For readers of A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and Bad
Blood by Lorna Sage comes an intensely honest and surprisingly witty
literary memoir of one woman's life as a sufferer of
Obsessive-compulsive disorder Joanne Limburg is a woman who thinks
things she doesn't want to think, and who does things she doesn't want
to do. As a small child, she would chew her hair all day and lie awake
at night wondering if heaven had a ceiling; a few years later, when she
should have been doing her homework, she was pacing her bedroom,
agonizing about the unfairness of life as a woman, and the shortness of
her legs. By the time she was an adult, obsessive thoughts and
compulsive behaviors had come to dominate her life. She knew that
something was wrong with her, but it would take many years before she
understood what that something was. This memoir follows Limburg's quest
to understand her OCD and to manage her symptoms, taking the reader on a
journey through consulting rooms, libraries, and websites as she learns
about rumination, scrupulosity, avoidance, thought-action fusion,
fixed-action patterns, anal fixations, schemas, basal ganglia, tics, and
synapses. Meanwhile, she does her best to come to terms with an illness
that turns out to be common and even--sometimes--treatable. This vividly
honest memoir is a sometimes shocking, often humorous revelation of what
it is like to live with so debilitating a condition. It is also an
exploration of the inner world of a poet and an intense evocation of the
persistence and courage of the human spirit in the face of mental
illness.
