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usually parted with money for a little volume that encouraged me to per- haps "feel the fear and walk through it" or maybe to "heal my life" or it mightn't be a bad idea to "rediscover" my "child within" or asked me to consider "why I need you to love me before I can like myself."

    What I really needed was a self-help book to help me stop buying self- help books, because they didn't help. They just made me feel guilty. It wasn't enough just to read the books. For them to work, I had to do things--like stand in front of a mirror and tell myself a hundred times a day that I was beautiful, which was called affirmation. Or spend half an hour every morning imagining myself being showered in love and affection, which was called visualization. Or writing lists of all the good things in my life, which was called writing lists of all the good things in my life.

    I usually read the book and did what it suggested for about two days and then got tired, or bored, or caught by my brothers as I spoke seductively to my reflection in the mirror. (I never forgot The Great Scorning that fol- lowed that.)

    And then I would feel depressed and guilty. So I would say that the hy- pothesis of the book must be fundamentally faulty because it hadn't made me feel any better and then I could abandon the whole project with a clear conscience.

    I tried lots of other things also--evening primrose oil, vitamin B6, excess- ive exercise, subliminal self-help tapes that you play when you're asleep, yoga, pilates, a flotation lucy sullivan is getting married / 39

    tank, aromatherapy massage, shiatsu, reflexology, a yeast-free diet, a gluten- free diet, a sugar-free diet, a food-free diet, vegetarianism, a "lots of meat" diet (I don't know if there's a name for it), an ionizer, an assertiveness course, a positive-thinking course, dream therapy, past-life regression, praying, meditating and sunlight therapy (a holiday in Crete, to be precise). For a while I ate nothing but dairy products, then for a while I gave up dairy products completely (I'd misread the article the first time), then I felt that if I had to go another day without a bar of chocolate, I would be killing myself anyway.

    And while none of my measures turned out to be the Final Solution, at least they all worked for a while and I never again got as depressed as I had the first time. But Mrs. Nolan had said something about help being available if I only asked for it. I wished now I'd brought a tape recorder into the room with me because I couldn't remember exactly what she'd said. What did she mean?

    The only thing I could think of was that maybe she meant that I should go for professional help, and see some kind of therapist or counselor or psychologist something or other. The problem was that about a year ago I had seen a therapist, about eight weeks or so, and that had been a complete waste of time.

6 Her name was Alison and I used to go to see her once a week where we sat in a bare, tranquil little room and tried to figure out what was wrong with me.
    Although we had discovered all kinds of interesting things--like the fact that I still held a grudge against Adrienne Cawley for giving me a game that the box said was "suitable for two-to-five-year-olds" at my sixth birthday party--I didn't seem to have learned anything more than what I had already managed to figure out for myself on many a sleepless night.

    Naturally, the first thing that Alison and I did was the psychotherapy witch hunt called "Cherchez La Famille," where we tried to hold my family responsible for everything that was wrong with my damaged psyche.

    But there was nothing funny about my family, unless normal was funny.

    I had a perfectly normal relationship with my two brothers Chris and Peter--that is, I spent my childhood hating their guts and they reciprocated in traditional fraternal fashion by making my life a misery. They made me go to the store for them when I didn't want to, they hogged the TV set, broke my toys,