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    Help Me!
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    Help Me!
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    Help Me!
    Ebook376 pages6 hours

    Help Me!

    By Marianne Power

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    I wanted to find out what would happen if I really did follow the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People? Really felt The Power of Now? Could life be transformed? Could I get rich? Skinny? Find love? Be more productive and fulfilled? Because I really did want all the things these books promised.

    For years Journalist Marianne Power lined her bookshelves with dog-eared copies of definitive guides on how to live your best life, dipping in and out of self-help books when she needed them most. Then, one day, she woke up to find that the life she hoped for and the life she was living were worlds apart—and she set out to make some big changes.

    Marianne decided to finally find out if her elusive “perfect existence”—the one without debt, anxiety, or hangover Netflix marathons, the one where she healthily bounced around town and met the cashmere-sweater-wearing man of her dreams—really did lie in the pages of our best known and acclaimed self help books. She vowed to test a book a month for one year, following its advice to the letter, taking what she hoped would be the surest path to a flawless new her. But as the months passed and Marianne’s reality was turned upside down, she found herself confronted with a different question: Self-help can change your life, but is it for the better?

    With humor, audacity, disarming candor and unassuming wisdom, in Help Me Marianne Power plumbs the trials and tests of being a modern woman in a “have it all” culture, and what it really means to be our very best selves.

    Editor's Note

    What happens when you actually DO self-help…

    Who knew self-help could be this funny? Marianne Power spent a year reading and putting self-help advice into action, one book per month. Find out what actually works, what not to bother with, and the surprising source of advice that helped Power the most in this entertaining and actionable read.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGrove Press
    Release dateJan 15, 2019
    ISBN9780802146885
    Author

    Marianne Power

    MARIANNE POWER is a successful British journalist and blogger. She lives just outside of London, England.  

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    Reviews for Help Me!

    4.5/5

    107 ratings17 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Power, Marianne. Help Me. 9 CDs. unabridged. 11hrs 24 mins. Brilliance Audio. ISBN 9781721335176. $35.99. Marianne Power's candid, hilarious, and thoughtful memoir will resonant with any woman who has ever looked in the mirror and thought to herself, "I'm not pretty enough, smart enough, thin enough, or accomplished enough." A New Year's resolution turns into a soul searching nightmare as famed international journalist, Marianne Power, vows to read and adhere to a new self-help book every month. From rejection therapy to finances to fighting fear to talking to men, Marianne pushes herself to the limits and discovers that self-help is no joke. Over the course of the year she finds herself jumping from planes, chatting up strangers on the tube, asking a room full of businessmen for a date, doing naked yoga, and walking over hot coals. But has any of it made her a better woman? It's a year of change and discovery but as Marrianne discovers, sometimes too much looking inward can make us more self-centered and desensitized to what truly matters. Narrated brilliantly by the author and her mother, the wit and candor shines through even the darkest moments. Readers will be charmed by this thought-provoking quest on what it takes to be the best version of ourselves. - Erin Cataldi, Johnson Co. Public Library, Franklin, IN
    • 5/5
      I loved this book. Marianne did a great job of keeping me interested across her journey of 12 self-help books. I really loved this book and felt that I could really relate to this story.
    • 5/5
      A finally honest account of someone trying to make sense of the guilty pleasures of first world problems. The final realization of wanting to solve our problems with a book but needing a friend more is very powerful. Does bring up the irony of this book in and of itself. If you’ve struggled with feeling guilty for being unhappy when you know you shouldn’t, turned to every self help book in your local
      Bookstore, and still feel more confused and lost than ever, pick up this book.
    • 3/5
      Average book, I love the author so funny and lovely but she didn't really give these books what they deserve, I hope that she would make a little review of every book.
    • 5/5
      This book is so underrated. It is well written, hilarious and sweet. I didn’t want it to end. I definitely recommend.
    • 5/5
      Witty, funny, touching, real. Absolutely impossible to ‘put it down’
    • 5/5
      Hard to put down. It’s funny yet very real.
    • 5/5
      It's a beautiful book. Honest, well crafted and truly funny!
    • 4/5
      Marianne decides to explore 12 popular self-help books over 12 months at the beginning of one year and discovers that they're not always helpful, and that this took longer than she took.If you're like me you've read a lot of self-help books and occasionally taken a few pieces of advice from them before inertia and time spent doing other things moves you away from the book. I keep meaning to do a Kondo-esque tidy but it would require more of my energy than I'm willing to devote to it. I do question if it sparks joy of things I'm putting away and I've removed a few things from my house as I'm asking that question. (I also remind myself that I deserve better than the things that don't work on my skin or in my life etc.). I also listen to the excellent By the Book Podcast and often agree with a lot of their points about the ones I've read.The Books she chooses are: Feel the Fear and do it anyway; Money a love story; The Secret; F**k it: the ultimate spiritual way; Angels with Doreen Virtue; 7 Habits of Highly effective people; Power of Now; Get the Guy; Daring Greatly and You can heal your life. She strugles with depression and becoming a bit of a self-centred ass for a while and all the time her very Irish mammy trys to steer her on a good path.Like me she finds things that resonate in books and sometimes she obsesses a bit and I couldn't abandon my life for a year like she did to look inward but by the end she's less broken, mostly by connecting with the people who are real in her life.

