Becoming a Better Me: The Co-Evolution of Contemporary American Memoir and Bestselling Self-Help Literature, 1952-2013 outlines the sociological hermeneutics of twentieth-century therapeutic discourse and the co-evolution of American life writing, with an emphasis on how bestselling self-help texts provide an interpretive frame for reading the therapeutic organization of contemporary memoir. It argues, via an interrogation of such cultural phenomena as the conversion narrative, talk-show culture, the popular hoax, and (seeming) readerly desire for authenticity--even factuality--within life-writing texts, that self-help, at least of the variety that routinely tops the New York Times bestseller list, is gendered, classed, heteronormative, and heterosexist in its very form. In contrast, bestselling examples of memoir from the same period might function as a way to either reify or disrupt and challenge beliefs that have come to seem natural, particularly as they appear in self-help. The major self-help texts that this dissertation interrogates, which range from Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) to Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (2006), illustrate that self-help, as a form of therapeutic discourse, by its very nature calls for certain kinds of norms that such critics as Nikolas Rose and Michael Warner have argued are completely artificial. Bestselling self-help is a site of power/knowledge that reveals and reinforces hegemonic identity construction and performance. Its roots in the New Thought of the nineteenth-century betray its tendency to reduce real problems, both embodied and rhetorical, to questions of "mind over matter," and its calls for authenticity find themselves pressured by the notion that, within postmodernity, there does not exist a unified, whole subject. The tremendous upsurge in the popularity of both memoir and self-help in the last half of the twentieth century necessitates an examination of the ways in which 1) self-help, as a cultural commodity, demands attention for the kinds of political signification it implies or suggests; and 2) although some examples of popular memoir have flattened into "genre memoir," which features a relatively predictable narrative arc, others have the potential to reassert the agency of the individual within a starkly biopolitical matrix made up of health, wealth, and the goal of holistic "well-being." Contemporary American memoir, though it frequently demonstrates evidence of the ubiquitous influence of self-help, might function as an alternative to self-help for those who have been excluded by the genre. In particular, the works of Mary Karr, Dave Eggers, Lauren Slater, and Cheryl Strayed point to the possibility of subverting the discourse of therapy that one finds embedded in self-help and in popular culture more broadly. Via their encounters with popular therapeutics in several different channels, these writers critically evaluate the possibilities and limitations of the hegemony of therapeutic discourse, thereby providing a way of reading the biopolitical subject as embedded in political, philosophical, and popular rhetoric. By reorganizing these autobiographical texts, this dissertation provides a new hermeneutics for reading contemporary American-authored memoir and autobiography via the rise of self-help and therapeutic discourse.
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