Welcome to the first episode in Numerologist’s Book Club series! This month, we read “How To Be Fine: What We Learned From Living By The Rules Of 50 Self Help Books” by Kristen Meinzer and Jolenta Greenberg.

In this episode, Rose speaks with these two incredible authors to discuss how they came to write this funny and insightful commentary on the world of self-help.

If you’ve not yet read the book, you can grab it here. The audiobook is only 5 hours long so you can listen to it before you listen to the podcast if you like.

Note: next month, we’re reading Dear Universe, by Sarah Prout. Click here to get October’s read now. 

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Announcer:

Welcome to the Numerologist Podcast where we bring you a very special guest every single week to help guide you on your spiritual journey, live with abundance and inspire your soul.

Rose:

Hey, Numerologist community. Rose here. Welcome to another episode of the Numerologist Podcast. Welcome to the first episode in our book club series. Now, if you don’t yet know about the Numerologist book club, let me just give you a little bit of a rundown. Each week, we’re picking a book from the world of self-improvement, self-love, self-help, spirituality, that kind of thing, inviting you our Numerologist community to read it and then I’ll be interviewing the book’s author and asking them your questions.

If you’re not following [inaudible 00:00:44 ] already on Instagram, you can head over there for more information, book announcements and the opportunity to pose your questions. Or if you subscribe to the Numerologist newsletter, you will get updates and opportunities over there, too. Now, I’ll put the link to sign up and our Instagram link in the show notes for this episode so you can go check them out there.

In our first episode, I am so excited to talk to Kristen Meinzer and Jolenta Greenberg, the two incredible authors of How to Be Fine: What We Learned from Living by the Rules of 50 Self-Help Books. These two friends and colleagues were successful in their own rights before they came together to collaborate on their hugely popular podcast By the Book, which is now in its seventh season.

Comedian and self-proclaimed reality TV historian, Jolenta is a Moth StorySLAM winner and has held a comedic residency at Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn. Plus, she’s been featured in NPR and BBC. Kristen is a long-time audio producer and host and head of nonfiction programming at Panopoly. She served as a culture producer for WNYC, launch producer of The Sporkful, a development producer for CBS News Productions as well as many other accolades. In her spare time, and I don’t know how she’s got any, Kristen gives guest lectures on pop culture, public history and audio production at the Brooklyn Historical Society and local universities.

But in spite of their successes in their career, it’s perhaps the vulnerability they show each week in their podcast By the Book for which they have gained the most notoriety and global recognition, and it’s this podcast which really gave the framework to their now popular, insightful and incredibly funny book How to Be Fine. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming Kristen and Jolenta. Hey, Kristen, Jolenta. How are you?

Kristen Meinzer:

Hey.

Jolenta Greenberg:

Hi.

Kristen Meinzer:

Thank you so much for having us.

Jolenta Greenberg:

Yeah, we’re well.

Rose:

Thank you for being here. Excellent, excellent. Now, I just want to jump straight into it. This is our first book club podcast. I’m hoping that most people who are actually listening to this will have already read the book but like I said, it is one of our first ventures into a book club. For those people who haven’t necessarily read the book, could you just give me a short introduction to the book, the How to Be Fine elevator pitch, if you will?

Kristen Meinzer:

Well, Jolenta and I have hosted a show for seven seasons now, a podcast called By the Book. In each episode of the show, we choose a different self-help book. We follow every single rule in the book down to the letter. We record ourselves at work, at home, in the world… Well, not at work anymore since we’re all trapped at home… and in our marriages so that the listeners can hear how each book enhances or destroys our lives.

Our listeners have asked us for years now, “Please write a book that is all about what actually works, what doesn’t. If you can compile everything that you’ve learned, if you can tell us stuff that you haven’t told us yet… Are there things that are not in the final episodes of the show that actually happened? Are there things that happened in your earlier years that inform how you react to the books now?” We were asked over and over and over again and eventually, Jolenta and I said, “You know what? Let’s do this. We’ve lived by enough books. We’ve lived by 50 books,” at the time we wrote the book it was 50 books, “and let’s just get it all in one place for people,” and so that’s what we did.

We like to think it’s a great book for people who are already fans of the show, but a huge number of people have discovered the show because of the book. People have read the book because they thought it looked interesting and didn’t even need to be fans of our show to enjoy it. We hope that everybody picks up the book. Whether or not you’ve heard of us or not, it really does have a lot of fun, a lot of embarrassment, a lot of disclosure about the good and the bad of ourselves and these books we live by.

Rose:

Absolutely and I’ve got to say, I actually listened to the audiobook. I’m an audiobook girl.

Jolenta Greenberg:

Yay.

Rose:

I haven’t listened to the podcast before and I definitely got so much out of the book. It was hilarious. It was great. It’s definitely one of those things where I’m like, “Well, I’ll check out the podcast,” because it almost felt like a conversational sort of podcast itself within the book. Was that conscious? Was that intentional?

Jolenta Greenberg:

Yeah. Yeah, it was. I’ll backtrack it a bit. The book, we broke up into three sections where it’s advice that we’ve come across that’s really worked and helped, advice that’s just we find to be detrimental, like maybe put in there to help keep selling self-help stuff and not necessarily help people, and then also a sectio of things we wish more books would include, wellness practices, things we do in our lives to help keep them going smoothly or maybe get a little happier that books tend to overlook.

And so then, we each took a subject or a piece of advice that we vibed with and just sort of broke it up from there. And then once we’d all written our chapters and pieces, we sort of had to go back through in order and make sure the first mention of this book is here, so when Kristen brings it up there, she should do a nod to “As Jolenta said a few chapters ago or in this section, blah, blah, blah.” We try to sort of draw that thread through where we know what the other has talked about in the previous stories and chapters.

Rose:

Yeah, that makes total sense. One question I’ve got is, was there anything you disagreed on? Did you ever come together and think, “Well, I’ve chosen this”?

Jolenta Greenberg:

Oh, yeah. Oh, we disagree on so many things. That’s partially why some of the things we took are the ones we took. I love decluttering and swear by it, and Kristen hates it. I mention it in the book where it’s like, “These things… Again, nothing is universal as stuff like, what, breathing, eating.” But you know what I mean. Advice isn’t universal and it’s like I share my experience with how I feel like it really helped me, and I share how it really stressed Kristen out, too.

Kristen Meinzer:

Yeah, and one thing we really try to make clear in the book is we’re not trying to tell everybod