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You know a new self-help book for women is a smash-hit craze when…it’s so popular that nobody you know has a copy.
Seems like everyone’s heard about the book He’s Just Not That Into You: the No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guy. Subsequently, it shot to the top of the Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble charts, onto the New York Times bestseller list, and out of American bookstores faster than you could say Simon & Schuster. The book has built-in cachet beyond even the Oprah factor: Author Liz Tuccillo was a writer for ”Sex and the City,” and co-author Greg Behrendt was a consultant for the HBO comedy.

Advice From A Guy Who Broke Up
The concept for the book sprang from a well-remembered “Sex” scene: The women are dissecting Miranda’s date from the previous night, offering their theories on way he declined her invitation into her apartment afterward. Carrie’s boyfriend proceeds to squash their optimism with his manly insight: “He just not that into you.”
But before it made its way onto the small screen, this cruelly honest little line came from the mouth of Behrendt, who offered it as a real piece of advice to a writer during a “Sex and the City” story meeting.

The idea is that if a guy is giving a woman excuses (he’s busy…he doesn’t want to ruin the friendship…he’s scared of his feelings…he dropped his phone in the toilet…), he would rather chew off his own arm than tell her the truth: He’s just not that interested in her.
So, Behrendt (a reformed “bad boy” who fit the pattern) and Tuccillo turned this epiphany into a book, and Oprah got her giddy mitts on it, and that was all she wrote. “Demand is huge,” says Stephanie Trout, manager of the Barnes & Noble on Northwest Highway in Dallas. “It’s mostly Oprah-driven.” She says it’s mostly women in their late 20s to early 40s asking if they have the book. For weeks, the answer was: not yet.

So where does He’s Just Not That into You rank among trendy advice books – is it more or less popular than, say, The Rules? It’s still too early to judge, says Julie Powell, a manager at the Borders on South Hulen Street in Fort Worth. “It’s getting the same attention that early Dr. Phil did,” she said. “Right now, it’s the thing.”

“It’s Gonna Start A Revolution”
When they were writing the book, one of the authors dared to dream that the concept would create a frenzy. “I thought as big as one could think,” says Tuccillo, who in the book lays bare some of the stories from her own love life. “I thought: ‘Oprah’s gonna love it! It’s gonna start a revolution. We will change the world!”
“Then, when I was waiting for the book to come out, I was just mortified. And I thought: ‘what was I thinking? Everybody’s gonna be reading a book about my love life. I want to kill myself.’ ”

Turns out her first gut reaction was on the mark. But for all the book’s popularity, where are all the women who should be lining up to tell Tuccillo that the tome changed their lives?
“What I’m getting more than anything is women saying they can’t find the book,” she says. “Which is really upsetting?”
But a good problem to have in the publishing world, no?
“No, it’s not good!” she says. “You want people to be reading the book!”
Well, clearly, someone is.
“I don’t think so,” she says. “I think that they just took them all off the shelves just to vex me.” She adds: “Of course I worry, and I’m thinking no one’s gonna go back and buy the book.”

Well, Emily Korman, the manager at A Hooper, an upscale Fort Worth boutique, says she’ll probably pick up a copy.
“You feel like it’s things that you already know it,” she says.

But will this, as Oprah and others have predicted, truly create a revolution? (“I think this is going to free women. This is true liberation,” she said on her show.) In other words, given the choice between self-delusion and the cold, hard truth, will women really want to hear the latter?
“Based on the popularity of the book,” Tuccillo says, “I think it’s a love-hate relationship, in that they don’t want to hear it, but yet they desperately want to hear it.

“I think women making excuses for men who are ultimately just not that into them is a widespread behavior whose time has come to an end. We hope. And I guess everybody felt it and we put a name to it.
“And I think that women can go back to behaving the way they want to behave, but there’s now a name for it. A woman can say to a friend: ‘You know, I think he’s just not that into you.’ And you’re gonna know what that means.”

A Psychologist Speaks Out
Still, the book probably won’t a panacea to men’s practice of cushioning the blow, cautions Roberta Nutt, professors of psychology at Texas Woman’s University in Denton.

Nutt admits she hasn’t seen the book yet, but she tends to worry a bit about anything that looks like pop psychology. (Don’t get her started on Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.)
“It may help, but I don’t think by itself it’s going to set all women free,” Nutt says. “It may be a tool to help them along in the process. My hunch is that the frenzy is about the need – not necessarily about the book itself.
“What it tells me is people are having trouble in relationships and they’re desperately trying to make them work. They’re looking for help. Books can help some, but they don’t solve all problems. If you get an insight you didn’t have, that’s help.”

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