![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
An autobiographical novel/fictionalized memoir about growing up with OCD. Tara Sullivan was always an anxious child. When she was eleven, the phrase "Step on a crack, break your mother's back" popped into her head. It took on a weird force, circling around incessantly inside her mind and accumulating power. Even though she knew it was just a saying, she had to avoid stepping on cracks. Then she had to start counting the cracks.
Her anxiety, obsessive thoughts, and compulsive behaviors get worse and worse, causing huge disruptions in her life and family. This is all happening in the 80s, when OCD was less well-known to the general public, especially in children, so no one has any idea what's up with her. Her mother panics that this is destroying the family and gets physically abusive, thinking that Tara is doing it on purpose and needs more discipline. Tara is sent to a series of therapists and accrues a series of wrong diagnoses, most of which boil down to "anxious kid acting out."
FINALLY, a chance encounter with someone who's heard of OCD provides a diagnosis and helpful therapy from a specialist. Therapy is difficult but very helpful, and it's en enormous relief to Tara and her family that she has a condition with a name and treatment.
This book is more educational than something you'd read for fun, complete with an afterword by a psychiatrist. But it is quite readable. It's also an extremely vivid portrayal of a particular type of childhood OCD from the inside. If you want to know what OCD might feel like to a child - what it's actually like to have obsessive thoughts, what it feels like to have compulsions, why apparently inexplicable meltdowns happen - this is a good book to read.
Her anxiety, obsessive thoughts, and compulsive behaviors get worse and worse, causing huge disruptions in her life and family. This is all happening in the 80s, when OCD was less well-known to the general public, especially in children, so no one has any idea what's up with her. Her mother panics that this is destroying the family and gets physically abusive, thinking that Tara is doing it on purpose and needs more discipline. Tara is sent to a series of therapists and accrues a series of wrong diagnoses, most of which boil down to "anxious kid acting out."
FINALLY, a chance encounter with someone who's heard of OCD provides a diagnosis and helpful therapy from a specialist. Therapy is difficult but very helpful, and it's en enormous relief to Tara and her family that she has a condition with a name and treatment.
This book is more educational than something you'd read for fun, complete with an afterword by a psychiatrist. But it is quite readable. It's also an extremely vivid portrayal of a particular type of childhood OCD from the inside. If you want to know what OCD might feel like to a child - what it's actually like to have obsessive thoughts, what it feels like to have compulsions, why apparently inexplicable meltdowns happen - this is a good book to read.
