It's July 29 and I'm going to see Sarah Ban Breathnach, whose name is pronounced Bon Brannock. She is the author of Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy, a 500-page meditation to help women find fulfillment by appreciating what they already have. It has been on the best-seller list for 70 weeks, with 2.2 million copies in print. (A companion journal zoomed onto best-seller lists last month--an astonishing feat for a virtually blank book.) Simple Abundance's entry for this day is "The Home as a Hobby," in which she suggests that cleaning out the basement for an art studio, if seen as a pastime, would be fun instead of drudgery. On July 30, she wants you to get rid of "Habits That Steal Precious Moments," so that instead of reaching for a glass of wine, you are satisfied with sparkling mineral water if it is served with a wedge of lemon in a pretty goblet.
Never mind that after removing mildewed mattresses and broken toys, many of us will want a glass of something stronger than club soda, even if it's poured into the Mason jar we've just emptied of rusty nails. This is Martha Stewart for the spirit, and like the doyenne of impossibly complicated domestic arts, Ban Breathnach is exhausting in her particulars yet somehow soothing in her totality. Few devotees of Martha Stewart are going to build a Palais de Poulet, then match their wall colors to the aubergine eggs laid by her free-range chickens. And it's unlikely that Abundance's 2.2 million copies are in the hands of many people who actually hauled junk out of the basement last Tuesday. But Ban Breathnach is right: you would feel better after clearing a space for yourself. So much so that just thinking about it is enough to lift the spirit.
Because there is so much self-help mush out there, journalists like me see authors like Ban Breathnach wearing a KICK ME sign. When I come to visit, she takes her own advice and snatches a small pleasure out of a potentially prickly situation: she fixes us iced tea and scones. Sitting in the living room of her comfortable brick house in a middle-class Washington suburb without a touch of wretched excess from her newfound wealth, she readily agrees to show me where she writes her first drafts, even though it's in bed. And anticipating my next line of questioning, she offers that indeed money does make some things easier and is a great blessing but that money "doesn't protect you from life's sufferings. Tears are the same whether they fall on silk damask or cotton." She has current proof of that. She and her husband, a government lawyer and the mayor of Takoma Park, Md., have just separated. With her 14-year-old daughter upstairs and the pain still palpable, she doesn't want to talk further about it.