New Book for Over-Achievers and People-Pleasers

Essays by author Amy Wilson helps readers overcome constant overachieving.

Join us at Beaverdale Books at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 24, for a visit by author Amy Wilson who will share her new collection of essays called Happy to Help: Adventures of a People Pleaser.

Happy to Help is about how  readers can be the one everyone else depends on and still be struggling―how you can be “happy to help,” even when, for their own sake, they shouldn’t. When Wilson started writing Happy to Help, she imagined a reader who was a lot like herself: a person who had far more things on their to-do list than time to do them and wasn’t sure what to do about it. When an overachiever becomes overwhelmed and asks for help, what that person usually receives back is advice: to do less, to lean in, to go with the flow, and to stop making things harder than they need to be. None of which, it turns out, is particularly helpful.

This isn’t a how-to book for slacking off or caring less. But Wilson hopes readers will come to understand that when life becomes too much to handle, there just might be something that needs to be fixed besides yourself.

Amy Wilson is a writer, podcaster, and performer. She is the author of the memoir When Did I Get Like This? and her latest book, Happy to Help. Amy is also the co-host of the Webby-honored parenting podcast What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. She and co-host Margaret Ables have racked up over 11 million lifetime downloads and 800 episodes since the podcast’s launch in 2016 and regularly perform live shows for audiences around the country.