In college Abby is diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and while she accepts this as an explanation for the counting and kissing and collecting, she resists labeling her fiercest obsession, certain that her prayers and her relationship with G-d are not an illness but the cure. She also discovers a new passion: performing comedy. She is never happier than when she dons a wig and makes people laugh. Offstage, however, she remains unable to confront the fears that drive her. She descends into darker compulsions, starving and cutting herself, measuring every calorie and incision. It is only when her earliest, deepest fear is realized that Abby is forced to examine and redefine the terms of her faith and her future.
Amen, Amen, Amen is an elegy honoring a mother, father, and beloved aunt who filled a child with music and their own blend of neuroticism. It is an adventure, full of fast cars, unsolved crimes, and close calls. It is part detective story, part love story, about Abby's hunt for answers and someone to guide her to them. It is a young woman's radiant and heartbreaking account of struggling to recognize the bounds and boundlessness of obsession and devotion.
Sunday night was usually the best night of the week in my house. Our neighbors, Estherann and Arthur, came over for vodka tonics and crackers and to talk politics. Estherann was always knitting fuzzy sweaters and scarves and she let me sit by her feet and dig through her canvas bag of yarns. Then Mom pulled out the Chinese take-out menu and we each got to choose a dish to order.
"You know what that means, kiddo," Dad would say with a wink my way. I was his special helper.
As soon as Dad and I climbed into the station wagon, he would turn on Woody's Children, Woody Guthrie's radio show where he sang folk songs with a team of banjos and little kids whom I imagined living on a prairie and frolicking through enchanted forests. Dad usually had one palm on the steering wheel and with the other he'd tap out Woody's rhythmic rhapsodies on my thigh. We'd sing "This Land Is Your Land" and "If I Had a Hammer" and scores of songs about love and dandelion wine, rolling into new melodies as effortlessly as the hills themselves. Sometimes Dad went extra slow and ... read full excerpt from: Amen, Amen, Amen: Memoir of a Girl Who Couldn't Stop Praying (Among Other Things) ebook
