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Marianne Power was a self-help junkie. For years she lined her bookshelves with dog-eared copies of definitive guide after definitive guide on how to live your best life. Yet one day she woke up to find that the life she dreamed of and the life she was living were not miles but continents apart. So she set out to make a change. Marianne decided to finally find out if her elusive perfect life lay in the pages of those books. So for a year she vowed to test a book a month, following its advice to the letter, taking the surest road she knew to a perfect Marianne.

Marianne started her journey in 2014. A writer and journalist, Power found herself stuck and decided to live by the rules of one self-help book a month over the course of one year, charting her progress on her Help Me Blog. The end results have been published in her debut book, Help Me! Marianne Power talks to us about why she started the project, which self-help books she would and wouldn’t recommend, and the lessons she’s picked up along the way.

Can you be happy without long-term romantic love at the centre of your life? Society still sets the gold standard for successful living as being married with children. As Marianne Power turns forty, she wonders why this is still so elusive for her, and whether in fact this is even what she wants, or just what she feels she should want. At first she tries to lean into the alternatives—self-love, self-marriage, sisterhood—but is she simply avoiding confronting her fears about commitment, relationships and sex?