Welcome to Geoff Rodkey's Bad Advice!

Thoughtful, empathetic, and totally misguided

Hi, there! If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you’re on the distribution list for the emails I send whenever I publish a new book. 

This isn’t a book. It’s an advice column. I am offering free advice for any problem you have, large or small. No matter what your question is, I’ll answer it in a manner that’s carefully considered, tactfully expressed, and almost certainly wrong. 

Not interested? Just scroll to the bottom and click “unsubscribe.” If I know you personally, I promise not to make it awkward by mentioning your lack of support the next time we see each other.

Still reading? Thanks for the vote of confidence! It’s misplaced. But I’ll do my best.

Since advice columns can’t exist without questions, here are a few to get us started: 

Why are you doing this?

Honestly? I don’t know.

It might be because my youngest kid went to college, and having been furloughed from a 23-year enlistment in the parenting army, there’s a little existential hole in my life that I can no longer fill by making my kids sandwiches and then yelling at them for not appreciating it.

Also, I’m not sure if you’ve noticed this, but the world seems to be full of problems. And I’ve started to wonder if one of them might be that not enough people are asking me to help solve them.

The fact that the solutions I offer will be terrible does not affect my confidence in sharing them with you.

Do you have any qualifications for this kind of work?

None. 

But I did some research, and here’s the wild thing: nobody does! It’s a completely unregulated sector of the economy. Worse, most of the people who get into this racket are emotionally damaged grifters.

Case in point: the two most popular advice columnists in American history were Ann Landers and Dear Abby. At the peak of their influence, they had a combined audience of two hundred million people.

Ann Landers was a charlatan. As best I can tell from the historical record, she only became an advice columnist because she was consumed with a poisonous envy of her twin sister, who’d married a much wealthier guy than she did. 

Since it was the 1950’s, Ann Landers did not get therapy for this crippling resentment. Instead, she sublimated her fratricidal rage into a newspaper column through which she could engage in mass psychological projection by lecturing strangers on how to deal with their own toxic interpersonal hangups. 

And here’s where it really gets nuts: not only was Dear Abby every bit as unqualified as Ann Landers, she only started her own column to professionally sabotage her jealous shrew of a twin sister. WHO WAS ANN LANDERS. (True story. Check out this Book Riot article.)

I may not be a model of psychological health, but I’m nowhere near as screwed up as those two.

Are you soliciting questions? 

Ohmygosh, YES! Please send me your questions! This column can’t exist without them. Thanks to a prior friends-and-family solicitation, I currently have five in the hopper, for which I am hard at work devising thoughtful, empathetic, totally wrong answers.

If none of you submit a sixth, this will be a pretty short trip. 

So if you want advice—it won’t be good, but at least it’ll be free—please email me with questions. Or just leave one in the comment section.

More soon! Although if you’ve made it this far, you’re tantalizingly close to that “unsubscribe” button (it’s way at the bottom, buried in the small print). So this could be the last time you hear from me. Your call.

That said, you’re also pretty close to this much larger “share” button, and if you’d like to offer my bad advice to others, I’d be grateful.