On Saturdays my friends and I load into somebody’s old Volvo and head to a thrift store, where we buy tchotchkes that reek of other people’s lives and clothes that we believe will enhance our own. We all want to look like characters on the sitcoms of our youth, the teenagers we admired when we were still kids. None of the pants ever fit me, unless I head into the maternity section, so I buy mostly sacklike dresses and Cosby sweaters.
Some days, my haul is massive: a peach power suit with subtle coffee stains, leggings with trompe l’oeil chains running down the sides, a pair of boots specially made for someone with legs of different lengths. But some days the spread is meager. The usual bounty of patterned off-brand Keds and ripped negligees has been snapped up. On one such day, I wander over to the book section, where people discard their guides to better divorce and crafting how-tos, sometimes even their scrapbooks and family photo albums.
I scan the dusty shelf, which looks like the book collection of an unhappy and maybe even illiterate family. I ignore get-rich-quick advice, stop briefly at Miss Piggy’s autobiography, contemplate a book called Sisters: The Gift of Love. But when I reach a faded paperback with edges so yellowed they have almost gone green, I stop. Having It All, by Helen Gurley Brown, who graces her own cover, leaning against her tidy desk in the kind of shoulder-padded plum suit I have taken to wearing ironically, all pearls and knowing smile.
I spend the sixty-five cents required to take the book home. In the car I show it to my friends like it’s a decorative joke, something for my shelf of kitschy trophies and Sears photo-studio shots of strangers’ kids. This is our hobby, appropriating meaningful artifacts and displaying them as evidence of who we will never be. But I know I’m going to devour this book, and when I get home I head straight to bed, shivering under my patchwork quilt, an Ohio snowstorm swirling in the parking lot outside my window.
The book is from 1982, and on the inside cover is an inscription, written in ballpoint pen: “To Betty! Love, Margaret, your Optifast friend. ?” This moves me, the idea that the book was handed from one woman to another in some long-ago weight-loss support group. I extend her message in my mind: Betty, we can do it. We are doing it. Let this book take you to the stars and beyond.
I race home from class every day for a week to devour Helen’s teachings. I’m electrified by the way that, in Having It All, Gurley Brown shares her assorted humiliations and occasional triumphs and explains, with Idiot’s Guide precision, how you too can be blessed with “love, success, sex, money, even if you’re starting with nothing.”
Most of her advice, it should be noted, is absolutely bananas. She encourages readers to eat fewer than a thousand calories a day (“crashing is okay, so is fasting … Satisfied is out of the question. You have to feel slightly uncomfortable and hungry during your weight loss or it probably isn’t happening”), avoid having children if you possibly can, and be blow job ready at all times (“the more sex you have, the more you can tolerate”). Helen has little tolerance for free will in this department: “Exhaustion, preoccupation with a problem, menstrual cramps—nothing is a good excuse for not making love unless you happen to be so angry with the man in your bed your eyes are darting around their sockets and your teeth are grinding.”
Some of her advice is a little more reasonable: “Always leave for the airport fifteen minutes earlier than you could. It will save your valves wearing out,” or “If you have severe personal problems then I think you go to a shrink for advice and support. I can no more imagine not going to get your hurting head and heart taken care of than one would go around the streets with blood spurting out of your throat …” But her frank wisdom loses some of its power because it’s forced to occupy the same space as gems such as “to me, avoiding married men totally when you’re single would be like passing up first aid in a Tijuana hospital when you’re bleeding to death because you prefer an immaculate American hospital some unreachable distance across the border.”
Having It All is divided into sections, each section a journey into some usually sacrosanct aspect of feminine life such as diet, sex, or the intricacies of marriage. But despite her demented theories, which jibe not even a little bit with my distinctly feminist upbringing, I appreciate the way Helen shares her own embarrassing, acne-ridden history in an attempt to say Look, happiness and satisfaction can happen to anyone. In the process she reveals her own unique pathos (a passage about binge eating baklava stands out in my mind), but maybe I underestimated her. Maybe that is not an accident but is, in fact, her gift.