Asking for a Friend

Preface

I’LL BEGIN BY GETTING SOMETHING OUT OF THE WAY: I have no clear and easy tricks for a happier, healthier you. I have no instant remedies for sluggishness, or shyness, or social discomfort. I possess no secrets to success. My morning routine, which I am not suggesting you imitate, can be summarized as (1) Wake up. (2) Hurry.

But this book tells the stories of sixteen people who made their names, and sometimes their fortunes, by telling people what to do. They are all professional advice-givers, and their job is to answer Americans’ thorniest, most intimate questions.

You’ve probably heard of many of the individuals profiled in the pages ahead, like Benjamin Franklin, “Dear Abby,” Dale Carnegie, and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Others may be new to you, like John Dunton, William Alcott, Dorothy Dix, Sylvia Porter, and Joan Quigley. All of them wrote, in one form or another—books, columns, letters, almanacs—and their words and ideas were so popular that they rumbled across all spheres of American popular culture, their maxims stitched on pillows, printed on mugs, recited at dinner; their faces fixtures on magazine covers and cable channels; and their books docked permanently on the bestseller list. They dislodged long-established norms about how Americans ought to date, mourn, work, and raise their children, and defined, and redefined, what was “right” and what was not.

Most so-called serious writers diagnose but never prescribe. A memoirist might probe her own experience with mourning for her readers’ benefit, but she’s unlikely to offer explicit instructions. Listening to Lena Dunham talk about her struggles as a woman in Hollywood may inspire you, but even she, with her porous definition of personal boundaries, stops short of providing a step-by-step guide. Advice-givers don’t have these hang-ups—as a group, they tend not to have many hang-ups.

And yet few writers come close to possessing the power and influence advice-givers wield. They literally tell people what to do! And people listen! Even though they often aren’t licensed to be giving advice; frequently their only qualifications are their imperviousness to embarrassment and their penchant for popularity. Most of them entertain as they counsel; they are skillful at coining catchy one-liners and composing sentences that play in your mind like a pop song. Often, their advice columns are designed to be playful. There is no telling if correspondents like End of the Line or Losing It are the melancholic people they claim to be or if they are pranksters, or editors making backhanded assignments. Still, columnists have become the arbitrary authors of social rules, helping readers decide what is required of them. After Pauline Phillips, or “Dear Abby,” wrote about the importance of writing a will, hundreds of thousands of people signed one for the first time. With one column, she normalized the idea that preparing for death, while one is still young and healthy, is not morbid but prudent. This book is filled with stories like this, of not particularly credible people issuing mandates that millions of Americans followed.

America is unique in its hankering for advice. The British have their “agony aunts”—their equivalent of advice columnists—but rarely do they reach the same level of prominence as their American colleagues. The American self-help empire has been sprawling aggressively for decades, overtaking bookstores and the internet. It’s estimated that Americans spend eleven billion dollars a year on self-help books. (“Here’s Sound Advice: Write a Book, Become Rich,” went one headline in Forbes.)

This multibillion-dollar industry employs many, many advice-givers. There are experts on finance and car maintenance and dog obedience. But the advice-givers profiled in this book are of a more ambitious ilk: they attempt to provide concrete solutions to the murkiest problems; they are brave—or foolish—enough to seek answers that have escaped philosophers, poets, and religious scholars for centuries, and to bill themselves as experts on topics as broad and impossible as love, health, and life itself.

The typical story about an advice-giver, the one you’ve likely heard before, is about a phony or hypocrite. A person incapable of following his own sage wisdom, who espoused knowledge on subjects like dating or friendship even as he remained perennially single and friendless, or who encouraged moral or fiscal restraint while he was millions in debt with a family on every continent.

Miss Lonelyhearts, the 1933 novel by Nathanael West, is the classic example. It tells the story of an anonymous advice columnist for a New York paper. The novel begins with letters from the people seeking advice from Miss Lonelyhearts: there’s one from a woman being pressured by her husband to have an eighth child against her and her doctor’s wishes, another from a teenage girl born without a nose and bullied by the other teenagers at her school, and one pained letter from a boy who suspects that his deaf-mute little sister was molested and isn’t sure what to do. Each letter is its own distinct melodrama, but their authors are all people who don’t need just advice but an empathetic friend—someone who can say “It’s going to be okay” with conviction. Then we’re introduced to the individual behind Miss Lonelyhearts, who is tasked with performing these significant feats of emotional labor. He is a depressed middle-aged man who dulls his loneliness with alcohol and chain-smoking and despises his colleagues and his readers. He churns out columns dense with mawkish one-liners such as, “When old paths are choked with the debris of failure, look for newer and fresher paths.” Miss Lonelyhearts’s advice is clear and straightforward, presumably helpful to those seeking direction, but also a symptom of the columnist’s own emotional limitations. He’s an expert at dismissing dangerous feelings. “Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily,” West writes of Miss Lonelyhearts.

