Help Yourself is a big, modern-day fairy tale that interweaves the stories of three engaging characters as they navigate pivotal passages in their lives.

Merry Strand spent all her days in a rural North Carolina mountain town before being lured to the Atlantic coast by the promise of an inheritance from the biological father she never knew existed. The windfall could save her adopted family from financial ruin, but in order to receive it she must earn it by completing a series of tasks.

Fritz Forth - Merry's late father's loyal attorney - promised to help Merry, but he would infinitely rather be back at home in London with his rock-star-wannabe lover. And Jack Morningstar, a Midwestern widower attempting to reconcile his memories of his late wife with his newfound knowledge of who she really was, numbly occupies the beach house next door.

An abandoned barrier island in the offseason is the setting for the poignant ups and downs and eventual transformations of these characters as they learn to help each other and ultimately to help themselves. The Dickensian supporting cast lends comic relief and additional pathos in the forms of a curmudgeonly dead Englishman, a crazy mountain-town radio therapist, a suicidal software engineer, a matchmaking dog, and possibly a ghost.