That’s the empowering message of The Total Woman: if you’re a woman in an unhappy marriage, everything is your fault. If hubby is morbidly obese, unemployed and smell like a garbage dump that’s because you must have nagged him or beaten down his fragile self-esteem by not complimenting him often enough. If he’s a loser it’s because you made him one. It’s up to you to make him a winner. For God. For America. And maybe for yourself on some level as well, although always remember that you come last, if at all.

Thankfully, since housewives are to blame for all of the problems in their marriages, there’s a sure-fire, can’t miss, quick-fix solution: become everything you imagine your husband wants in a wife, partner, lover and sex slave. Transform yourself into a perpetually ready sex-bomb and your husband will have no choice but to love and respect you. He may even buy you a new can-opener, or pat you on the behind while winking waggishly, or tell his friends, “My wife sure is a swell lady! She’s not a nagging shrew at all! I sometimes enjoy spending time with her!” and, honestly, what more could a woman want than that? Seriously, if you think you’re entitled to anything more than that, The Total Woman feels strongly that you’re wrong. Dead wrong. And also hate Jesus.

As an evangelical Christian, Morgan would never condone or promote adultery but if a housewife were to gain five pounds, develop ugly cellulite or those love handles that nobody loves, can she blame her poor husband for sleeping with his secretary and treating his obese shrew of a wife with disdain?

In The Total Woman, Morgan comes off less as colorful and kooky in the way self-help gurus are expected to be, but rather as genuinely mentally ill. In developing The Total Woman program, Morgan transformed the pathological self-negation and masochistic martyrdom of what appears to be, to my eyes at least, a deeply unhealthy and troubled marriage between an unpleasant, inconsiderate, almost impressively dull lawyer and a sad, lonely woman who felt she needed to transform everything about herself to prove worthy of the sub-par lump of a man she married into a one-size-fits all strategy to save any troubled marriage that fits within its incredibly narrow confines.