A Memoir of Compulsion
Amy Wilensky was eight years old when she started to suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder and so began the fascinating and moving memoir of a life plagued by irrational behaviour. Ostensibly illogical, Amy's fears and compulsions ranged from denying herself water, to an impulse to stockpile rotten food; from needing to touch wood to ward off harm, to balancing on the edge of a subway platform.
Now a young woman and a powerful witness to her own disfunction, Wilensky observes the emotional fall-out of this socially disabling condition. By turns both tragic and comic, her gripping narrative extends our understanding of the complex human mind, with subtlety, humour and an eye for the absurd, and challenges our notion of what it is to be "normal".
