Halfway through day two, I was crying because I ate two pickle slices and a leaf of lettuce. I knew I was cheating, and I felt horrible about myself. According to the rules of the book I was living by, I was supposed to consume only boiled leeks or the water that came off of boiled leeks, and I was failing. This was all happening just a week after I threw out half my earthly possessions and three weeks after I moved traffic with my mind.
I was living by a diet book called French Women Don’t Get Fat. The week before, I was living by The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Three weeks earlier, I was living by The Secret. This was my life. Every two weeks, I lived by a different self-help book, following all the rules down to the letter: eating what the books said to eat; talking as the books said to talk; waking, sleeping, decorating, and interacting with my husband according to each book’s doctrine. And I was recording it all for a reality-show podcast called By the Book.
The person who roped me into this life was my brilliant and hilarious friend Jolenta Greenberg. Jolenta is a comedian, storyteller, voice actor, teacher, and self-help enthusiast. She is a woman who loves crystals and talks earnestly about chakras and truly wants to believe the promises that self-help books routinely shill. The reason she asked me to cohost By the Book with her was that my views were exactly the opposite.
I thought it would be good for a laugh. We would have fun. We would be ridiculous. We would make an entertaining show.
Little did I know that all these books would actually change my life—sometimes even for the better. If not for By the Book, I never would have penned that Amish romance novel I’d always joked about writing. I never would have traveled back to my past lives. And I’m not sure I would have had some of the difficult conversations I’ve had with my husband about our marriage.
By the Book started off as a wacky experiment, but over the course of its life, it’s come to be something much bigger—and not just for us. We have a Facebook community of more than fifteen thousand people from around the world who talk with one another every day about topics that range from workplace drama to alcohol abuse. We’ve headlined live events for the likes of The New York Times and given interviews to NPR, the BBC, the CBC, and even RNZ (that’s Radio New Zealand). And we’ve been written up by The Guardian, The Washington Post, Time, Bust, BuzzFeed, IndieWire, and the librarians of Lawrence, Kansas.
But despite all our appearances, interviews, episodes, and Facebook community, listeners still want to know more. Why don’t you two write a self-help book sharing what you’ve learned from living by all these books? we’re often asked.
And so, we’ve written this book. Obviously, we hope it satisfies our existing audience. But our dream is that it also speaks to people who’ve never heard of us—people who just want to know what two very honest women have to say about how their lives have been upended and improved by methodically following the advice of fifty self-help books in three years.
Note: Our goal is not to tell you how to live your lives. In the grand scheme of things, we’re not what you would call experts. We’re not psychologists or doctors. And we honestly don’t believe we know more than you do about how to be the best version of yourself. As Jolenta often says, Only you are an expert in you.
We’re really just here to share our story, and to talk about what’s worked for us and what hasn’t. And for what it’s worth, those things don’t include mushy missives like “Empower your heart.” Yes, mush can be inspiring and fun. But it can also be hard to actually put into practice.
Thus, we’ll be talking only about concrete steps we’ve taken. That means things you can try at home if that’s really and truly what you want to do. But if you just want to laugh or shake your head as we recount how we’ve tortured ourselves in the name of betterment, that’s also fine by us.
You do you, and we’ll do us.