Books Written by Martha Beck

More than a dozen. The ten on this page run from Expecting Adam (1999) to Beyond Anxiety (2025). Before those she published Breaking the Cycle of Compulsive Behavior (1990, with John C. Beck) and Breaking Point: Why Women Fall Apart and How They Can Re-create Their Lives (1997), and in 2013 a collection of her essays, The Martha Beck Collection.

The Way of Integrity (2021) is the most common entry point and the most self-contained. If you want the practical exercises rather than the argument, start with Finding Your Own North Star (2001). If you would rather read her as a memoirist than as a coach, start with Expecting Adam (1999).

Martha Nibley Beck, born 29 November 1962 in Provo, Utah, is an American sociologist, author and life coach. She holds three Harvard degrees, a bachelor’s in East Asian studies and a master’s and doctorate in sociology, and has taught at Harvard and the American Graduate School of International Management. She wrote a monthly column for O, The Oprah Magazine for nearly two decades and runs a coach-training programme.

Finding Your Own North Star is her best-known practical book, and The Way of Integrity the most widely read of her recent work, after Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club in 2022. Expecting Adam, The Joy Diet and Leaving the Saints were also New York Times bestsellers.

Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose, published in January 2025. It became a New York Times bestseller.

She holds a PhD in sociology from Harvard, so the title is academic rather than medical. She is not a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, and her books are written from a sociological and coaching background rather than a clinical one.

It defines integrity not as moral rectitude but as being undivided: not living one way while believing another. The book is structured on Dante’s Divine Comedy, moving from recognising the divided life, through dismantling it, to what Beck describes as life on the other side. It was a New York Times bestseller and an Oprah’s Book Club pick.

In February 2022, about ten months after the book came out in April 2021. Winfrey said she hesitated because it was not a novel, and chose it anyway.

In the 2005 memoir, Beck alleges that she was sexually abused as a child by her father, the LDS scholar Hugh Nibley, and describes recovering the memories as an adult. Her mother and seven of her siblings denied the allegations, and the book drew strong criticism within the Mormon community, partly over the reliability of recovered memory. The dispute has never been settled.

Yes. She left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1993, after her then-husband John Beck, and wrote about the departure and what led to it in Leaving the Saints (2005).

Yes, it is a memoir. It covers Beck’s pregnancy with her son Adam, who was diagnosed with Down syndrome before birth, while she and her husband were graduate students at Harvard. It also describes experiences from that period that she presents as inexplicable by the academic framework she was trained in, which is the part readers tend to divide over.

No. Despite the title, it contains no eating plan. The ten daily practices include doing nothing for a short time, telling the truth and taking a small risk, meant to be added one at a time rather than all at once. Her diet book is The Four Day Win (2007).

Once. Diana, Herself: An Allegory of Awakening (2016) is her only novel. Everything else she has published is memoir, self-help or essays.