“Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author.” 

The novel’s first lines point out the contradiction inherent in someone reading a self-help book. Improvement, if the book can actually be said to provide it, comes from the author, not from the self. Because the novel is written in self-help format, it is immediately clear that it is meant to be a book of methods, and that the title of the book is meant to be taken literally. 

“You embody one of the great changes of your time. Where once your clan was innumerable, not infinite but of a large number not readily know, now there are five of you.” 

When the family lived in their small town, everyone was known—and in many cases, related to—to them. Once they arrive in the city, the narrator realizes that things have changed. There are strangers everywhere he looks. This can be a threat, but it can also be an opportunity. The family will have to rely on itself in this sea of strangers, but the strangers also represent an opportunity for connections and new business. 

“Time is the stuff of which a self is made.” 

The narrator classifies the reading of enjoyable knowledge as another contradiction in self-help. A book that one reads for pleasure is still classified as self-help because that pleasure serves as a distraction: an improvement over circumstances worth escaping from, if only temporarily. It is an escape from one’s self and a loss of one’s time, and therein lies the contradiction: it is self-help that reduces time, the stuff of which a self is made.