Straight Talk, the 1992 film starring Dolly Parton, depicts a different kind of ruse: a hick with a heart of gold falls into a job as a radio psychologist in Chicago and claims to hold a PhD though she never went to college. One of the more notable advice-givers from the last few decades is Donald Trump, a person and brand that has become almost synonymous with deceit. (This isn’t a political statement: every reality television star traffics in flash.) Trump’s 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal painted him as a cautious and expert deal maker, but within five years of its publication, four of Trump’s companies had filed for bankruptcy.

The advice columnists in this book aren’t just hypocrites and narcissists, even if they do display those tendencies once in a while. They’re all well-intentioned people who tend to get in the way of their own noble instincts. Many of them are social reformers who upended the status quo, expanded rights for women and minorities, and proselytized greater acceptance for different ways of living. Dorothy Dix, for instance, was an advice columnist at the turn of the twentieth century who strove to legitimize domestic work, urging wives to strike until their husbands offered them a living wage. All of the individuals in the pages ahead are idealists, eager to change the world, or at least get people to change their behavior. They share a curiosity for giant moral and emotional questions and an instinct for controversy.

I should get something else out of the way: I don’t necessarily recommend that you follow all of the advice in this book. Some of it is extreme, outdated, or downright insane. William Alcott, an early dieting expert, urged his followers to avoid tomatoes under all circumstances. Dorothy Dix advised against divorce, no matter how miserable the relationship had become.

While their wisdom may not always seem relevant today, the advice-givers in this book were all, at some point, responding to Americans’ emotional needs. This book is a history of Americans seeking the answers to their generation’s hardest questions, their parents being just as out of touch as ours are. Their questions are a window into the particular and universal torments of being alive in the 1810s or 1910s or 2010s. I am as interested in the advice-givers as I am in the millions of Americans who needed them.

FIVE OR SO years ago, in my midtwenties, I became disquietingly addicted to an advice column. It was called “Dear Sugar,” and it was published on The Rumpus, a website geared to emerging writers. I was, as they say, “between things”—that joyless euphemism for having more time on one’s hands than one wants. I didn’t know then that “Sugar” was Cheryl Strayed, the novelist and memoirist who would soon publish Wild, a memoir about the months she spent hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. “Dear Sugar” had no clear publishing schedule, so I checked the site every day. I never missed a column. I never sent Sugar a letter, but I felt connected to those who did. They were lonely, too.

If you were looking for straightforward advice, Sugar was not the person to turn to. She would call you a “warrior” or even a “sweet arrogant beautiful crazy talented tortured rising star glowbug,” which may or may not have made you feel better. She would offer you anecdotes—some harrowing, some charming—from her own life, but she was unlikely to tell you what to do. And that was precisely what made her columns so appealing. Sugar was the internet’s greatest relief from itself. The internet is like a garrulous friend—entertaining and inattentive, carrying on regardless of who’s around. Sugar, in turn, liked to listen. Thousands of people wrote to Sugar seeking not her advice but her attention. She received a letter early on in her tenure that went, “WTF, WTF, WTF? I’m asking this question as it applies to everything every day. Best, WTF.” And then other letters like it—vague, existential pleas for Sugar’s companionship—started flowing in. “I don’t have a definite question for you. I’m a sad, angry man whose son died. I want him back. That’s all I ask for and it’s not a question,” one reader wrote, in a letter that went on for pages. She had both male and female readers, but their questions recalled what Betty Friedan, in The Feminine Mystique, called “the problem that has no name.” Friedan wrote about the “strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction” among American housewives in the fifties who spent too much of their days alone. Sugar’s readers, similarly, had trouble naming what plagued them. They were self-centered enough to think that their problems merited attention but too shy or unpracticed to ask the right questions. They seem atomized, listless, and chronically lonely. If confronted with this kind of existential angst, Miss Lonelyhearts would have given actionable, straightforward advice. (“Try to have lunch with a friend!”) Sugar, on the other hand, was an aficionado of dangerous, complicated feelings, a glutton for experience. She said “I’m sorry” a lot and offered her condolences in lyrical prose. “How painful. I’m sorry this happened to you,” she told Mourning and Raging, whose husband had cheated on her. “Though we live in a time and place and culture that tries to tell us otherwise, suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us,” she wrote to another advice-seeker.

I wrote above that I was “disquietingly” obsessed with “Dear Sugar.” As far as addictions go, reading is a fairly anodyne one. But advice or self-help, despite its ubiquity, still carries a whiff of shame. It’s an embarrassment, for many, to be caught in the self-help aisle; they would rather be caught reading a worn paperback with a woman in a red bustier on the cover. (Those posing the questions have always been granted anonymity, but even reading these exchanges seems to demand a degree of privacy.) Advice books are considered undignified reading material and, at the same time, too edifying to be excused as a guilty pleasure.

