Looking For Help Remodeling Your Man? Just Ask Bruce Cameron How

By Linda Orlando

W. Bruce Cameron is a humor writer from southern California who has written a manual that offers women "tips and techniques on accomplishing something you know is impossible but want to try anyway." That impossible accomplishment would be to remodel a man. Response to his book has been overwhelmingly positive, both from women and from men. According to Cameron, men love reading about their "adorable quirks" (which women call "faults"), and because they think nobody would really want to change them, they believe the whole concept of remodeling a man is just a joke.

Cameron’s latest book, How to Remodel A Man, explains in great detail the things a woman must understand before attempting to change a man. For example, men don’t really resist asking for directions when they’re lost, because they never are actually lost. They’re just exploring. Also, the phenomenon of "male selective hearing" is a misconception, because it implies that a man has made a choice not to hear something. The truth is, a man has preset biological impediments to hearing certain things, so a woman needs to learn how to communicate while bypassing those things a man can’t hear anyway. Other remodeling tips include advising women to bury the remote control in a man’s pile of laundry; doing so will not only get him to see the piles, he will actually learn to move them. And perhaps one day even put the laundry into the hamper.

Cameron attained his celebrity status slowly. After writing eight novels, none of which were published by conventional means, he set up a website so he could post his own works for the world to read. The site began with just a handful of subscribers, but quickly grew to a legion of adoring fans, and his writings were picked up by The Rocky Mountain News and other newspapers. So, in true humorist fashion, Cameron thanks Al Gore for inventing the Internet since it was his gateway to success. The success of his writings led to the mainstream publication of his first blockbuster book, "8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter," which was turned into a television series starring the late John Ritter.

How to Remodel A Man also tackles weighty issues such as leaving the toilet seat up, snoring, sports, and dirty clothes that land everywhere around the hamper but never actually in it, plus how to make a man more sensitive and get him to dress better and eat right. According to Cameron, "dating is the process during which two people share stress, awkwardness, and disappointment in order to determine the degree by which they each need to lower their standards." And men and women have different goals in mind for dating: for women, the goal is sharing, intimacy, and a relationship. For men, the goal is women.

The hilarious chapter titles offer readers an invitation that is impossible to resist: "Men Doing Housework: Not As Rare As a Solar Eclipse, But About As Useful;" "Manners and Habits and Hygiene: Tips on Remodeling a Man So That He Goes From Being Offensive to Being Merely Irritating;" and "Communication: How to Contact the Male Brain Via the Ears." In Chapter 11, "Dating and Romance and Other Things Men Can't Really Do," Cameron writes: "I've read that men are from Mars—that is, they come from a life-less planet where the surface temperature ranges from 30 degrees to 200 degrees—and women originally hail from Venus, which is a steamy, oxygen-less planet where the barometric pressure would crush an aluminum can. No wonder women and men can't get along with each other: They're both dead."

Cameron hasn’t let his success go to his head, because he is a remodeled man himself and therefore doesn’t brag. But he does acknowledge that his book is "perhaps the most important literary work in the history of literature" and he is "an absolute genius for having written it." Of course there are probably plenty of men who wouldn’t agree with that assessment, but Cameron isn’t worried about their opinions mattering much. "I’m telling people this is an instruction manual for remodeling the male of the species," he says. "And men don’t read instructions."