your mom

In this biting satire of Tony Robbins-esque self-help gurus, humorist Brian Haigh paints today's so-called life coaches as con men who spout ambiguous, nonsensical wisdom to exploit the earnest-but-gullible. In Awaken Your Perfect Self, the guru is the fictional Jim Hoenfhmfjn ("the last 'h' and 'j' are silent"), and his victim takes the form of the narrator, a young man who moves to Los Angeles to follow Hoenfhmfjn and write a book about his teachings. This Kindle Single is short and sweet, but there's no shortage of laugh-out-loud moments. And though the naiveté of the narrator feels a bit exaggerated, even given the absurdist tone of the story, Haigh's dialogue walks a perfect balance between the believable and the absurd. When Hoenfhmfjn tells the narrator to "think of this highway we are on as the road of life," it makes you wonder if Haigh didn't lift that line straight out of a late-night self-help seminar. --Kevin Nguyen

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