Funny writer’s life examined — through prism of self-help books

By Kristen Peterson (contact)

Friday, March 7, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Courtesy Photo

Beth Lisick will be in Las Vegas Monday to read from her new book, “Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone.”

When readers last heard from Beth Lisick in “Everybody into the Pool,” her hilarious collection of personal stories, she’d gone from working odd jobs, touring with Sister Spit and living in a leaky warehouse in San Francisco to buying a house in Berkeley with husband Eli, raising baby Gus and letting her yard go to hell.

In her new book, “Helping Me Help Myself,” Lisick is in that same house, Gus is in preschool, the yard is still a mess and her income is sporadic, if not scarce. Her organizational skills? Not so good. But so what?

Lisick has a goal. It’s the first day of 2007; she’s injured from a talent-show stunt at her party the night before involving an impromptu demonstration of the splits. Lying in bed she realizes she could hone this talent in the coming year, make it “more symmetrical or showbizzy.”

Though it’s a fantastic plan, Lisick at the age of 37 isn’t convinced of its heft, realizing that maybe there were other things to strive for: improving her organizational skills, personal finance, etc.

She goes straight to the experts: Stephen Covey, John Gray, Richard Simmons, Sylvia Browne, Jack Canfield and the like.

The full-bodied plunge into self-improvement has her reading self-help best-sellers, attending seminars and taking a Cruise to Lose trip with Simmons, which we’ll hear all about Monday when Lisick does a reading and a book signing at the Reading Room in Mandalay Bay.

Though “Helping Me,” released this year, has the hilarity, keen observation, crazy characters and engaging narrative typical of Lisick, it also offers a sampler platter of deep thoughts, tenderness and critical self-examination that are bound to surface when looking at your life through the words of top-selling gurus.

Not exactly what you’d expect from Lisick, a witty hipster, skeptic, poet and co-organizer of San Francisco’s Porchlight: A Storytelling Series. Or from an author who is busy working with Tara Jepsen on a stage production, “Getting in on the Ground Floor and Staying There.”

“I definitely revealed a lot more about who I am,” she says from her office in Oakland, Calif. “My first instinct was to take out the parts where I was being sincere and kind of a drag, but that’s not true to the project.”

Nor was she going to “write the book that has been written a bunch of times about how much money they make and, you know, what their credentials are and how they actually are hypocrites because of this and that. That information is already out there. We all know this is cheesy. We all know these people are suspect in some ways. That’s not my angle.”

Compared with “Pool,” she says, “it was way much more challenging because I really did feel I had to represent these people and their philosophies as true as I could. I wanted to be fair and try to get the point of this book across in a way that’s not making cheap shots. The material is too easy to make fun of.

“And it was such a weird project. That book was almost a performance art experience where I thought, ‘All right, I’m just going to get in there and see what happens.’ I started out thinking, ‘I can do anything. It’s so amazing.’ But these books would sort of point out my shortcomings and insecurities.”

That’s where she gets serious. But apparently not serious enough for a certain cadre of Amazon readers/reviewers who wanted Lisick to do a complete 180 with her life or rip Suze Orman and others to shreds.

One reader attacks the “one author a month process,” but gosh, isn’t that the way many Americans approach self-help? By dabbling in a variety of approaches and authors, then lining them up on their bookshelves?

And the book did manage to change the habits of a complacent, easygoing skeptic.

She taped a dollar bill to her wall in response to Canfield’s taping a $100,000 bill to his wall early in his career, wrote a check to herself for $1 million, organized Gus’ clothes in plastic containers and straightened up her home using the advice of Julie Morgenstern.

“I realized that I am really kind of complacent about a lot of things in my life that actually secretly sort of bug me,” Lisick says. “It did feel good to get my closets organized and it still does. I was never like that before. And we started an account for Gus’ college education.”

The bill is no longer on the bedroom wall because she and husband Eli had their cracked walls fixed after a mold outbreak.

But, she says, “I still have the bill and I do still have the million-dollar check written to myself from me in my wallet.”