Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Devil In the Details

As you can probably gather from the cover, this book is about someone with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).  Specifically, this book is a memoir about a teenage girl's struggle with OCD, specifically scrupulosity.  Scrupulosity is a hyper-religious form of OCD.

One thing that was interesting to me about this book was that Jennifer Traig's mental illness would seemingly turn itself off and on again.  She talks about "getting better" and then going into more intense bouts with her scrupulosity just a few months later. 

A lot of her scrupulosity issues included an obsession with items being kosher.  Traig's father was Jewish while her mother was Catholic.  This was inherently confusing for Jennifer because she chose to follow her father's Jewish roots while the family practiced Christmas as well as other Christian holidays.  This proved to be disastrous for Jennifer when ham (Christmas or otherwise) was cooked...the ham was also why Jennifer determined every single dish in the house was none-kosher (because ham or some other sort of pork product had rested on it at some time or another).  Jennifer even obsessed over whether or not the glue that held the first few sheets of a paper towel roll together was kosher.

Needless to say, this book was insightful into the mind of someone with OCD.  However, it was not my favorite.  There were parts where Traig appeared to try to be funny (joking about how plump she was and her name being remarkably similar to a certain famous person's weight-loss program). Yet, I wasn't laughing for the vast majority of the book.  If someone were to ask me my review of this book...I would probably just shrug and say, "eh."

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