John Galliano, Hilary Mantel and Louise Mensch — meet the self-help aficionados

p41 edition 06/06 Mandatory Credit: Photo by Richard Young / Rex Features (2209034cw) Gillian Anderson Dior at Harrods Launch, London, Britain - 14 Mar 2013 Mandatory Credit: Photo by David Fisher / Rex Features (1226738d) John Galliano Fashion Fringe during London Fashion Week, Covent Garden, London, Britain - 18 Sep 2010 Mandatory Credit: Photo by Geraint Lewis / Rex Features (1190014z) Hilary Mantel at The Sheldonian Theatre Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, Oxford, Britain - Mar 2010 Hilary Mantel, writer and winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize 2009 for her book 'Wolf Man'

6 June 2013

Only one self-help book has ever made it to my shelf. I’m ashamed to admit it was He’s Just Not That Into You. Yes, it is supremely badly written and not by anybody with any qualification other than having a penis. Yet it did make me admit that a particular “he” was not that into me after all and I found someone else who was.

I have never again ventured into the territory of self-help. It’s a genre tinged with a hint of desperation, and this week John Galliano has done nothing to aid its image.

In his first interview since the anti-Semitic rant that cost him his job, Galliano admitted to Vanity Fair that in the worst stages of his alcohol addiction when he was shaking and wasn’t sleeping he “would go to bookstores and get some self-help books, but I was in denial”. Clearly it was real therapy he needed, which he got.

“For many people self-help books can definitely make a lot of improvements, if not solve or fix a problem completely,” says psychologist and fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, Terence Watts. “If self-help is well written, then it can certainly help people to bring about the change they are looking for. Some people will say that a book changed their life.”

Plenty more high-profile people are self-confessed self-help fanatics. Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel at the weekend called herself “a self-help queen”. She wrote: “I read books about problems I don’t have, just in case

I develop obsessive-compulsive disorder or crippling phobias. Of course, there’s nothing I recommend. If I ever found anything useful, I’d keep it to myself, to steal a mean advantage.”

Former politician and writer Louise Mensch has called her own love of self-help “shaming”, saying: “I like motivational books because I like the go-getting American spirit — your destiny is in your own hands...”

Meanwhile The Fall’s Gillian Anderson has in the past said that one of her favourite books is When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chödrön, insisting that she has “read the good ones” in the self-help genre.

If you fancy dipping in to self-help yourself, don’t do what I did. Watts says: “Books written by therapists are better than those written from the perspective of someone’s own suffering because therapists have dealt with all manner of issues and people and can remain detached from the problems.”

If you still think that “he” is into you afterwards, seek professional help.