where women don't get maternity leave, where there is no universal day care, and where healthcare is generally privatized and expensive. If you're going to move to France, then by all means, read this book, but otherwise I think you'll find it pretty depressing. It also really flies in the face of attachment parenting, which seems to be the thing among yuppie parents I know, so it's not very relevant. I should probably mention I don't have kids, so my authority is suspect on this one.
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua; Another parenting book I'm not qualified to comment on, but all the same: Amy Chua is truly, deeply crazy, and this book is the proof. It makes me very angry that she is probably rich because of this delusional piece of psycho-babble garbage. Here's the gist -- be really mean and strict and hard on your children and berate them at every turn; insist on raising them in America and then use every opportunity to point out to them how terrible American children are; and finally, emasculate your husband as much as possible and question his parenting skills constantly. Then, get into an enormous fight with your daughter in Moscow on a family vacation (who vacations in Moscow?!) and watch your 10-year old run away from you, screaming and in tears, in a foreign country. Then write a book about it, as if this is the platonic ideal of mother-daughter relations. Side note -- her daughter goes to Harvard and is super-smart and seems well-adjusted but STILL: not worth it.