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Monday, July 9, 2012

Books Tomorrow Night: Shrinks to the Stars at Third Place Books

Posted by David Schmader on Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 11:35 AM

Everything I know about therapists/authors Barry Michels and Phil Stutz comes from last year's New Yorker profile:

Using esoteric precepts adapted from Jungian psychology, [Michels and Stutz] have developed a program designed to access the creative power of the unconscious and address complaints common among their clientele: writer’s block, stagefright, insecurity, the vagaries of the entertainment industry....If “The Secret,” a best-selling self-help book, promises riches through manifestation—think about a pile of gold and one will literally appear—“The Tools” represents a prosperity gospel better suited to a patient base that repeatedly encounters humiliation and failure even as it is conditioned to expect life-altering windfalls.

Stutz’s patients have won so many Oscars—twelve or thirteen, he told me, reluctantly—that he has developed a coping strategy he calls the Stutz 96-Hour Academy Awards Principle, which postulates that by Day Four life sucks again and no one knows who you are, so you might as well get over it now. His credo for writers is “KEEP WRITING SHIT, STUPID.”

Tomorrow night at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Stuz and Michels will appear in conversation with Maria Semple, after which they'll sign copies of their book, perhaps with a Sharpie-scrawled "KEEP WRITING SHIT, STUPID!"

(Full, fascinating New Yorker profile here.)