But seeking advice should never be shameful. Needing advice means you have yet to learn something that others seem to know—what to wear to an interview, what to give someone as a wedding present. And not knowing something is a sign that you’re entering a world different from the one in which you were raised, or a world that recently discriminated against people who look like you. We need professional advice because we don’t know any other women in our industry, or because we’re the first person in our family to attend college. Americans’ interest in advice reflects our cultural tendency toward optimism: we tend to believe that with a bit of direction and a small boost, the future can be bright. Seeking advice is for strivers, for people who want to better themselves, land a new job, get in shape.

The fact that Americans want advice is proof that the American dream still exists, at least in people’s imaginations. Who doesn’t want to believe that with hard work, determination, and a bit of advice, that anything is possible? It’s an idea that advice-givers have been peddling for centuries. Benjamin Franklin wrote Poor Richard’s Almanack, his annual compendium of life lessons, with the hopes that anyone, from any background, would be inspired by it.

Over the centuries, the advice changes, as do the people supplying it, but the questions largely remain the same. Should I stay with my husband after learning he’s cheated? How do I get out of debt? How do I seem more confident than I really am? There’s never been a time when life hasn’t been mind-bogglingly hard, or a time when we didn’t hope for someone or something to come along to make sense of it all. The past was never as simple as it now seems. Many of the most confusing questions—How do I mourn my loved one? What’s the secret to a happy marriage?—have been confusing us for hundreds of years.

There is a community of historians concerned with what’s called “emotional history” who study how people throughout time have communicated their feelings. I am not a historian, but I consider this book a work of emotional history, one that examines the flawed and fascinating people who have offered Americans comfort and wisdom over the past three hundred years as well as the people who turned to them when they wanted to be told that everything was going to be fine, when they sought someone—like Sugar—who could say “I’m sorry” and sound like they meant it. History is, typically, a chronology of great accomplishments and the figures who helmed them, but advice columns offer a different kind of history: one that looks at the anxieties quietly suffered by innumerable Americans and that they revealed, exclusively in some cases, to a pseudonymous stranger. In the early twentieth century, many women started advice columns because they offered a rare shot at a byline. The history of advice centers around these influential women who amassed power through their assiduous emotional labor—work that was quintessential to formation of American identity but is rarely, if ever, mentioned in textbooks.

ADVICE-GIVERS HAVE directed their audience to be obedient or rebellious, disciplined or free-spirited, fiercely self-reliant or unfailingly generous, depending on the decade. If you pick up an etiquette book from the 1790s, you will not learn how to be less anxious at a party but how to make those around you enjoy themselves. Particularly during times of war or upheaval, advice-givers stressed the importance of honoring social binds, whereas today the emphasis is more on self-actualization, or “self-help.” Selfishness has gone from a categorical sin to something more complicated, something that can even be worth fighting for.

In the colonial era, advice-giving was the job of the genteel. Today, we want advice-givers to be accessible; we want to be spoken to in the first person. There’s been a cultural shift favoring vulnerability over expertise. This book maps the transformation of the advice-giver from the buttoned-up pundit to the tell-all peer, from Benjamin Franklin to Top Writers on Quora. The barriers to achieving authority—an elusive but necessary quality for those who give advice for a living—have loosened over the past few centuries. There’s always been advice geared toward women or toward specific immigrant groups or ethnic communities—Jewish advice columnists, black advice columnists—but until the twentieth century, advice marketed to a general, all-genders audience was almost exclusively written by white men. In recent years, the internet and podcasting have lowered the barriers for aspiring advice-givers. But aside from Oprah, who politely declined to be interviewed for this book, mass-market life advice is still largely dispensed by white people.

I’ve grouped the advice-givers in this book into four loosely chronological categories. The first group are men who dispensed nonreligious advice from the late 1600s to the mid-1800s, when most social guides were written by preachers or religious scholars. These men referenced the Bible but based their ideas on a range of other texts, conversations with friends, and their own experiences. Even though they were all white, male, and pedigreed, they still grappled with their claims to authority. The second group, mostly women, all worked in the twentieth century and distinguished themselves by striking the tone of a friend, of someone who resembled the reader and related to their pains and fantasies. They sought recognition not for their merits or achievements but for their capacity for empathy. The third group, who also worked in the twentieth century, were experts in their field, possessed PhDs or other impressive credentials, and believed that they were uniquely qualified to give advice in their subject area, whether that be child rearing, mourning, or astrology. The fourth group are contemporary advice-givers, all of whom walk a fine line between friendliness and authority; they want to be relatable, but they also want your respect. Compared to their predecessors, they are far more willing to share stories from their own lives, citing their mistakes to prove their credibility. But they are also quick to formalize their services, bestowing themselves with made-up titles like “life coach” so that they’re not mistaken for laity.

But the most well-received advice-givers throughout history have tended to be those who argue that following your heart too steadfastly is a lonely enterprise, but abiding too closely to external demands will harden you. The goal of most advice, ultimately, is to find a compromise between an individual’s needs and those of the society she lives in. It’s a compromise that fuels America’s most idealized vision of itself: a country where everyone can express their differences but still get along.