My book is out today! Is "wellness" a scam? Goop translations!
My 4th book, You Belong To Me is out today! Where can you get it, you ask?
Your local indie book store! My favorite is Watchung Booksellers in Montclair. If you want your book signed, just request it in the “notes” section
If you don’t live near a indie store, order from Bookshop.org which raises money for local bookstores no matter where you live
Request that your local library order You Belong To Me.
Listen to the audio book on Libby, which is your library’s audible app!
If all of that fails, then you can of course order it from Amazon, B&N, Walmart and all of the other big stores. But remember that as a society we are nothing if we don’t have books, and the people who actually support books are your local stores and libraries.
Last thing! No matter where you buy the book or read the book, you can always write a review on Amazon or Goodreads which is extremely helpful in selling the book. Every review counts.
Thank you!
Victims and Victimizers
YOU BELONG TO ME is about a teenage girl name Frances Bean who falls in love with the daughter of a local wellness guru. Bean, as her friends call her, is awkward, she has bad skin, she attends a very elite high school and the only reason she can afford to go there is because she’s the teacher’s daughter; her friends are a group of goth kids so she’s very much an outsider. But when she and the popular Julia Patterson, whose mother owns the wellness company Deep, are paired for a school project on Jane Eyre, they develop a huge crush on each other.
Soon, Bean is wearing white, going to fancy wellness parties and gets completely sucked into a completely different world. There, she meets a guy named Kai who is for some reason the spiritual leader for a whole bunch of underaged girls. (Sounds familiar… Charles Manson?) The girls who work for Deep aren’t just smitten with Kai. They’ll do anything to make him happy, they think that his words are above everything else and that his happiness equates their happiness. He’s the true definition of a narcissist.
He gaslights the girls into turning against each other for his own pleasure. When I was reading about the different women who have gotten pulled into cults over the years like Allison Mack from NXIVM and the “Manson sisters” I thought about how those women weren’t just victimizers, that they were also victims. It’s important to understand how a malignant narcissist can hurt you with their thought control and manipulation. We’re all vulnerable to it. We have the greatest malignant narcissist in the White House right now running our country!
Is “Wellness” a Scam?
In other news: I wrote an article for People Magazine (yay!) questioning if “wellness” is a scam. I write:
When I first saw Dieux Skin’s CEO Charlotte Palermino declare that the wellness industry was a scam back in October, I couldn’t help but take a long hard look at myself.
I know I’m not alone in that, in a desperate need to feel better, and despite my own misgivings, I’ll hand over money to a complete stranger. Snake oil salesmen have been professing to cure all sorts of ailments for centuries. My skepticism has even seeped into my unconscious; my new book, You Belong To Me, is about a teenage girl who gets drawn into, of all things, a wellness cult. But even as I ingest handfuls of turmeric, bathe my crystals outside under a full moon, go to the acupuncturist before the ENT and, yes, now regularly see a reiki master, I can’t help but wonder if Palermino is right, that wellness is a scam. And if it is, then why do I keep forking over the money?
In this article I write about my history working at not one, but TWO health food stores in the 90s. How my father was obsessed with two brilliant kooks, Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw and question my own wellness practices. You can read more here.
Goop Translation
Goop: “Spring essentials”
Goop translation: Darlings, the only person who can wear these $495 shorts and this $495 shirt is someone tall and very skinny like me. Otherwise you’re going to look like a fat cow! Good luck!
Thanks again for reading and being a supporter.
xo
Hayley