You Can Create an Exceptional Life

Though she has established a self-help publishing empire, legendary author Louise Hay has herself written just a few books, and is really only known for one - the paradigm-changing and trend-setting You Can Heal Your Life, originally published over 20 years ago, and in recent years turned into a really very good movie.
I recently saw Ms. Hay live on stage at the I Can Do It! Conference in Sydney, and she was looking sprightly for an 80-something woman. She announced and launched her brand new book that day, a small dialogue with Life Coach and Oprah favourite Cheryl Richardson called You Can Create an Exceptional Life.
Though slight it is a well-edited and quite fascinating book, teaching many of the basic principles of New Thought and filled with autobiographical detail about Louise Hay, much of which real fans have heard before. The fresh re-telling actually works well, however, putting the stories of rising above hardship into a new context, and giving the much younger co-author Cheryl Richardson something to bounce off and react to.
The book is basically created from a series of Skype conversations between the two women, much of the time while both were in pyjamas, apparently. I hope they recorded the sessions - what a vision for future generations!
There is in the book a hint of defiance, a creeping weariness with the cynics and nay-sayers who instinctively dismiss everything the two women represent. Richardson says, "I no longer defend the spiritual principles that have guided and shaped my life. They work and I know it." In an age of radical atheism and hegemonic negativity, I am beginning to notice that advocates of a more feel-good spirituality and world-view are becoming ever-so-slightly radicalised. It would be interesting to chart this new turn.
Both women credit the influence of the great New Thought ideas and thinkers, in particular the work of Emmet Fox and Florence Scovel Shinn. At the heart of those teachings is the idea that most humans are possessed of enormous potential powers to re-shape the world and to create a life of abundance and happiness.

Maggie Hamilton - An Introduction

One very important element of self-help writing that I will be exploring in my thesis is the influence of what is commonly known as the "New Age." Anyone who has had anything to do with books in the last 20 years will know that this segment of the publishing industry has had an explosion in popularity. Though this popularity has died down somewhat, it is still a very important section of the market, and most publishers have an imprint (or two) devoted especially to New Age titles.
Indeed, at some point in the 80s the literature of self-help and the New Age became blended in the minds of publishers, retailers and book buyers, and these days the distinctions between them are hard to define.
The central author I'll be concentrating on in my chapter on the New Age is Maggie Hamilton. Now, in the spirit of full disclosure I must mention that Maggie is not only a personal friend, but also my publisher. This leaves me in the unenviable position of analysing closely and critiquing the work of a friend! But the thrust of my thesis is not to in any way tear down or dismiss the genre of self-help. On the contrary, the fundamental idea of my thesis is that these books represent important cultural artefacts, and document a popular literary history of Australia. Nonetheless, I am reading them closely for patterns and intertextuality, for derivations and similarities - no author could be comfortable with that kind of analysis!
Like that other great icon of Australian self-help, Stephanie Dowrick, Maggie emerged from the publishing industry. They also both hark from New Zealand, which is another fascinating coincidence - and quite possibly material for an entire journal article. But I digress.
Having achieved some success as a children's author, Maggie published her first book spiritual self-help book, Coming Home, in 2002. Very much a book of its time, it combined a whole host of spiritual influences in describing a spiritual journey "Home" to the soul. Elegantly written and beautifully produced in its first edition (complete with Pre-Raphaelite detail on the cover), Coming Home represented the fruits of Maggie's own spiritual journey, with Shamanic, Spiritualist and New Age Christian ideas peppered throughout.
Maggie later branched out into a more practical (and to some, more accessible) format of writing books of more specifically focused (and less overtly spiritual) advice. The first was Love Your Work in 2004, followed by What Men Don't Talk About in 2007. This excursion into the problems of gender prompted Maggie to continue to tease out these questions, and she has produced two highly successful books specifically addressing the problems of parenting: What's Happening to Our Girls (2008) and What's Happening to Our Boys (2010). In the interim she has also continued to write in the areas of spirituality and self-help, producing a small book of inspirations in 2004, Magic of the Moment, and a wonderfully eclectic and wide-ranging collection of essays and encounters with the sacred, A Soft Place to Land (2007).
Importantly, Maggie's influence on the world of New Age publishing continues behind the scenes. She is the director of the New Age imprint at Allen & Unwin, Inspired Living, and in that capacity has published a number of important Australian books in the area.
She also excels as a speaker and teacher, and is much sought after in that capacity.
I look forward to reading her books more carefully as I attempt to identify their influences and place them more exactly on the continuum of self-help literature in Australia. The breadth of her influences and the widespread success of her work make her a perfect case study for my thesis.

Salinger and Christian Science

In this week's Spectator, Christopher Hitchens tells the following fascinating story about J. D. Salinger:

My friend Roger Lathbury, a literary publisher working across the river in Virginia, wrote to J.D. Salinger in 1988 asking if he could reprint his last published story, ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’, in book form. Eight years later Salinger wrote back to agree. He even proposed coming down to Washington, where the two had a meager snack at the National Gallery of Art. Over lunch he asked Roger if he, too, was fond of the Christian Science classics of Mary Baker Eddy. Two things arise from this trashy recommendation. It undermines the frequent comparison of Salinger to Twain, who wrote a hilarious demolition of Mrs Eddy. And it rather suggests that we won’t find much of value in any undiscovered manuscript.

It's interesting how so many critics and commentators have such a difficult time dealing with Salnger's interest in religion and mysticism. Like Hitchens, they use it as a means to belittle him, to imply that he couldn't have been all that great because of his crazy interest in matters metaphysical. Like those other literary lightweights Yeats and Blake, Dante and Milton, Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Apparently Salinger's interest in Christian Science was longstanding, with his daughter accusing him of neglect because his beliefs meant he never took her to a doctor when she was ill. The fact that he was born Jewish leads me to compare him interestingly to that other great Jewish Christian Scientist Joel Goldsmith.