With its almost child-like motif of a rainbow-coloured heart on the cover, You Can Heal Your Life offers a message of non-judgmental love and support that has endeared it to people everywhere. In ten years it has sold three million copies in 30 countries, and Hay is now a matriarch of the self-help, New Age and holistic healing movements. She attributes the book's success simply to her ability to 'help people change without laying guilt on them' and in fact the book has the calmness of a person who has gone through the worst and survived. This is a survivor narrative, and the title only really makes sense when we read the final chapter, a plain-speaking record of Hay's difficult personal history.

Born in Los Angeles, Louise's mother had early on tried to foster her out. Raped by a neighbour at five years old, Louise continued to be sexually abused until the age of 15, when she left home and school to become a waitress in a diner. She gave birth to a girl a year later, but never saw the child again, having had it adopted out. She left for Chicago, spending a few years in menial work, before basing herself in New York, becoming a high-fashion model. There she met an 'educated, English gentleman' and married him, leading an elegant and stable lifestyle until, 14 years on, he met someone else and divorced her. A chance attendance at a Church of Religious Science meeting changed her life. She became a certified church counsellor, and subsequently a Transcendental Meditator, after attending the Maharishi's International University in Iowa.

Becoming a Minister and developing her own counselling service, she wrote a book called Heal Your Body, which detailed metaphysical causes of bodily illness. At this point she was told she had cancer, and through a combination of radically changed diet and mental techniques, was healed. After spending most of her life on the East Coast, she moved back to Los Angeles, and was reunited with her mother before her death. Now in her seventies, Hay is one of the world's best-known motivational speakers and writers, often touring with the likes of Chopra, Dyer and Redfield.

You Can Heal Your Life is the message of a person who has crawled out of victimhood, and this aspect of it has had enormous appeal, particularly to women with similar histories. The essence of Hay's teaching is love of the self and evaporation of guilt, a process that Hay believes not only makes us mentally free but physically healthy, as the study of psycho-immunology attests. Affirmations are vital in becoming the person we wish to be, and the book contains many to choose from. All the familiar self-help messages are given attention, including breaking free of limiting thoughts, replacing fear with faith, forgiveness, and understanding that thoughts really do create experiences.

This book will not be for everyone. It is quite New Agey, fitting into the 'journey to wholeness' mould of writing that is now so common, but remember that Hay was a pioneer of it. For those who have read a number of self-development books, it may seem a bit simplistic and contain nothing new - it is certainly no intellectual undertaking to read it. On the other hand, it has a directness and enthusiasm that makes it stay in the mind, and intuitively makes sense.