Title: Practically Perfect in Every Way
Author: Jennifer Niesslein
Author's web site: http://jenniferniesslein.com/
Date: 2007
Publisher: Putnam / Penguin
ISBN: 978-0-399-15391-4
Length: 343 pages
Quote: “I feel vaguely dissatisfied,with an unspecified yearning located somewhere in my abdomen. Am I happy?”
It’s possible that one reason why the self-help books of which she makes a diligent study don’t help Jennifer Niesslein a great deal is that, on the whole, she is happy. She edits a magazine, spends lots of quality time with her kid,and has time to wonder if she might be happier if the house were more tidy, if she had more money in the bank, if she and her husband talked more about the relationship, if she ate health food, if she went to church. So she buys these books that are probably intended for people who are positively unhappy. Most of the books offer her some useful tips for some specific things, but on the whole she feels that what they’ve guided her to do has been navel-gazing.
But she’s quite funny about it. Highlights of her survey of self-help books include a scene where she and her husband growl through a prespecified number of minutes of Talk About The Relationship, culminating with a solemn pledge to each other: “We are united against Dr. Phil. We pledge to never, ever time our conversations again. We will never use the phrase ‘Thank you for caring enough to share’...” Then there’s a “discovery” that all introverts would naturally have made before age fifteen if so many parents and teachers hadn’t joined in the implicit conspiracy to make us feel like defective extroverts: “‘Casual friends,’ I’m beginning to suspect, means that you’re stuck in small-talk purgatory forever.” Duh, right, that’s why some of us didn’t want to be voted Most Popular.
It’s possible that another part of Niesslein’s discontent is that, although she’s living in Virginia, she’s not a Virginian. Her background, lifestyle, lack of religion, and excess of politics all belong Somewhere Else. She takes up space in Virginia the way people take up space in Illinois or New Jersey, in a place that has no culture of its own, and then wonders why she seems not to be part of her community or its culture. One of the shortcomings of self-help books is that their scope rarely permits them to offer the one obvious, but also specific, piece of advice a reader needs most. For Niesslein it might be: “If you want to shun anything ‘conservative,’ if your sense of ideological purity won’t allow you to read a book about marriage without worrying that your ‘gay’ friends are left out of it, if you can’t listen to the ministers at the churches in Virginia, why don’t you just go home?”
By the end of the book Niesslein’s little boy is in school, living a more independent life, and Niesslein is devoting her time to an organization whose main goal will turn out to have been irrelevant. This kind of thing happens to people who move into places where they don’t belong and dedicate themselves to political agendas that don’t belong in those places either. Niesslein writes a cheery ending for the book, but as you read about the organization and its political goals, and think of recent news, you’ll think: Oh poor baby. Still, she seems emotionally resilient enough to get over this.
I’d like to see her get completely over it. I think we need a self-help movement for illiberal left-wingers, where they gradually desensitize themselves to their phobias of “conservative” ideas, learn to hear people out before throwing themselves into efforts to do things for others that the others don’t want or need to have done. In an ideal world that could be the topic of Niesslein’s next book.
Whatever the topic of her next book is, though, I expect it will be a good read. Practically Perfect in Every Way is a good read. Warmly recommended.
To buy it here, send $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment; three more books of this size will fit into that $5 package along with this one, and we'll send $1 to Niesslein or a charity of her choice.
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