In this commanding debut memoir, Watson conveys what it’s like to live with multiple mental illnesses.
Watson’s comprehensive autobiography recounts her life before and after she was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive and bipolar disorders. The memoir spares no details, and Watson’s raw voice and transparency make it an unflinching, unfiltered look at life with paralyzing illnesses. For example, the author admits to a narcotics addiction and provides a comprehensive look at her excessive bathroom and shower routines, which involve “washing the same arm in the shower ten times” and “brushing my teeth in the same pattern five times.” She ends nearly every chapter with helpful tips for living with OCD, depression and bipolar disorder—an innovative approach that eliminates the distance between her and her readers. She also makes it clear that her mission in writing and publishing this memoir is to help others understand these disorders. As a mix of facts and self-reflection, this memoir is an invaluable medical narrative; to read it is to feel her pain as if it’s one’s own. However, if the book’s brutal candor is its strength, it can also act as its flaw; the tell-all honesty can be helpful, as when the author analyzes her symptoms, but sometimes it can be superfluous and overlong, as when she lists the names of the medications she’s currently taking. A stronger edit might have made for a more sharply focused and coherent book, as it lacks a narrative storytelling structure. That said, its energy and the stream-of-consciousness voice lend it an authenticity that might have been lost if it were more refined.
An admirably sincere, if unpolished, memoir.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479365302
Page Count: 392
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
An excellent exploration of a new paradigm of behavior for our chaotic times.
A fascinating work that explores the ways in which the individual perceives his immediate surroundings and maneuvers within social constructs to describe the dynamic interplay between the individual and his society.
Our sense of immediacy, a psychological and social process of reciprocity with our proximal surroundings, can be a vehicle for the moral justification of both exemplar and horrific acts by the ordinary individual subscribing to an overriding belief system. In this illuminating work, Katz organizes his essays around five dimensions that illustrate the immediacy paradigm. Transcendence (1) is the ability to rise above a circumscribed situation to alleviate deep suffering and pain in a search for an overarching meaning in life. Katz offers the example of many prisoners of Auschwitz who took such a spiritual path to find solace when confronted by the extraordinary evil of the Nazi regime. Constriction (2) involves the creation of a local moral universe that requires complete allegiance to a specific cause, effectively squelching any outside ethical or moral value. As a contemporary example, the extreme abuses of Iraqi captives at Abu Ghraib prison occurred within a military-sanctioned construct that subverted prisoner rights beneath the overriding cause of the war on terror. Impinging (3), a process that utilizes languages and symbols to directly impress the concerns of the societal construct upon the individual, is often the means of transmission. The transforming (4) process involves the parallel duality within an individual psychological makeup: the public persona, Path 1, that often reflects a successful career trajectory and general contentment on the surface, and Path 2, often dormant, that includes a private reservoir of insecurities, survivor guilt and self-hatred. In the process of transformation, there may be a catalyst for the activation of Path 2, enabling previously unmentionables to surface, which often brings about a feeling of being overwhelmed, and sometimes leads to murder, suicide or other reprehensible acts in the face of utter despair. The final attribute of immediacy is the existence of a certain degree of the unknowable (5) within the established boundaries of the rules of conduct, a gray area that often leads to uninformed, poor and often violent decisions. This well-organized text contains many valuable nuggets of information that explain the model of immediacy and how it relates to the often shocking behavior of humanity.
An excellent exploration of a new paradigm of behavior for our chaotic times.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 1936
ISBN: 0-9744352-0-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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