What I didn't know was that Ms. Traig probably doesn't need any help from the blogging community. With her own natural talents and conventional publishing connections, she offers the world a book that is so much fun even my local library has a copy. (I mean, normally they do -- maybe I won't give it back. But, to repeat, even my local library has a copy. My local library doesn't house certain Hugo-winning sci-fi writers or, damnit, a few critical Shirley Jackson works. And yet they have a copy of Devil in the Details. This means something.)
Not that a little blogicity (no, I can't seem to satisfactorily mate blog + publicity after all) hurts -- it got me to seek out the words behind such an engagingly precise cover, no?
I called the book "fun." Is OCD fun? (No.) Is anorexia fun? (No.) Is scrupulosity-as-a-disease fun? (No, not once you look it up.) Are books by good-natured, intelligent, funny, expressive women who've survived all of the above and don't mind sharing (or creating) the lighter side of it fun? (YES.)
Amazon has an excerpt. Read it. See what you think.
I'm not one of those people who watches "Coronary Country" on PBS then spends the next day wondering whether she's having a heart attack (yes, I'm either alluding or ripping off), but Traig's lovely book made me start thinking about OCD.
Okay, it's a chemical/brain disorder. Why does it manifest how it manifests, so differently in so many people? Why do some wash this and others pat that? Why do some check doors five times and others have to turn on the lamp just-so or the family parakeet will die?
Like, you know how songs get stuck in your head? Do you ever have one stuck in your head and you can't even think about unsticking it until you've played it through to a certain point? Otherwise everything feels uncomfy and wrong? You can't stop mid-note? Is that governed by the same chemistry as OCD?
What about other things in life that just make you tense? Me, I can't handle shoes being out in plain sight. I don't like stuff being all over the floor anyway (although I've learned to live with it), but shoes are just the shapely leather droppings of Satan sent to block my pirouette space. Put them in the closet or neatly against the wall or something. Am I dipping a toe in some dangerous neural connections there?
When I was around ten, I always had to finish one item on my plate before I'd eat another. I had to. Everyone has childhood stories like that. But, is it the same part of the brain that creates OCD that creates these quirks? What makes these rituals and foibles go from "just a phase" to "Wackytown problems"?
Craig had an all-access pass to Wackytown.
I do like her take on anorexia. I mean, we know anorexia kills people. Before it does that, it makes them loose-toothed and furry. Anorexia = bad + sad. We get that, and we care.
On the other hand, as Traig points out, many girls of a certain background become anorexic. Not just because they're dieting too much, but because they start playing those really scary head games that turn into mental health concerns. Some work their way into hospitals. Some work their way out. (Traig, despite some therapy and meds, is more in the latter category. More beauties of brain wiring?)
Heck, I was anorexic for about a year. (I know exactly which movies Traig is talking about, too. The Best Little Girl in the World wasn't a warning, it was a fascinating caress from a kindred spirit. You wouldn't know it, not at my size today, and I'm glad.) I've been looking for someone who knows how to laugh it off (and zap its elite/glam mystique) while succinctly rattling off how stinky your life is when you can spend three or four hours worrying over a stray calorie that jumped between your lips and whether there will ever be enough sit-ups in the world to make it have never happened.
Anyway, I like how Traig (who did get furry, and she turned orange) handles this topic; her attitude is indicative of the whole book -- no solemn drama, no tearful hugs. No lecturing... she just keeps the comic narrative humming down Kosher-greased tracks, assuming we are smart enough to know that, if you have to circle the block six or maybe sixty times because you're not quite convinced you didn't just run over somebody, this really isn't funny.
And yet the book is fun.
And you'll never indulge a funny little habit again without thinking of what might have been.
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