My mother was a self-help fangirl.
In the 80s and 90s, the subject of mental health was treated like a kind of newly discovered disease and the publishing industry raced to capitalize on the demand for books on the topic.
The so-called, “Me” Generation encountered new taxonomies of meaning and definitions for the human experience that their parents’ generation inherited from their parents and the community around them.
For the first time, this narrative was crafted by strangers in business and academia and popularized by other strangers in the media.
Divorced and afraid, researchers, 12-step programs (think: fill-in-the-blank-Anonymous), commercial enterprises (think: Weight Watchers), and any shister with a point of view, held the keys to the social order.
Suddenly, anyone with an answer had the qualifications to be a prophet. And anything marketable would stand for a pulpit.
Shaped by these various books and programs, my mother’s approach to mental health, her own behavior, and the way she, a single mom of an only-child, tried to raise me, manifested primarily in obvious emotional fragility and a less obvious denial of her own basic instincts.
Rules about curfew, television, allowance, etc. were set by what she read in a book and not what…
