[The following was written by Synthesis Weekly columnist Emilie Clark. She can be reached at emilie@synthesis.net]

Helping Me Help Myself
By Beth Lisick
William Morrow

So graduation is upon us. My main advice to graduates would be to rethink the whole idea and stay in college forever, but it’s probably too late for most of you so you’ll have to go ahead and graduate. Too bad.
Many of you probably think graduation will be the start of your “real life.” You know, the one where you get a job, stop spending so much of your money on beer and start to become your parents. But with the economy the way it is, don’t count on it. In fact, you might end up like Beth Lisick, who makes a substantial chunk of her income from donning a banana suit and passing out fruit to passersby. It is at this point that you, like Lisick, may decide that you need a bit of help — self-help to be exact.

Helping Me Help Myself is the memoir of a year spent devoted to living the advice contained in self-help books. Every month she picks a different facet of her life that could be improved and sets about improving it. Lisick tries all the greats: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus; The Artist’s Way; Suze Orman and even Richard Simmons. As you might suspect she comes at this task from a highly cynical point of view. Lisick is a slam poet/author/banana suit wearer living in Berkeley — not you your typical self-helper. But as cynical as she is, she’s also fair and does her best to quell her gag reflex in order to let the self-help really sink in. And along the way the reader can’t help but pick up some good tips, too.
The book is very funny, which is pretty much my only criteria for a good review, and you do come away with a sense that Lisick learned something in her quest. But I couldn’t help feeling disappointed that by December no major revelation had been reached. The only things that seem to change in her life are smaller, practical things, and the big questions she starts out with are never satisfactorily answered. Perhaps that’s to be expected when you devote your intellectual activity to books you can purchase at the grocery store, but I still felt unsatisfied when it was over. Thankfully though, Lisick’s personality and sense of humor make the memoir still worth the cover price and the few days it took to read.

More after the jump.

I’ve noticed that this “annual self-improvement” book has become a bit of a trend. For my birthday, my boyfriend bought me The Know-it-All, by A.J. Jacobs. I’m still convinced that it was a not-so-subtle dig at my personality, but he assures that he just thought I’d like it. Jacobs’ quest in the memoir is to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in a year. The narrative of the book is very clever — it starts with A and ends with Z and intersperses personal revelations with plenty of facts from the Britannica. In fact, unfortunately for the boyfriend, the book had the unintended effect of making me even more obnoxious as I cluttered my brain with useless trivia and provided a continuous stream of commentary on all the stuff I was learning. In this way, the book acts as a sort of Encyclopedia-Light for those of us who don’t have the free time or the will power to read the whole thing (I’m not sure which one I am).
I think the lesson to take away from both of these books is that learning doesn’t stop once you graduate. In fact, others might say that learning doesn’t really begin until you step out from the hallowed halls into the real world. Who knows? I don’t really feel smarter or more equipped to be successful and happy than I was before I read these memoirs. But perhaps that’s because I spent most of the last few days catching up with The Hills online. There’s my real advice to you, graduates: Don’t spend the summer catching up on The Hills; no good can come of it. And if you start to freak out thinking about entering the real world, just remember those two little words that calm everyone trying to hold on to their glory days: graduate school.

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Tags: advice to graduates | banana | beth lisick | facet | gag reflex | mars women | memoir | men are from mars | men are from mars women are from venus | poet author | revelation | richard simmons | self help books | seven habits of highly effective people | slam poet | substantial chunk | weekly columnist | william morrow

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