"Daily Afflictions": You Deserve a Slap in the Face Today

Imagine standing before the mirror each day, face to face with yourself, and declaring, "It's not whether I arrive; it's how I lose my way," or "I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way." Imagine calling a therapist because you feel too good about yourself. Unmanageably successful. You want to downsize your self-esteem and explore how to reach the bottom of your game.

In Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the Universe (Norton, $11.95), a compact, seditiously funny book "attractively designed for desperate readers on the run," Andrew Boyd does much more than poke fun at the ubiquitous realm of self-help. The author of Life's Little Deconstruction Book and The Activist Cookbook carves out a legitimate place of value for our inner critics, our inner bigots, our inner psychopaths. Following the familiar format, Boyd quickly breaks rank, with page headings like, "Being there then," "The uses of obsession," "The nurturing power of dysfunctional families." He quotes from history's great dark dwelling poets and philosophers before offering up his own perversely enlightening twists of logic. "In a faithless age, irony is the only way to take yourself seriously, and the only way to show others that you distrust yourself enough for them to trust you."

A book like this could have gone stale rather easily, once the reader "got" the joke and figured out the formula, but Boyd recharges us, page after page, by confounding our expectations. Instead of running dry, he reveals fresh reserves of depth in his reasoning and gives authentic wisdom and consolation with his brief, poetic arguments in favor of our failures, sorrows, and self-doubts.

Quoting from the introduction: "Affirmations bathe you in light and manifest all that is positive. ... Afflictions remind you that when you feel desperate and alone, you are." Or, to quote the final affliction: "I am One with the Universe, and it hurts."

Katherine Tanney is the author of Carousel of Progress. She is currently at work on her second novel.