Marginal to bad advice wrapped in a “You can do it/Tough Love” package

I grabbed this audiobook from the library after internet algorithms kept pushing it at me.  I knew nothing about it, and thought with the title and the cover photo that it might be humor-centric self help.  After listening to it, I might have to re-evaluate some life choices to see why amazon thinks this is for me.  It starts off earnestly, as a lot of mommy-blog type advice does, but even in the introduction, she gets self-righteous and talks about the contempt she has for the people who write to her who are struggling, how she wants to yell at them to snap out of it and do better to fix their situation.  It was at that moment I realized, “ugh, I think this is going to be self help for privileged white girls.”   The advice and commentary that I didn’t outright disagree with was mostly superficial and forgettable.  In the section about setting goals (The Lie: I Thought I’d Be Farther Along By Now), she talks about setting goals for yourself and working to achieve them.  This is hardly groundbreaking, but it counts as decent advice.  However, one of her examples was how she worked really hard to get this $1,000 Louis Vuitton bag that she dreamed about when she was, like, really poor, you guys.

As tedious and tone deaf as a lot of the advice was, two sections really stuck out to me as being harmful.  First, she has really messed up ideas about health and wellness, which is not all surprising.  She peppers this through the early sections of the book that are dealing with other subjects where she talks about how terrible certain food/drinks are, and the recurring talks about her running half marathons.  But the whole thing really comes home near the end of the book where she completely conflates weight with health, and health with virtue.  She gives a list of rules to follow, with no real scientific backing, she gives several examples of “actual reasons” why someone might be overweight or out of shape, but then proceeds to tell everyone that if you’re not healthy and fit, then you’re only half living your life and you need to stop making excuses. Just harmful and gross.

I was also disgusted by how she framed her experience with adoption.  While I’m in no way attempting to minimize the pain of the adoption process for prospective parents, everything she wrote sounded incredibly entitled.  She framed her issues with international adoption as due to corruption.  She talked about how the caseworker in the LA county system purposely misled them so that they would take twin babies that were not actually eligible for adoption yet because the biological father wanted custody of the babies. In both cases, she framed it like people were taking children that rightfully belonged to her, and that they were doing it intentionally to harm her.  Unless things are drastically different in LA, foster care is rooted in the goal of reuniting children with their families whenever it is safe, it is not intended to be a backdoor to domestic adoption.

Now for the most petty reason that I did not like this book- when I went to update my Goodreads page, I saw that she had rated her own book 5 stars, and wrote “Because, if I don’t think it’s worth five stars, what hope is there??”  I just can’t.