Flossing 
Andrew O’Hagan
- Poems to Last a Lifetime edited by Daisy Goodwin Buy this book
- All the Poems You Need to Say I Do edited by Peter Forbes Buy this book
People have been asking for books to help them since the invention of printing. Before printing, actually, in the days of scrolls and tablets: what is the Bible if not a self-help manual? William Caxton got in on the act early enough with The Game and Play of Chess Moralised (1474), a book which aimed to make people better than they used to be, not by bringing their souls nearer to God, but by bringing their pawns closer to the king, which many readers accepted would do for the time being. In what my headmaster used to call the interim period, self-help books have taken over the world, which is fast becoming a place where no one is safe from the threat of their own improvement. Nineteenth-century must-haves – How to Be Happy though Married (1887) and How to Be Pretty though Plain (1899) – have recently been, well, improved on, with the publication of such instant classics as How to Become a Schizophrenic by John Modrow (1992) and How to Shit in the Woods by Kathleen Meyer (1989).1
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Andrew O’Hagan’s The Atlantic Ocean, a collection of essays on Britain and America, will be published in June. Be Near Me, his last novel, has been shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Other articles by this contributor:
Good Fibs · Truman Capote
The God Squad · Andrew O’Hagan in Bushland
At the Design Museum · Peter Saville
A Journey in the South · Andrew O’Hagan travels to New Orleans
Disgrace under Pressure · Andrew O’Hagan reads some lad mags
Iraq, 2 May 2005 · Two Soldiers
The Nominee · With the Democrats
Seventy Years in a Filthy Trade · Andrew O’Hagan meets E.S. Turner
print layout
tell a friend