Artisanal Chicken Soup for the Soul

Is The City Authentic a self-help book?

I put “self-help” into the AI image generator. This thing is gonna take my job any second now.

The other day I was pleasantly surprised to find my book featured in a post by

Tara McMullin

about why authenticity always feels so fake. After introducing my concept of the predictably unique she writes:

Yes, we want to "be ourselves," but we also want to fit in. We want to show off our unique interests and style, but we also want to show up in a way that's recognizable to others. I'd like to say that this is more a question of "social compatibility" than "market compatibility," that being enmeshed in a community culture naturally tempers our choices. But it's hard to say where the market stops and culture starts today. The market sells us the tools we use to create or signal culture, and so without consciously doing otherwise, we reproduce market compatibility through our daily choices.

I wrestle with this every day. My quote-unquote authentic self is illegible to most people who don't share a smattering of my identities. My authentic self is a bad fit for prevailing market conditions. And yes, I might even say that my authentic self is intimidating, or at least that's what I've been told. As I write about in my book, the impulse to sculpt a market-compatible version of myself is hard to ignore, and my attempts to do so resulted in multiple episodes of depression and burnout throughout my life.

I do not know if McMullin describes her own work as self-help, I know that label carries with it a lot of negative, boot-strappy connotations but that’s not her lane, at least not in what I’ve read. But Amazon puts her in self-help (that’s not the author and sometimes not even the publisher’s choice) and she is talking directly to the reader, about the reader, and that’s good enough for me to at least put it adjacent to that genre.

There is a secret about my book that I knew I’d reveal eventually, though I thought it’d take a bit longer for someone to catch on the way McMullin has. The entire time I was writing The City Authentic I was intensely interested in the process of taking this big thing I was writing and turning it into a commodity. Call it an occupational hazard or “going native” but each step in the commodification process was fascinating. At no point (to the credit of everyone at UC Press) did I feel like the questions about market fit and audience were destroying the quality of the book or the ideas I was trying to get across. To the contrary, I think authors should be primarily concerned with who they want to speak to and what few key points they want the reader to take away. A book can change a mind in only so many ways.

And so the secret is that I wrote The City Authentic as a self-help book. After I wrote it the press gave me a bunch of stuff to fill out about how I wanted the book advertised: what goes on the cover, how should media talk about the book, what sorts of professional organizations and conferences should they send it to, that sort of thing. At the end of one of these forms they gave me the opportunity (made the mistake?) of asking me if there was anything else they should know that would help with selling the book. Here, is, verbatim, what I wrote sometime around September ‘22.

This is going to sound weird but when thinking about audience it might help to think of this as a self-help book. A big part of this project, which I think I get at in the selling points, is the promotion of social theory as useful to everyday people. I want to give people a vocabulary and analytical lens to understand what is happening to their neighborhood. I think anything that positions the book as helping people make sense of the world would be a good idea.

I have no idea if this paragraph translated to a change in what the press did with my book, you’d have to ask them (don’t actually ask them), but it is gratifying to see that the book might be doing that on its own.

It is probably a mistake to wade into the Discourse™ around whether the left should meet the Jordan Peterson-style politically inflected self-help nostroms with an offering of our own but I’m gonna make some cautious contributions.

I’ve seen it argued that the self-help genre does more to instigate the feeling of progress than assist in accomplishing anything. For example:

It is hard to fix yourself, but perhaps that is exactly what self-help does—not in the sense of “repair” but instead in the sense of making a thing constant across time and space. Self-help doesn’t help us will our aspirations into being so much as it soothes anxiety about our shortcomings, about our capacity to keep aspiring. Self-help is a form of deferral, a procrastination: putting off actual struggles by reading a book that tells us how we’re just about to begin the struggle, a quixotic routine that should be familiar to many leftists.

This feels correct but it misses the fact that lots of people do want direction in life. The world keeps coming and changing and destroying itself, and obsolescing before it comes up with something new for you to buy. How are you supposed to make sense of any of this? What structure of emotion and meaning can all this hang off of? People, especially young people, need something more than Bo Burnham’s That Funny Feeling.

The best option is to talk to a real person and learn from them. Mentorship is definitely something I’ve benefited from when I could get it and all else being equal human relationships are better than media consumption. But I think most people know that and they turn to books, podcasts, substack or whatever when they’re still having a hard time finding the answers to their questions.

So while my book wasn’t supposed to be self-help per se I did write it towards (and maybe for) the person who needed some connections between how they felt about the world and themselves. That sort of move can happen in all sorts of topics —from the science of UFO encounters to a history of needle point— but I knew about cities, social media, and economic development so I wrote it about that. But it’s my hope that maybe more writing can focus on that aspect of sense-making while contributing to whatever topic they’ve chosen. Answering the “so what?” question early and often seems especially helpful right now.

Perhaps we can meet self-help with social-help. Society-help? I don’t know what to call it. But anything that keeps the individualistic, “this problem you’re having begins and ends in your head” version of advice down and turns up the, “here’s how to locate yourself in this chaos.” It’s been difficult to get the intellectual left to do this. For example here’s Marshall Berman writing in 1982,

Many artistic and literary intellectuals have immersed themselves in the world of structuralism, a world that simply wipes the question of modernity —along with all other question about the self and history— off the map. Others have embraced a mystique of post-modernism, which strives to cultivate ignorance of modern history and culture, and speaks as if all human feeling, expressiveness, play, sexuality, and community have only just been invented —by the post-modernists— and were unknown, even inconceivable, before last week. Meanwhile social scientists, embarrassed by critical attacks on their techno-pastoral models, have fled from the task of building a model that might be truer to modern life. Instead they have split modernity into a series of separate components —industrialization, state-building, urbanization, development of markets, elite formation— and resisted any attempt to integrate them into a whole. This has freed them from extravagant generalizations and vague totalities— but also from thought that might engage their own lives and works and their place in history.

Now, 41 years later all I can say is, yeah ditto that. Conservatives like to point to things they don’t like and call it something like “post-modern cultural marxism” which isn’t really a thing but if they’d stopped halfway at just “post-modern” I think they’d at least be making a cogent point that only a few people enjoy pretending as though they’ve invented everything anew again. Lots of people want to plug into something that’s already there. They want a sure thing to bet on. Conservatives, ironically, make up a post-modern pastiche of revanchist ethnonationalism and patriarchal psychodrama and call that “Western Civilization” and counsel sagely that we must RETVRN to that.

But leftists can produce things that do “engage their own lives and works and their place in history” while also giving some direction to others. That isn’t individualistic or manipulative. It’s just helpful. And who couldn’t use some help right now?

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If you’re nearby come out to the Schenectady County Historical Society on 6/22 for my book talk and cocktails! Details here: https://schenectadyhistorical.org/event/cityauth/

What I’m listening to right now: