Self-help vs. The Hey Nonny Handbook
Not being one to turn down an interesting free book, I had absolutely no hesitation in taking delivery of the The Hey Nonny Handbook from Harriman House. I was in any case bemused by the subtitle: ‘The literary survival guide for women’ and fascinated by the author’s claim that people in crisis can find help in real literature, rather than self-help books.
As someone whose (alas, now limited) reading of late has tended to be the self-help variety because I get so much from it, but who used to devour ‘real’ literature, I shall reserve judgement of the author Janice Warman’s comment in the Bookseller until I've read the book. She said ‘Those in crisis shouldn't turn to 'self-help' books. All the help you need can be found in real literature.’ I too know about the therapeutic power of getting thoughts and ideas down in writing and I’ve written about it before in the divorce recovery context, but I am a great believer that the best self-help books are a cost-effective way of finding answers which may be hard to find elsewhere.
The author’s article in The Bookseller, click here goes on:
The self-help industry is growing exponentially; estimates for the US alone peg the market at $10bn, while a search for "self-help" on Amazon yields 41,138 titles. This is good news for self-appointed gurus, publishers and booksellers - but is it good news for the public?
I would argue that there is a far greater source of wisdom available to us all: books. Ordinary books - plays, poetry, novels and biographies - written by people who, like us, have been through the mill. Face it: there's nowhere you've been that someone more articulate hasn't been before. "We read to know we're not alone," said C S Lewis.
It's the sense of recognition we have when we read a poem or a passage that echoes our own experience that is therapeutic. Far more so than being told we can "change our life in seven days" or warned that we might be "a woman who loves too much". This is why we wrote The Hey Nonny Handbook - the literary survival guide for women.
We discovered that when you're in extremis, an Auden poem can console, a paragraph from Fay Weldon can have you howling with laughter - and a Sally Ann Lasson cartoon can convince you that she has a camcorder set on permanent record in your house. Before the book came the Hey Nonny Club: a loose affiliation of women with troubles in their lives. As Chekhov said, "Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day-to-day living that wears you out." Looking through the prism of our own lives - 40 - something women for whom things had just begun to go wrong - we found that our own shelves contained the answer: a medicine chest filled with potent remedies.
We shared jokes, cartoons, short stories, poems, novels and biographies; in fact anything that would shed light on our situation. Our point is not that all self-help books are useless, but that it's becoming increasingly hard to pick out those that are any good. We recommend a few: Lewis Wolpert's Malignant Sadness is excellent on depression, but then so is F Scott Fitzgerald in The Crack-Up. Kingsley Amis is unsurpassed on the curmudgeon's view of women, as are Ibsen and Shaw on marriage, and Gloria Steinem on activism.
We're unashamed advocates of poetry, which illuminates where other forms of writing merely inform, and perhaps provided the earliest form of selfhelp. Our title came from "Much Ado About Nothing", by arguably the greatest poet: "Then sigh not so, But let them go, And be you blithe and bonny, Converting all your sounds of woe, Into Hey nonny, nonny". You know it makes sense.
So what is this book actually all about? Here’s the jacket text for The Hey Nonny Handbook:
Take two women: One finds her high-flying career has flown her straight into a brick wall; the other discovers her husband lurking in the shrubbery, texting his mistress. This is the book they wrote.
Do you have teenage children, elderly parents or a husband in crisis? Then this book's for you.
From divorce to depression, menopause to marriage, from infidelity to insomnia - it's all here in The Hey Nonny Handbook.
This book won't provide chicken soup for your soul. What it will show you is what the authors found themselves: that literature can save your life. There's nowhere you've been that someone more articulate hasn't been before. As C.S. Lewis has said, 'We read to know we are not alone'.
Women have always banded together for reasons of safety and mutual support. The Hey Nonny Club started life as a loose collection of women (not a collection of loose women!) who had troubles in their life - and from that club this book has grown.
The authors hope that women everywhere will learn from their experiences and benefit from their words, from the City high-flyer to the mother in track pants mucking out the guinea pigs.
Laced with the acid wit of The Independent's cartoonist Sally Ann Lasson, it abounds in wicked humour and black comedy.
Read it on the beach, give it to a friend in trouble or keep it on the kitchen shelf. And as Gwendolen said in The Importance of Being Earnest, you will 'always have something sensational to read on the train'!
I don’t think I can wait to read it on the beach, I shall probably devour it at the airport.
So you’re a male reader – what’s in this book for you? Whilst unashamedly feminist, it might appeal to men who want to learn insights into the way women think, act and want to live their lives. Whilst it could be uncomfortable reading for some, this quote from Anthony Clare in the epilogue sums up for me how men can learn much from women:
‘Men were in command. Men today are in shock. Boys and grown men have always taken for granted that what they were doing was more important than what girls and women were doing. The very traits which once marked out women as weak and inferior – emotional, spontaneous, intuitive, expressive, compassionate, empathic – are increasingly being seen as the markers of maturity and health.’
The Hey Nonny Handbook is by Harriman House at £19.99 but you can order it here:
