Dbo: Footprint of the Editing World's Lack of Diversity and "Theology-checking" in NY Times Bestseller

My friend suggested I read Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Holllis, which is currently #1 on the NY Times bestseller list of How-To books. Reading this book, I have thought more about the footprint of the lack of diversity in the publishing industry, as well as the lack of fact-checking we considered in our last class, so I figured I'd share my thoughts on the book here. (Also this is a super long post so hopefully it will count for my forgetting to post something last week).

As a brief overview, the book has twenty chapters. Each chapter has more-or-less the following structure: First Hollis tells a story about her own struggle with the chapter-topic and how she overcame it. Then she moves on to more exposition of whatever truth or encouragement she wants to convey in the chapter, occasionally referencing her Christian faith, and lastly, she lists specific and tangible strategies that she used to overcome the problem. The topics she covers range from mothering, to sex, to work ethic. Overall, the book resembled a very long pep-talk.

Although the title of the book implies its audience is women, I didn't get the sense Hollis was writing to someone like me (granted, the book talks a good deal about parenting, but this sense went beyond that difference between Hollis and me). I've gotten this sense before when reading other advice/how-to Christian authors, namely John Piper and C.S. Lewis (although, I tend to cut Lewis some slack because he was writing in a different day-and-age, and because - well, he's dead). In the case of Piper and Lewis, I would be occasionally pulled out of the book whenever their assumptions would periodically remind me that they weren't really writing to people like me; they were writing to men like them. Reading Hollis' book I had similar feelings. It was harder to place what exactly was making me sense that I was not an intended reader, but this impression was validated in chapter four when Hollis describes her online presence saying "I have worked tirelessly over the last couple of years to create content that caters to women. I have spent numerous hours trying to figure out exactly what women like us want in life" (Hollis, 41). In the first quoted sentence, Hollis mentions women generically, as if she's talking about any and all women. In the next sentence, however, she clarifies and specifies that she is not catering to all women; she is catering to "women like us", to which I replied in the margins of my copy of the book: "Who is the us?".

There is another clear moment when Hollis discloses that she is not, in fact, addressing all women in this book. In chapter eight on mothering she says, "somewhere some cynical reader is thinking about all the parents who do fail. There are plenty of mamas who make bad choices, who hurt themselves or their children... but I'm not speaking about those mamas. I'm talking to you" (Hollis, 87). Maybe I am the cynical reader Hollis is describing, but Hollis' admission that she's not talking to "mamas who make bad choices", points to a larger qualm I have with her book.

The main mantra of Hollis' book is "Only you have the power to change your life" (Hollis, 211) or as she puts it another way, "It's all in your hands now. Everything that happens from here on out is entirely up to you" (70). Or "You are meant to be the hero of your own story" (Hollis, 5). The entire book boils down to try harder, try smarter, and you will eventually reach your dreams because you can. I'm sure there are many women who need to hear that message, and, judging by its position on the NY Times bestselling list for the past forty-seven weeks, many women have loved hearing it. It's an inspiring mantra for most. Who doesn't want to be told that if they keep trying they will eventually reach their goals? Isn't that the American dream?

This mantra, however, is not always true. It doesn't hold for everyone. I could go on a rant on how the American dream is a lie, but this post is already longer than I intended. If you still believe in the American dream, do your own research. Type "american dream lie" into the Google search box. Other people put it more eloquently than I can.

Aside from her mantra being untrue in a factual and societal sense, it's not Biblical. When I read books by Piper and Lewis, I was able to look past their assumptions about me as their reader and glean the merit of their argument or theology. Finding such merit in Hollis' book was more challenging for me because her theology and arguments (in my humble opinion as a twenty-year-old decently-read theologian) were less sound. When building an argument, most people will draw from outside sources to validate their claim. Christian books tend to quote the Bible or other Christian literature. In Hollis' case, though, the vast majority of her advice stemmed from her own personal experience, and although much of the advice is phenomenal and although I'm sure many women have similar experiences, there is a fallacy of anecdotal evidence.

Holding the claims I have quoted above next to scripture, Hollis' truths come up short of Biblical truth. Her claims diminish the role God can and often does play in people's lives, but I am more concerned with how her mantras enlarge what people should expect from and for themselves. I know that sounds pessimistic, but hear me out: Hollis' claims make it seem like success is totally dependent upon the individual, which is simultaneously empowering and daunting for someone just starting out, reassuring and emboldening for someone who has already made it, but absolutely devastating and crushing for someone who has failed at their dreams. Failure and success are not always granted to those who deserve them. For one, there are broken systems that favor one person over another through no one's fault or merit. Furthermore, there's God-given grace and what some people call luck both of which play into people's successes and failures. Hollis doesn't acknowledge this.

I understand Hollis' goal to pep-talk women into achieving their dreams, and I'm sure she has reached that goal of inspiring women to pick themselves up and try again. However, these two glaring (at least to me) errors of (1) presenting itself as a book written for all women when in reality it feels as if it is written for a subset of women, and (2) championing mantras that - when examined more closely - are widely viewed as false; make me wonder at the book's editorial process. In chapter nineteen, the second-to-last chapter of the book, Hollis openly acknowledges race and difference as something she and her community have struggled to address. She does this with grace and admirable honesty, but it came long after I had already gotten the sense that she had no idea how "white" she was. This chapter - or at least some of its content - needed to come earlier in the book. This realization reminded me of Chris Jackson's essay in What Editors Do. I wonder if a person of color ever read the book before it was published. If they did I wonder if their feelings were at all similar to mine and if, because of their presence in the editing world, the tone of the book would have been more all-inclusive.

Hollis' book also reminds me of our conversation on fact-checking last class. Thomas Nelson, Hollis' publisher, is a division under HarperCollins Christian Publishing (HCCP), the self-described "leading provider of inspirational content", so perhaps they are more interested in books' inspirational capabilities than their theological foundations. I would assume HCCP have some ramifications on what they will or will not publish as a Christian publisher, but similar to how other non-fiction publishers leave fact-checking up to the writer, I suppose Christian publishers leave theology-checking (for lack of better words) up to the writer as well. Besides what I mentioned above, there were a number of other claims Hollis makes that are at least theologically shaky, and moreover, I felt that many of the truths she did not mention were perhaps more important the some of those she did. But even if some of Hollis' editors had doubts about the book, I'm sure they were weighing the two questions all editors consider: Is it any good? And will it sell?

Girl, Wash Your Face isn't a bad book. It's a great pep-talk and an inspiring read if you don't think about it too much. Hollis says exactly what so many people want to hear, and because it sounds so encouraging and because it is mostly true (and likely because Hollis already had a significant online following), the editors figured the book would probably sell. And they were very right.