At 29 years old, Anna is full of self-loathing. She hates her job, her boyfriend is having an affair and her parents’ response to her troubles is indifferent at best. This is the starting point for A Voice of One’s Own, the first novel to be published by The School of Life. In its pages, fiction and self-help make for uneasy bedfellows.
Co-founded by philosopher Alain de Botton in 2008, The School of Life broadly aims to teach its “students” how to lead calmer, more fulfilling lives. Its publishing arm, launched in 2016, disseminates self-help literature with pithy titles such as Reasons to be Hopeful and A Simpler Life, which purport to blend philosophical wisdom with practical advice. Like De Botton himself, the books are Marmite; while many critique the school for peddling watered-down pop philosophy, its teachings have clearly found a market. The organisation has branches in seven major cities, and its most popular title, Big Ideas for Curious Minds, has sold over 120,000 copies globally, while its workshops on playfulness, confidence and self-awareness regularly sell out. The new book represents a departure, however. Through A Voice of One’s Own, The School of Life is showing, rather than telling, its readers how to live better.
A shrinking market may account for the shift in strategy – according to Nielsen BookData, UK nonfiction sales decreased by 11 percent from 2021 to 2022. Another explanation lies in the school’s long-held view of art as functional.
“We’ve always had this big strand of thinking at The School of Life about art, which is that it’s for something, it’s useful, it does work for the viewer,” says Sarah Stein Lubrano, a faculty member and consultant for the school. “Hegel has this lovely quote about the sensuous presentation of ideas – that we can’t access certain ideas unless they’re made appealing to us – and I think [The School of Life] is always looking for new, interesting ways to get certain ideas across.”
The ideas the school is attempting to convey through A Voice of One’s Own include the importance of introspection and the formative nature of childhood experiences. The book was produced by an in-house content team and forgoes an author credit. The school’s head of therapy services, Robert Cuming, tells me that several members of the team are training to be therapists (the school offers 50-minute sessions at £115 a pop), lending the book a high degree of “psychological authenticity”. Fittingly, the book’s most salient theme is the value of therapy. Over a concise 165 pages, Anna hits rock bottom before finding Dr Devi, whose guidance begets an assortment of positive outcomes.
Literature has long been used to educate, from the instructional wordplay of Dr Seuss to the moralising works of George Orwell. Even self-help novels have some precedent in texts such as Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist, but The School of Life may be the first publisher to own up to its intentions; A Voice of One’s Own is being billed as a “therapeutic novel” with explicitly practical purposes. Lubrano suggests that, in some cases, fiction is more effective than self-help in communicating such messages. “When people read a novel, there’s something freeing about the fact that the character is fictional. You can identify with them but not feel too close to them. You have a little more mental flexibility to take in new ideas without feeling defensive. [Anna is] a prop, but she’s a very thoughtful literary prop.”
Approaching literature in this manner, however, doesn’t always serve the reader. “Characters that primarily represent messages and ideas can come across as one dimensional or pedantic,” says Jolenta Greenberg, who road tests self-help books in her podcast By the Book. “When not done well, the agenda of the author and the story can almost seem to work against each other.” This is often the case with A Voice of One’s Own, where therapy-speak is inelegantly wedged into the narrative. When Anna’s habit of rejecting Nice Guys is revealed, for example, the omniscient narrator declares that “it takes a lot of self-love to forgive someone who desires us”. Such authorial pronouncements may as well come pre-highlighted.
Much of the novel focuses on Anna’s therapy journey, which Lubrano describes as “one of the most interesting adventures we could ever go on in life”. Here though, it’s entirely conventional. After a handful of sessions, Anna finds a new job, a new boyfriend and opens herself up to the idea of motherhood. Conventionality is a criticism that has been levelled at the school before, with the writer Lisa Levy once describing its titles as an “enraging little study of contemporary assumptions about sex, marriage, and relationships”.
Despite its Woolfian title, A Voice of One’s Own makes no claims to high literature, so perhaps it is unfair to judge it as such. Instead the book aims to be useful, and time will tell whether any readers find it so. For me, while the exploration of psychodynamic relationships – how Anna’s past shapes her present – is thought-provoking, and sections on the physical manifestations of mental health are interesting and important, I walked away with very little in the way of practical advice. This book is trying to serve two masters – and neither one, I fear, will have its needs met.
A Voice of One’s Own by The School of Life (The School of Life Press, £14.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