      6 people found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Hey Even when veI’m not gonna was nude Jim ughh j
    • 5/5
      A brilliant and honest read. Who among us doesn't wish we could be the best version of ourselves, whatever the h*ll that means. Marianne's difficult journey to self-acceptance and contentment is one I believe will resonate with most modern women.

      3 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I was surprised by how much I really enjoyed this book. The book starts in the tone I figured the whole book would be in: a light, sometimes comedic journey into the slightly weird world of self-help books. However, as time goes on, Marianne kind of spins out of control and confronts much more serious issues than I imagined she would. She is funny and relatable but also allows herself to be very vulnerable and honest. I enjoyed the book from start to finish and will look for Marianne's writing in the future.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I was a bit shocked with Power's blunt honesty about her perceptions of herself: did she really see herself like that? And I realised probably yes... so how refreshing to have this authenticity, vulnerability and humour to share with her readers her darkest hours. Power probably went much deeper than most in her ambitions - and certainly misguided in her application of the advice in the books she read - but she's also a testimony to who we can be as people: extreme, fun, dark, passionate, depressed, victorious... this book has all the emotions with the sharp eye of the journalist.
    • 5/5
      I LOVED this book so much. It was vulnerable and honest and made me feel understood. Not only that, it was so enjoyable to read and she told a story so well, like a non-fiction Bridget Jones. This is a book that I hope imprints itself on me. She showed courage in sharing the mistakes that she made along the way, pushing through her insecurities and having tough but real conversations. This is a woman I admire.
    • 3/5
      A journalist decides that she is fed up of her life and decides to try 12 different self help books over the course of a year, each one aiming to "fix" some of her perceived problems. It doesn't quite work out the way she'd planned or expected. January starts well, with "Feel the fear" with her embracing a number of different challenges to take her out of her comfort zone. It's interesting that some of them address social fears and other deep seated evolutionary fears. She manages the life modelling, but decides that she is never going to enjoy skydiving, what with being scared of heights. February's book addresses money and here's where the one month per book lets her down, I felt. She makes some good progress within the month, but one month isn't enough to fix ingrained habits and the distraction of moving on to the next book means that the good progress she'd made in financial matters is lost by the lack of focus.Some of the self help she tried just sounds entirely nuts. Rejection therapy just sounds horrible, even if it does teach a lesson that you self reject than actually get rejected. And not all rejection is bad, when one door closes, another opens. But that still doesn't make me want to go out and get rejected at every opportunity. I can see the attraction of "F*ck it" idea, but I'm not sure that it seems sensible to do so in all aspects of life, not really. She ends up in a really poor mental state, and at least does the sensible thing by engaging an expert to help. She also then proceeds to find, in this poor state, a book that actually does help her. This may be a case of the right book at the right time than because it is necessarily the best self help book. She finishes the book having finished her project to try 12 self help books, having taken almost a year and a half, rather than the planned year. And it seems that she is more comfortable in her skin at the end than she was on the journey, so maybe it has helped. But I'm not sure that I'd be suggesting it as a good idea. the most positive experiences seem to be those where she has had support alongside the self help book itself. So the week long Hoffman retreat and and Therapist in conjunction with "The Power of Now" both seem to have had the most telling impacts. All of which could be read as an indictment of the self help industry, in that they could easily do more harm than good to some individuals. I think that this might have been a foolhardy task to have undertaken, and can only be glad that it seems to have turned out as well as it did, without further harm.
    • 4/5
      A very zany book that is part memour, part self-help. I appreciate that it flows quickly and mixed the two components without tendium or trite. A good read if one is into or thinking of getting into self-help books. Many of her encounters are typical to the big city and not transferable to suburbia, but it's interesting nevertheless.
    • 4/5
      This was a fairly enjoyable read, but I think a lot of that had to do with me being quite familiar with many of the books mentioned and also having had a period where I was obsessed with self help books.