Quote of the Day (Molly Young, on Advice Columns)

“It’s one of our great cultural paradoxes that people hate being told what to do but love reading advice columns. Order me to tidy my work space and I’ll bristle. Show me an advice column about a disheveled co-worker and I’ll read it eagerly, with zero compulsion to apply its lessons to myself. Advice columns are always directed at some other slob (or jerk or wing nut). They are stages where the humble dramas of personhood play out in letters edited and condensed for clarity. They promise utility while providing, at their best, a creamy scoop of entertainment with a scant sprinkling of moral education on top.”—American literary critic Molly Young, “Listen Up” (review of Jessica Weisberg’s Asking for a Friend), The New York Times Book Review, June 3, 2018

The advice column feels like a staple of the mass media age. Nathanael West might have mocked it in his 1933 novel Miss Lonelyhearts, but even back then you couldn’t pick up a newspaper without finding this feature.

In my youth, readers of my local northern New Jersey paper found solace in “Helen Help Us,” while sisters Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren (known as “Dear Abby” to millions of readers and as “Dear Abie” to All in the Family’s Archie Bunker) counseled millions of others nationwide for years.

Even the more high-toned papers have their own versions of this. Just this morning, I noticed, The Good Gray New York Times featured a Q&A in its “Ask the Therapist” column concerning the propriety of confronting a nursing-home friend about her possible affair with a married admirer. And, for good measure, in its Sunday Magazine, “The Ethicist” (Kwame Anthony Appiah) serves up assorted interpersonal wisdom on important issues. (Just in time for this week: “Do We Have to Spend the Holidays With My Parents?”)