happy to help: adventures of a people pleaser

A Brit&Co Most Anticipated Books of 2025

Amy Wilson, co-host of the award-winning podcast What Fresh Hell, takes a funny and insightful look at how women are conditioned to be ＂happy to help＂--and what happens when things don’t go that way.

Amy Wilson has always been an ultimate helper. As a big sister, Girl Scout, faithful reader of teen magazines, personal assistant, sitcom sidekick, and, finally, mother of three, Amy believed it was her destiny to be a people pleaser. She learned to put others first, to do what she was told, to finish what she started, and to look like she had everything under control, even when she very much did not.

Along the way, Amy started to wonder why doing it all had been her job. Still, when she tried to hand over some of her to-dos, no one was particularly interested in taking them. And when she asked for help, in return, she got advice: have a sense of humor, quit nagging, and stop trying to be perfect.

Amy dutifully took on these goals--with varying degrees of failure--until the day she started to question if something else needed to be fixed besides herself.

Hilariously relatable, Happy to Help is a collection of essays about how you can be the one everyone else depends on and still be struggling--how you can be ＂happy to help,＂ even when, for your own sake, you shouldn’t.

Amy Wilson is a podcaster, author, actor, speaker, and business owner. She is the co-host of What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood, a Webby Award-winning parenting podcast. Additionally, she is the co-founder with Margaret Able of Adalyst Media, which offers podcasts with dedicated all-female audiences to advertisers and listeners alike. Author of When Did I Get Like This?: The Screamer, The Worrier, and the Dinosaur-Chicken-Nugget Buyer, and Other Mothers I Swore I’d Never Be (HarperCollins), Amy has contributed to Parenting, Redbook, American Baby, NPR, Huffington Post, Babble, CNN.com, and The New York Times. She began--and ended!--her career as an actor after graduating from Yale University.