.IAmMarkManson sold 12 million copies of his self-help hit, 'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.' Then he started taking his own advice. benjwallace reports
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Photo: Walker Bunting A few weeks earlier, I had met up with Manson in Austin, where he had flown to help his mother, Chris, move into a house he bought her in a 55-plus retirement community. Manson was wearing athleisure that exposed a psychedelic tattoo with the words EX NIHILO wrapped around an upper arm. We helped Chris assemble some bookshelves and hang pictures, and later, along with Manson’s wife, Fernanda Neute, we visited his old turf north of the city.
While healing from some of his old wounds, Manson became disillusioned with the PUA scene, and as he would later do with Subtle Art and self-help, he increasingly cast his advice as a rebuttal to the field’s conventional wisdom. “What Mark helped people see was it was never about the women,” Mr. Awesome, now a West Coast academic, recalls. “It was about you. When you got your shit together, pickup got easier.
He was fashioning a niche for himself as the tough-love counterpart to a wave of sunnier self-help blogs then in vogue. One popular site, Tiny Buddha, Manson held in particular contempt. “It posts, like, a bajillion articles every day, and every single article was just the same flavorless, shallow, powder-puff, feel-good piece,” Manson says. “I used to be very bitter about that.
Manson flew to New York and met with eight publishers. One of the last editors he saw was Luke Dempsey at HarperOne. “He walked in with the proposal,” Manson recalls, “threw it on the table, and said, ‘Look, I’m a cancer survivor. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. And I don’t care what it takes — I’m gonna publish your book.’ ”
Chris Hemsworth shares Manson’s first book with his Instagram followers in 2017. Last fall, I visited Manson at his home in Tribeca. The elevator opened directly into the 5,475-square-foot apartment, a floor-through penthouse loft in a doorman building. It was location-scout bait with contemporary art and big windows that let in lots of light. But he wore his success uneasily.
Down a long hallway, Manson’s home office contained a camera on a tripod along with big lights for the videos he shoots for his followers. A world map was stuck with hundreds of pushpins from his vagabond days. Built-in bookshelves were filled with foreign-language editions of his books as well as thick volumes of history and philosophy.
HarperOne’s executives were of a similar mind and “put a lot of pressure on me,” he said, pushing an ambitious timeline to produce the first of two follow-up books Manson owed them. I asked whether it was a given that book No. 2 would include fuck in the title. “My stance was, ‘I’m not against it, but I’m not going to make up ‘fuck’ titles,’ ” he said.
But the apartment disillusionment reflected a deeper change in Manson, which COVID hastened. He started studying past pandemics so he could see the current one in perspective. “Without that context, everything on Twitter feels like it’s world-ending,” he says. He branched out into American history, reading Ron Chernow’s biographies of Grant, Washington, and Hamilton, and he realized that his newfound interests were increasingly divergent from the self-help material he’d built a business around.
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