She discovers plenty of room for improvement

Helping Me Help Myself

One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone

Beth Lisick

William Morrow: 264 pp., $24.95

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BACK in the olden days, memoirs were written the olden way. A set of compelling events befell our protagonist, who then wrote about them. In these days of marketing before content, that paradigm often gets flipped on its head: Authors contrive events so as to write about them. Welcome to the new, not-so-brave world of shtick lit -- all those books with titles such as “My Year of Eating Only Cheddar Cheese!” (“Chapter One: My relationship to cheddar cheese has always been complicated. . . .”)

Thankfully, Beth Lisick’s new book, “Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone,” manages, in its best moments, to transcend the limitations of this insidious genre. The Berkeley-based humorist has an easygoing style and a light comic touch. She’s also wise to her own weakness for flattery. As she browses a book by her inaugural guru, success coach Jack Canfield, she comes across the dedication, which praises “all of those courageous men and women who have ever dared to step out of the dominant culture of mediocrity. . . .”

“My cynicism falls away,” Lisick declares. “He means people like me, the ones taking the road less traveled. Just as I’m thinking, Why, thank you, Jack! Thanks for the kudos! it dawns on me. Reading this type of book is exactly something I’ve always associated with the dominant culture of mediocrity.”

Nonetheless, our heroine trudges forward. There’s a book to be written, after all. She flies to Chicago to hear Stephen Covey, author of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” “This man has a hypervitality about him that is slightly otherworldly,” she observes. “Like he might possibly be emitting a messianic high-pitched buzz at all times.”

The undisputed highlight of Lisick’s year (and her book) is a weeklong “Cruise to Lose” with fitness guru Richard Simmons. Simmons may be a prancing punch line on the late-night shows, but Lisick and her friend are dazzled by their first encounter.

“He comes at me with his arms extended, wraps them around my shoulders, and affixes his lips to my cheek. Mwah mwah mwah mwah mwah mwah MWAH!

“ ‘I’m so glad you guys are here!’ he exclaims, as if he’s been scouring the ship for the two of us all afternoon. He bends in the knees a little and claps a few times. It feels pretty great.

“ ‘We’re so glad to be here!’ I yell excitedly into his face. My smile is huge.”

This sort of goofy candor is what makes Lisick such a likable narrator. When she describes subjecting her chaotic, junk-strewn home to the scrutiny of a professional organizer, we wince on her behalf. Ditto on her efforts to discipline her rambunctious 4-year-old by employing a method known as 1-2-3 Magic. Lisick does best, in other words, when she’s in genuine need of guidance.

That said, she doesn’t show much follow-through on the advice she gets. By her own account, for instance, Lisick and her husband have big problems when it comes to money. She turns to financial guru Suze Orman. The only concrete action she takes is to seek a lower APR on her credit card. The chapter feels like a victory of shtick over substance. So does the chapter about marriage. Lisick attends a talk by John Gray, author of “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus,” who proves even more unctuous than you might imagine. But given what we know about her marriage -- that she and her husband “hardly ever get to hang out” and that she made out with another man on her cruise -- we may conclude that the relationship deserves more serious consideration.

(She skips the chapter on sex altogether, blithely noting that she and hubby “need to have sex more often. So that’s what we’re going to do.” Uh, OK.)

By late summer, Lisick appears to have run out of steam. Her chapter on creativity consists of a watered-down book report about Julia Cameron’s already platitudinous “The Artist’s Way.” Her chapter on God offers little in the way of spiritual struggle. Instead, she goes to see a wisecracking psychic.

It would be easy enough to blame the genre for these dull patches. With only a year and a shaky premise to work with, there’s no way Lisick can generate the rich material that energized her 2005 essay collection, “Everybody Into the Pool.”

But Lisick herself chose the premise. She owes us more than a few witty swipes at the low-hanging fruit of the self-help movement. That movement, after all, has become a billion-dollar industry precisely because it promises nifty shortcuts to the kingdom of actualization. Lisick spends a lot of time amid these true believers, but she doesn’t make much of an effort to understand the sorrows that drive their quest or the seductive myths they purchase. Nor does she ever appear in danger of any dramatic personal transformation.

As gimmick memoirs go, you could do a lot worse than “Helping Me Help Myself.” It’s sweetly neurotic, funny and occasionally insightful -- like Lisick herself. But it never honors her depth and talent as a writer. Instead, the book serves the same ultimate function as the self-help genre: It probably won’t make you a better person, but it may well distract you from your own discontent for a few hours.

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Steve Almond’s new collection of essays is “(Not That You Asked).”