Bibliotherapy: the Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives
By Nancy Peske and Beverly West
Recently in a library course, I was directed to this work as an example of psychological reference. To that end, I wrote this evaluation of the guide. What follows is the exact evaluation I submitted.
Utilizing a mixture of fiction and nonfiction, best friends and “identical cousins”, Nancy Peske and Beverly West have compiled favorite works that they argue can aid the female reader through certain major events of her life. To this end, the pair has arranged their selections into thirteen groupings covering everything from coming of age and sexuality to motherhood and career. Each chapter is further broken down into a general introduction, a focus on specific titles, notes from one of the editor’s reading diary, amusing and applicable quotes, related titles that the editors recommend “be thrown with great force”, and applicable titles that may be appealing to some readers even if they are not the editors’ “cup of tea”. Strewn throughout with humor, the collection attempts to provide a handy reading list to serve the psychological needs of the universal female experience.
While the authors attempt a noble undertaking, the results are less than ideal. First, the categories chosen are very limited in scope. In addition to sexuality, coming of age, motherhood, and career, they include bad girls, changing the bad boy, hearing your inner voice, existential crisis, midlife crisis, the personal is political, feeling unappreciated, martyrdom, and embrace your inner light. While many of these categories will appeal to most women, they are almost universally pop psychology concepts rather than deep psychological issues. Such blithe concepts give the book a less serious tone and suggest that the work is designed to be more of a self help diatribe than a serious psychological guide to important life events.
These “universal” experiences limit the appeal as well. While identity, partnership, career, and motherhood are the major issues expected to affect most women, larger Universal Experiences are completely ignored. The editors do little to explore the unavoidable human encounter with aging, strife, tragedy or death. While all women will experience identity and coming of age issues, many will never be mothers, have careers, or try to convert a “bad boy” into a respectable husband. To imply that these alone constitute the most important issues facing women is misogynistic and somewhat insulting. While it is fine to address these issues in a work such as this, ignoring the less cozy universal issues implies that women are subhuman. While we may wish we did not have to deal with poverty, discrimination, family strife, tragedy, and death, the truth is these issues will affect us more deeply and perhaps even more often than the issues being explored in this work.
Further, this degree of stereotyping and generalization limits the audience of the work greatly. While the core audience may be young modern career women, this hardly represents the entire female population. More alarmingly, the authors fail to explore any degree of variety in terms of race, culture, or even really age. The identity section alone would have been a great place to bring up alternative experience in terms of sexuality, race, and religion, but instead, the sole mentions of anything of this nature is a brief blurb on Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle in the budding sexuality section, and a quick aside about Haley’s Roots in the inner voice section.. While there should be little expectation that two Caucasian women would have deep feelings regarding texts dealing with racial or perhaps even religious identity, it would have enhanced the work greatly to include a list of important works relating to these subjects.
The issue that should alarm most readers, however, is the lack of science. No real attempt is made to explain anything of a psychological nature. The one mention of Freud is in reference to “the Exorcist” and sexuality, and it is not delved into much at all. Though this reference is interesting, it tells more about the movie than it does about the field of study at hand. The bad girls section offers a perfect opportunity to discuss the ego, superego, or id, but instead, it is presented as “good girls finish last, bad girls have more fun” manner. While the field of psychology is very complicated, has many theories, and can be very dry, the authors could legitimize their work, create more depth to their analysis, and attempt to satisfy their claim to be “bibliotherapy”. In fact, no psychologists are listed in the index, nor are any psychological concepts. No major psychological works are discussed either.
This brings up a very serious issue with this collection. Though published in 2001, there is not a single work referenced published after 1999. Moreover, of the 200 titles mentioned, more than 50% were published before 1980. Clearly the authors have made great efforts to include a large range of texts extending from biblical and Chaucerian references to eighties self-help favorites Codependent No More by Beattie and The Beverly Hills Diet by Mazel. Where this fails, however, is in the complete lack of surprise. All of the expected classics are included, with heavy reliance upon tried-and-true school reading list favorites such as Anna Karinina, The Awakening, The Scarlet Letter, and Rebecca. One of the few excursions into popular fiction—and incidentally, racial fiction—is a trite reference to McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale as an example of taming the bad boy. There is also a complete lack of alternative fiction including genre fiction such as mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy, or manga, and variety. The only text that ventures from the classic formula is Allende’s House of Spirits which the authors clearly dislike and openly ridicule. What most concerns me, however, is the reliance upon “dead white men” to express the female experience. Out of nearly 200 works, a full 40% are by men. The inclusive of some male voices provides a degree of balance, but for a work touted as being a “girl’s guide” to address “every phase of our lives”, these two women fail to present a genuinely diverse and decidedly female perspective.
Finally, the authors present their analysis and recommendations in a “girl talk”, chatty style that makes it difficult to take anything too seriously. Quotes are presented throughout in subsections titled “can I get that printed on a coffee mug?” and topic specific subheadings include trite names such as “bad girl bites”. The attempt to use a degree of humor throughout to make it more engaging works to an extent, but can seem slightly derogatory or annoying at times. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, however, since the authors previously published several self help titles together including How to Please a Woman Every Time on $5 a Day.
Nancy Peske and Beverly West have compiled an interesting collection of their favorite works. This volume will appeal to certain women and might be a fun reference for a book club or literary group. As a work of psychological reference, however, this work is lacking in research, science, and tone. Further, it fails to appeal to a wide variety of experiences, making it a questionable choice as a reference guide in an academic setting.
My candid impression? This is an interesting idea and could be quite useful if compiled by a joint task force of psychologists and librarians. Its value, however, is lost due to the complete lack of psychological insight, a disturbing reliance upon well-known and overused classic texts, an insulting failure to address a broader experience, and a frustrating avoidance of contemporary fiction and nonfiction. Indeed, one entire chapter is loaded with diet books and equally unhelpful self-help tomes that add nothing to the merit of the work. I would, however, love to see someone create a true bibliotheraphy of psychological value. What say you? What texts speak to you when it comes to psychological ideas?
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