Laurie Sandell

Once upon a time I was a voracious reader, intimately acquainted with the works of Philip Roth,  Hermann Hesse and Hawthorne. Then one day in the mid-nineties, I was in Barnes & Noble with my friend Zoë. She disappeared for a little while, then returned with a candy-colored book in her hand. Giggling, she dropped it onto our table. It was called The Real Rules by Barbara DeAngelis, and had been written as a response to that awful anti-feminist relationship guide, The Rules. We turned to the first chapter, ready to mock it mercilessly (we both hated self-help books), when the unthinkable happened: We were completely sucked in. We read it cover to cover, forced to admit the perky, dark-haired woman on the jacket might know a thing or two about relationships that we had yet to learn.

Over the next ten years, I amassed a small library of such books, hiding them in drawers until the day I said, “Ah, screw it,” and put them on the shelf among my novels. Now my apartment looks like a real book store, albeit one with only three sections: Fiction, memoir and self-help. Which brings me to the point of today’s blog post. In the past two years, I’ve shifted my focus from these books to live teachers. Josh Korda, who teaches meditation at Dharma Punx in New York. Marianne Williamson (pictured above), who lectures every Tuesday night in Los Angeles. And I know I’m late to the game on this one, but last night I heard Deepak Chopra speak, and I’m adding him to the mix. Come on in, Deepak, the holy water’s fine. I’ll get back to my Russian novels someday.