Happy to Help

Name: Happy to Help
Brand: Amy Wilson
Price: 17.99 USD
Availability: InStock

by Amy Wilson

Published 2025-01-07

Format

$17.99

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Additional Details

Publish Date: 2025-01-07

Pages: 272

Dimensions: 5.5 x 1 x 8.2 inches

Language: English

Format: Paperback

EAN/UPC: 9781958506783

In this honest, insightful, and often hilarious account, Amy Wilson explores her experience and frustrations as a people-pleaser—her story will resonate with anyone who has said, 'Happy to help!' one too many times. I couldn't put it down.

Gretchen Rubin

author of The Happiness Project
Wilson's refreshing and hilarious essays illustrate the ridiculous nature of the advice meant to fix women and the unfair emotional labor expectations we place on women. Happy to Help offers a new narrative that inspires women to hold true boundaries and value their time as diamonds. A must-read!

Eve Rodsky

author of Fair Play
My fellow type-A souls, Amy Wilson understands us. It's time to put down all we've been carrying, pick up this funny, all-too-relatable memoir, and rejoice in the empathy of a kindred spirit. Let someone else run the world today.

Mary Laura Philpott

author of I Miss You When I Blink
This book is a gift to women everywhere. Through candid storytelling and incisive analysis, Amy Willson illuminates the pervasive yet often invisible pressures that women encounter in their pursuit of excellence. Happy to Help is . . . a beacon of hope. . . with the gift of a trusted, smart, and funny guide to help along the way.

Jennifer Wallace

author of Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—and What We Can Do About It
Funny, wise and delightful—and smart and reassuring—Happy to Help will have you caught between laughing and nodding along, and maybe dropping a few balls you've been keeping in the air to give you time to read one more page.

KJ Dell'Antonia

author of The Chicken Sisters and How to be a Happier Parent
Amy Wilson is the wise and good-humored companion we all deserve in our lives as we consider the lessons we want to take from our past experiences and the meanings we hope to create out of whatever may come next. Her writing strikes an insightful balance between lighthearted and soul-searching, reassuring us that we're not alone in wondering where all the grownups have gone, leaving us–us?—to make The Big Decisions. As emboldening as it is endearing, Happy to Help will have readers questioning, in the best possible way, their roles as mothers and as partners and as people in the world.

Rebecca N. Thompson, MD

author of Held Together: A Shared Memoir of Motherhood, Medicine, and Imperfect Love

A Brit&Co Most Anticipated Books of 2025
An IPPY Gold Medalist in Essays
A National Indies Excellence Awards Memoir Finalist

Amy Wilson, co-host of the award-winning podcast What Fresh Hell, takes a funny and insightful look at how women are conditioned to be "happy to help"—and what happens when things don't go that way.

Amy Wilson has always been an ultimate helper. As a big sister, Girl Scout, faithful reader of teen magazines, personal assistant, sitcom sidekick, and, finally, mother of three, Amy believed it was her destiny to be a people pleaser. She learned to put others first, to do what she was told, to finish what she started, and to look like she had everything under control, even when she very much did not.

Along the way, Amy started to wonder why doing it all had been her job. Still, when she tried to hand over some of her to-dos, no one was particularly interested in taking them. And when she asked for help, in return, she got advice: have a sense of humor, quit nagging, and stop trying to be perfect.

Amy dutifully took on these goals—with varying degrees of failure—until the day she started to question if something else needed to be fixed besides herself.

Hilariously relatable, Happy to Help is a collection of essays about how you can be the one everyone else depends on and still be struggling—how you can be "happy to help," even when, for your own sake, you shouldn't.

Amy Wilson

Amy Wilson is the author of the memoir When Did I Get Like This? and the co-host of What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood, a Webby-honored podcast with hundreds of episodes and more than ten million downloads. Wilson's writing has also appeared in Real Simple, Redbook, Parenting, NPR Books, Babble, CNN.com, and The New York Times. Wilson is also an actor who has appeared on Broadway, as a series regular on network sitcoms, and as a comedy performer in Saturday Night Live's Studio 8H. She is a proud native of Scranton, Pennsylvania, a graduate of Yale University, and lives with her family in New York City.

"In this honest, insightful, and often hilarious account, Amy Wilson explores her experience and frustrations as a people-pleaser—her story will resonate with anyone who has said, 'Happy to help!' one too many times. I couldn't put it down."
—Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project

"Wilson's refreshing and hilarious essays illustrate the ridiculous nature of the advice meant to fix women and the unfair emotional labor expectations we place on women. Happy to Help offers a new narrative that inspires women to hold true boundaries and value their time as diamonds. A must-read!"
—Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play

"My fellow type-A souls, Amy Wilson understands us. It's time to put down all we've been carrying, pick up this funny, all-too-relatable memoir, and rejoice in the empathy of a kindred spirit. Let someone else run the world today."
—Mary Laura Philpott, author of I Miss You When I Blink

"This book is a gift to women everywhere. Through candid storytelling and incisive analysis, Amy Willson illuminates the pervasive yet often invisible pressures that women encounter in their pursuit of excellence. Happy to Help is . . . a beacon of hope. . . with the gift of a trusted, smart, and funny guide to help along the way."
—Jennifer Wallace, author of Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—and What We Can Do About It

"Funny, wise and delightful—and smart and reassuring—Happy to Help will have you caught between laughing and nodding along, and maybe dropping a few balls you've been keeping in the air to give you time to read one more page."
—KJ Dell'Antonia, author of The Chicken Sisters and How to be a Happier Parent

"Amy Wilson is the wise and good-humored companion we all deserve in our lives as we consider the lessons we want to take from our past experiences and the meanings we hope to create out of whatever may come next. Her writing strikes an insightful balance between lighthearted and soul-searching, reassuring us that we're not alone in wondering where all the grownups have gone, leaving us–us?—to make The Big Decisions. As emboldening as it is endearing, Happy to Help will have readers questioning, in the best possible way, their roles as mothers and as partners and as people in the world."
—Rebecca N. Thompson, MD, author of Held Together: A Shared Memoir of Motherhood, Medicine, and Imperfect Love

"Wilson imbues the stories with plenty of heart. [Readers] will appreciate this soulful take on charting one’s own path."
—Publishers Weekly

"This engaging collection is reminiscent of Erma Bombeck's essays on family life. Recommended for women's studies collections and discussion groups."
—Library Journal

“An engaging and hilarious combination of memoir and analysis with compelling storytelling and an intimate and candid voice. Reading Amy Wilson feels like a conversation with a friend.”
—Pittsburg Post-Gazette