For years Marianne Power lined her bookshelves with dog-eared copies of definitive guides on how to live your best life, dipping in and out of self-help books when she needed them most. Then, one day, she woke up to find that the life she hoped for and the life she was living were worlds apart--and she set out to make some big changes. Marianne decided to finally find out if her elusive 'perfect existence'--the one without debt, anxiety, or hangover Netflix marathons, the one where she healthily bounced around town and met the cashmere-sweater-wearing man of her dreams--really did lie in the pages of our best known and acclaimed self-help books. She vowed to test a book a month for one year, following its advice to the letter, taking what she hoped would be the surest path to a flawless new her. But as the months passed and Marianne's reality was turned upside down, she found herself confronted with a different question: Self-help can change your life, but is it for the better?