Self‐help books and the construction of reading: Readers and reading in textual representation

Reading therapeutic self‐help books requires that readers adopt particular reading strategies and positions in regard to texts. In a reader‐response analysis of Women Who Love Too Much, the authors construct an account of the ways in which this text attempts to control these aspects of reading. Self‐help books contest the interpretive prerogatives of readers through a construction of reading: a textual version of readers’ interpretive activities which comes packaged along with the more overt “content” of the book. This account of the construction of reading is discussed both in relation to Grodin's ethnographic study of self‐help book readers and in its relevance to theories of reading.