Friday, May 15, 2015

Review Me Twice - The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought by David Adam


One of the best things about this blog, I think, is that it has expanded my non-fiction horizons SO MUCH.  As in, I used to never read non-fiction and now I pick up a lot of it.  OCD is one of those things that, in reality, I don't know a lot about.  There are a lot of stereotypes surrounding it, one being that OCD means insane cleaning.

But I think the best thing about Adam's book is that he showed his reader that OCD isn't about being clean.  It's about something small, something negligent in our lives, becoming something all-consuming in his.  For him it was AIDS.  He would obsess about ways that he might contract the AIDS virus, and the ways he thought he could were insane, but that didn't stop him from thinking about it over and over, from it stopping him from living his life.

I like the fact that it was written more like a biography than like a "let me tell you about OCD" book.  I mean, he did tell me about OCD, but by telling HIS story, Adam's made it so much easier to really learn about the disease, to get that it's not just this weird things where you wash your hands to much, and I think that was really great.  If you're making a list of non-fiction this year, pick this one up.

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