Peruse the self-help aisle at your local neighborhood bookstore, and you’ll likely find tomes giving you all kinds of advice. Titles that tell us to “let them” or develop “atomic habits” or offer an expletive-laden guide to caring less.

For all the critiques of the multibillion-dollar self-help industry, it sells, launching the high-profile careers of authors and influencers and ways of life for its followers. What is it about self-help that we find irresistible?

That’s the question author Jessica Lamb-Shapiro set out to answer with her book Promise Land: My Journey Through America’s Self-Help Culture. It’s a topic she has personal investment in. “My dad was a child psychologist, and he wrote parenting books. And I later found out that he used me as an example,” she says. Her experience

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