Therapeutic Novels?
Oh…no, no, nope. This headline caught my eye in today’s “Bookmarks” email from The Guardian. The School of Life, a “social media company that offers advice on life issues” founded by Alain de Botton, has a publishing arm and has now put forth its first “therapeutic novel.” It’s called A Voice of One’s Own (hello, Virginia Woolf?) and is about a 29-year-old woman’s mental health journey.
You’ve probably heard of something called “bibliotherapy,” which is this idea that books, even if fiction, can provide a reader with a way to process emotions, understand something they’re going through, settle the mind. I don’t think they have to be “comfort reads” necessarily; I myself have felt a little jolt of assurance or fortitude after finishing something that’s a more difficult read. In other words, I don’t think bibliotherapy has to be this simplistic mirroring of one’s exact situation, i.e. “I am going through a divorce and so is the main character.” (But it could be.)
If there is one thing I can’t stand (and I’m ashamed to say that as I get older, the list of “things I can’t stand” is growing…working on that!) it’s making the idea of art simple and obvious. Can we not dumb down everything? Very rarely do we listen to music or look at a piece of art with this literal lens, so why books?
I started reading How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell yesterday, and in the introduction, she describes a cultural “…impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than obvious. Such ‘nothings’ cannot be tolerated because they cannot be used or appropriated, and provide no deliverables.”
Indeed. Books, i.e. art, can help us in all sorts of ways. But not in the same way that a self-help book might. As the author of this review surmises, “I walked away with very little in the way of practical advice. This book is trying to serve two masters – and neither one, I fear, will have its needs met.”
Why are people so scared of or have the inability to engage with the open-ended nature of quality art?
originally published on instagram