REVIEW: Happy to Help: Adventures of a People Pleaser by Amy Wilson

Reviewed by Angela L. Eckhart

When Amy Wilson was in eighth grade, she decided to stop raising her hand, even when she knew the answers. She no longer wanted her classmates to see her as the “Brainiac.” But her mission backfired when her teacher expressed disappointment. “How dare you withhold information that others might find useful?” Not only did she disappoint her teacher, but she ultimately let down the rest of her class by withholding the answers.

Merriam-Webster defines a “people pleaser” as “a person who has an emotional need to please others often at the expense of his or her own needs or desires.” All Wilson wanted was to be accepted by her peers, but at what cost? No matter what, she would disappoint someone. But it turns out it was usually herself.

Wilson realized she was a people pleaser when she looked back upon her life, specifically knowing she was the eldest of her siblings. She was the one who helped take care of them and innately knew her role within the family. She declares, “I didn’t ask why being an oldest sister meant living a foregone conclusion. There was work to be done. It fell to me to do my fair share of it.”

In her new essay collection, Happy to Help: Adventures of a People Pleaser (Zibby Books, 2025), Wilson shares many of her people-pleasing stories. Following an introduction are eighteen thematically titled essays, each one depicting a specific time from her life when she is trying to figure out who she is and what she wants while simultaneously trying to please everyone.

In her introduction, she greets her readers with a whirlwind description of lugging her children and her accoutrements onto and from a city bus every morning. She anticipates “the presumptive annoyance of those behind [us] in line,” which causes her to embrace a superhero power of doing it all quickly and efficiently. She may feel successful inwardly, but outwardly she does not receive any assistance or admiration from those around her for being so capable…even though she admits she is hoping for some recognition. “But no one ever told me they noticed all that I was managing, and that I was really good at it.” Yet, she concludes, “And why would anyone have offered me help, when I was endeavoring so hard to show everyone that I didn’t need any?”

Wilson recalls taking the Brownie pledge when she was eight years old, that she will “help people at all times.” In her view, you put others before yourself, even if it doesn’t always feel good. Not surprisingly, one of the first things a self-diagnosed people pleaser can do to stop this desire is saying, “no.” One could even word it nicely, like Bartleby, the Scrivener, saying, “I would prefer not to.” However, Wilson admits that “opting out isn’t as easy as it sounds.” A feeling of guilt from declining will often follow, causing oneself more undue stress. Wilson examines how she came to be this way, and she theorizes:

[But] when I look back at my life, through adolescence and career and mothering and living, the improbable goals I set for myself were not ones I dreamed up. They were achievements I was told I should want…. And if you’re like me, having revealed even the tiniest inclination toward being dependable and good at getting things done, you can end up feeling like the power lines on the side of the road, always just there making things happen, so reliably that people quickly stop processing their presence. Or never really notice them in the first place.

People pleasers possess many similar character traits, and Wilson offers her experiences in her subsequent essays giving readers an intimate look into her life. For example, in “Know Your Value,” she divulges how she became an actress from the auditions to gaining acting experience and working her way up professionally. One of the first things she did was become an assistant to a Broadway actress when she eventually realizes, “A person lacking the ability to set healthy boundaries probably should not accept work as a personal assistant.” She kept telling herself that, “I never doubted that if I kept showing up, someday someone would notice how much more I had to offer.” Eventually, however, she begins to focus on her own career and carve a path for herself. Her essay “No Hard Feelings” discusses not getting callbacks for auditions, being ghosted, and she reveals, “Career aims usually morph into something more reasonable as we get older.” She learns to be selective in the jobs she wants to perform and how well they will serve her professional development while balancing her family life.

In “Never Give Up” (this reviewer’s favorite essay, followed by “It’s Never Too Late”), Miller shares how she and her husband wanted to introduce their children to skiing, since they lived near a ski mountain. In typical people-pleasing fashion, she attempts the sport without having taken a single lesson and while she never becomes an expert, she manages to make it to the bottom. She is not having fun, though, and so she takes some lessons on the bunny slope. This essay is relatable to other skiers, and her descriptions are spot-on. She describes how to “snow plow” down the mountain: “I had learned how to lock my skis into a pizza shape and zigzag across Candy Land painfully slowly. I was in a considerable sweat from the considerable effort both to slow my skis and to avoid collision with the forty freestyling toddlers paying absolutely no heed to where they were going—which is admittedly what they usually do, just as lower speeds.” Her experience was a joy to read, both fun and enlightening, and she ends the essay with words of wisdom.

All of Miller’s essays are sprinkled with humor, vulnerability, and research, proving that she can not only tell good stories, but she gleans meaning from them. Her insights are refreshing and relatable. The essays’ endings wrap up neatly, like gifts containing sensical conclusions peppered with new ideas or rationalizations. If readers can’t identify with some of Miller’s experiences, they can certainly imagine or gain awareness. But one universal truth can be taken away from this collection, whether a people pleaser or not. And that’s the ability to say, “I would prefer not to.” Miller concludes that the basis behind this collection is not how to do more, or to do less, or to even not care; rather, “…this book does offer recognition that we are, most of us, managing quite a lot, and doing just fine.”