by JULIET WATERS

The self-help book movement of the last few decades has, of course, bred the self-help parody movement—books like: Cellulite Prophecy, 101 Uses for a Dead Angel, and Petted by the Light: The Most Profound and Complete Feline Near-Death Experiences Ever.

But some parodies are so good they actually might help you.

My dog-eared, coffee-stained copy of Pagan Kennedy’s Living: The Guide for the Maturing Hipster has been with me through many dark nights of the soul. Whenever I feel the urge to get a career, get married, feel guilty that my child

doesn’t live in a neighbourhood with more green space, or buy one of those beds with a mattress, this book is a gentle hand on my shoulder holding me back.

I suspect Daily Afflictions will be more like a headlock. The format is recognizable: a short essay followed by a mantra. But affirmations, as Boyd describes: “bathe you in light and… promise that you can attract what you wish for by visualizing it… Afflictions make no such promises. You can’t avoid suffering… A strong affliction is profound yet painful. It reminds you that the truth will set you free, but first it will hurt like hell.”

I realized the truth of this when I read “The Suburb Within”: “Most of us think of suburbia as a physical place. A place where folks value comfort, safety, and a good electric Saran Wrap cutter. A place where you can boldly assert your independence from cultural enrichment. But suburbia also exists within us. You might live in the middle of a big city, but there could still be a white picket fence around your imagination. You can take the subway to work but still park your identity in a two-car garage. This is inner suburbia, and you probably moved here long ago. You’ve let yourself be shaped by your fears of the unknown. You’ve learned to contain your longings and sympathies within a comfortable zone, measured and mediocre. To grow, you must move toward otherness. You must quit the ranch house of your soul and head for the forbidden places—your inner wilderness, inner bohemia, or even you inner inner city. The answers you need lie there, where you are least at home.”

I live with the accoutrements of slacker squalor, but in my heart I know I’m still trying to renovate my younger self. For a day, I kept my ear open for that little nagging voice of discontent, and repeated the suggested affliction. “I must quit the ranch house of my soul.” Now I feel even less content, but strangely better.

I’m being ironic. But that’s okay, because here’s another affliction: “Irony is the only way I can take myself seriously.” Why is this? Boyd isn’t the first to write about “ironic faith.” He credits Kierkegaard with the idea, but Boyd’s work is much shorter and easier to get. “When you believe in something but also believe it’s foolish to believe in anything, your only honest option is irony… To have faith today, you must at once affirm your faith and also ironically observe all that makes faith impossible. In a faithless age irony is the only way to take yourself seriously, and the only way to show others that you distrust yourself enough for them to trust you.”

It’s been said that a writer’s job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But how to do this in an age where it’s so easy to ignore the writer? Perhaps by encouraging self-affliction, and breaking this project up into small manageable tasks: embracing your inner corpse, visualizing the worst possible world, learning that there is no right person, but that “I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way.”

And certainly by remembering the words of Oscar Wilde: “If you are going to tell people the truth, you had better make them laugh or they will kill you.” :

Daily Afflictions by Andrew Boyd,
W.W. Norton, pb, 111pp, $17.50