MARTHA OF THE SPIRIT

By MARGARET CARLSON

It's July 29 and I'm going to see Sarah Ban Breathnach, whose name is pronounced Bon Brannock. She is the author of Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy, a 500-page meditation to help women find fulfillment by appreciating what they already have. It has been on the best-seller list for 70 weeks, with 2.2 million copies in print. (A companion journal zoomed onto best-seller lists last month--an astonishing feat for a virtually blank book.) Simple Abundance's entry for this day is "The Home as a Hobby," in which she suggests that cleaning out the basement for an art studio, if seen as a pastime, would be fun instead of drudgery. On July 30, she wants you to get rid of "Habits That Steal Precious Moments," so that instead of reaching for a glass of wine, you are satisfied with sparkling mineral water if it is served with a wedge of lemon in a pretty goblet.

Never mind that after removing mildewed mattresses and broken toys, many of us will want a glass of something stronger than club soda, even if it's poured into the Mason jar we've just emptied of rusty nails. This is Martha Stewart for the spirit, and like the doyenne of impossibly complicated domestic arts, Ban Breathnach is exhausting in her particulars yet somehow soothing in her totality. Few devotees of Martha Stewart are going to build a Palais de Poulet, then match their wall colors to the aubergine eggs laid by her free-range chickens. And it's unlikely that Abundance's 2.2 million copies are in the hands of many people who actually hauled junk out of the basement last Tuesday. But Ban Breathnach is right: you would feel better after clearing a space for yourself. So much so that just thinking about it is enough to lift the spirit.

Because there is so much self-help mush out there, journalists like me see authors like Ban Breathnach wearing a KICK ME sign. When I come to visit, she takes her own advice and snatches a small pleasure out of a potentially prickly situation: she fixes us iced tea and scones. Sitting in the living room of her comfortable brick house in a middle-class Washington suburb without a touch of wretched excess from her newfound wealth, she readily agrees to show me where she writes her first drafts, even though it's in bed. And anticipating my next line of questioning, she offers that indeed money does make some things easier and is a great blessing but that money "doesn't protect you from life's sufferings. Tears are the same whether they fall on silk damask or cotton." She has current proof of that. She and her husband, a government lawyer and the mayor of Takoma Park, Md., have just separated. With her 14-year-old daughter upstairs and the pain still palpable, she doesn't want to talk further about it.

Back in 1991 when she started writing Abundance, Ban Breathnach was angry and envious. She had survived a freak but serious accident--a ceiling tile had fallen on her head in a restaurant. The thought of continuing to write books about Victorian doilies and manners filled her with dread. She turned to a survey of philosophy, religion, history and poetry, and one day made a list of 100 things that were good in her life. The way to jump-start happiness, she decided, was to stop looking for what she didn't have and look instead at what she did have: breathing the same crisp spring morning air as the richest person in town, loving your kids as much. Just because that's what all the major religions preach and your mother told you a hundred times doesn't mean it doesn't bear repeating. She'd found the topic for her next book.

Ban Breathnach began to chart the journey from resentful to contented. She filled her writing with references to Buddha and the Bible, Rebecca West and Zsa Zsa Gabor, the humbling nature of hair, the joys of sleep as opposed to sex and how to compensate when you have neither. Paramount is the importance of simplicity and order: If you take it out, put it back.

Her sensibility is feminine, not feminist. Few of her quick fixes involve gross motor skills--perfume, crayon drawings and a hot bath are her nostrums of choice. She honors work, even if she doesn't grapple with the crushing choices that face women whose childbearing years and peak career years coincide. She doesn't say how you can stop for the pot of tea when the car pool, the grocery store and the new ad campaign all beckon at once. Nevertheless, women read Abundance--an engaging, well-written book--then give the book to 10 friends because it rings so true.

Success was not immediate. Ban Breathnach got 30 rejection slips before an editor at Warner Books suggested she restructure the book into 365 daily essays. It worked, and Warner printed 24,000 copies in November 1995. The book juxtaposed the sacred and the silly, pointing out the joy in the full hamper and the empty refrigerator as well as the light at the end of a long night of worry, all in digestible bites. And it sold steadily by word of mouth for months before it found the one reader who counts more than any other--Oprah Winfrey. She invited Ban Breathnach to be on her "People I'd Like to Have Dinner With" show that aired March 21, 1996. Two weeks later, the book leaped onto the New York Times best-seller list, and landed the No. 1 spot a week later. In November 1996, as behooves an author whose animating principle is being grateful, Ban Breathnach produced a sequel, The Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude, dedicated "For Oprah with Love. Thank You." And Oprah kicked in again three weeks ago, featuring the Journal on a follow-up program in which she pointed to a bin of 8,000 letters she had received from viewers about Ban Breathnach's latest project. "We're going to fill this studio [with letters]. What we've started is a national movement, honey," she whooped. She showed celebrities like Roseanne and Bill Cosby in the act of being grateful, listing their blessings in their journals. "If you begin to look at what you have in your life every day...and not on what you don't have, you will begin to see that you have more. I'm telling you it will change your life forever."

Journal is a masterpiece of brand extension: a series of blank pages that have intermittent homilies from Winston Churchill to Bob Hope to Laura Ingalls Wilder. On each day, the buyer is to write five things the buyer is grateful for. Oprah talked about the child who was thankful for the sound of his mother laughing, an observation surely to be valued above Power Rangers and Super Soakers. But does this justify $12.95 for a diary? New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath has declined to put the book on the Advice, How-to and Miscellaneous list (where Abundance now reigns), explaining, "I don't think the best-seller list should reflect merchandise."

Still, few writers get rich from simply writing. Simple Abundance is now a registered trademark, and there are calendars and audiotapes. But merchandising is less offensive when the author gives 10% of her earnings to charity--$250,000 already this year to the House of Ruth, Habitat for Humanity and the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, among others. And whether Journal is a book or not, it became, with Oprah's help, No. 1 on the Wall Street Journal's best-seller list.

Ban Breathnach is currently at work on her next book--a real one this time, about excavating the authentic self. But first she is off to Italy for a long-awaited vacation with her daughter. In keeping with her aphorism that we are human beings, not human doings, she's not even taking her computer, having promised Katie "no work, all play."

As for the stressed-out journalist, I'm grateful to be done with this week's writing, and I'm going to celebrate with water and a slice of lemon. Maybe it will do. Simple abundance, one day at a time.

--With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York