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Passing for Normal
By: Amy S. Wilensky , Roy Jr BlounteBook Publisher: Random House
Imprint: Crown Publishing Group
Format: ePub Encrypted (DRM)
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"What I remember even more distinctly than the incidents of cruelty and confusion, intolerance and avoidance--more vividly than standing in front of the mirror watching my head move with no conscious instruction from me--is the strain of trying to conceal my tics and rituals from others, especially those closest to me, my own family most of all."
The provocative memoir of a young woman's struggle to come to terms with a life plagued by irrational behavior.
I am crazy. But maybe I am not. For most of her life, this thought haunted Amy Wilensky as she watched her body do things she couldn't control, repeatedly twitching and contorting into awkward positions. Her mind lurched and veered in ways she didn't understand: She felt that she must touch wood at all times to ward off harm, that chewing a wad of stale gum would prevent a plane crash. Why couldn't she throw away meaningless scraps of paper? Why were six-word sentences strangely satisfying?
While Amy excelled in school and led an otherwise "normal" life, she worried that beneath the surface she was a freak, that there was something irrevocably wrong with her. It wasn't until she happened upon the book The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing after graduating from college that she realized she might be among the approximately 5 million Americans afflicted with Tourette's syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Passing for Normal is Amy's emotionally charged account of her lifelong struggle with these often misunderstood disorders. A powerful witness to her own dysfunction, she describes the strain it bore on her relationships with the people she thought she knew best: her family, her friends, and her self. Confronting the labels we apply to ourselves and others--compulsive, crazy, out of control--Amy describes her symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment with courage and a healthy dose of humor, gradually coming to terms with the absurdities of a life beset by irrational behavior. This compelling narrative, by turns tragic and comic, broadly extends our understanding of the wondrously complex human mind, and, with subtlety and grace, challenges our notion of what it is to be "normal."
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Title of eBook: Passing for Normal | |
| Release Date: 09-22-2010 | |
| Allowed Countries (hover) | |
| Publisher: Crown Publishing Group |
This eBook download is available in the following formats:
| Parent title | Passing for Normal |
|---|---|
| Encrypted (DRM) | Yes |
| SKU | 9780307765543 |
| File size | 1971 |
| Internet Security | n/a |
| Printing | Not allowed |
| Copying | Not allowed |
| Read aloud | No Sys requirements Download reader |
| Devices | Samsung Tablet, Apple Ipad & Iphone, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo eReader, Aluratek Libre, Iliad, Nokia, Blackberry, Hanlin |
| Note | ePub, short for electronic publication is one of our favorites and should be yours for a couple of reasons. ePub offers reflowable text giving you flexibility to manipulate how the content is presented. Moreover, lots of cool features are now being developed for the reader like advanced video and audio. ePub is now an industry standard, so all of the "non-propreitary" hardware manufacturers are now supporting it. |
Passing for Normal
Chapter One
SHADES of GROUCHO
As I stood outside the imposing front doors of New York City's Hospital for Joint Diseases, I bounced up and down on the balls of my feet in a halfhearted attempt to keep warm. My eyes were watering from the wind, and I could feel ice crystals forming on my eyelashes and the ends of my still shower-damp hair. For ten minutes I'd been trying intermittently—and desperately—to convince Bryant that we should not, after all, go in.
"Is it for diseases of the joints," I asked, trying my hardest to make the question sound provocative, "or for people who've got two diseases, like leukemia and, say, diabetes?" Bryant rolled his eyes.
"Five past," he said.
Now we were late.
A man swallowed by his enormous overcoat walked by us and into the lobby, and I scanned his profile as he passed. Was he with the Tourette Syndrome Association, I wondered? Was he in fact a regular at the monthly meeting that had seemed like a much better idea back in the relative warmth and familiarity of my apartment uptown? Was I minutes away from learning his preference—even numbers or odd?— and bearing witness as he blinked or sniffed or jerked his limbs akimbo in ways that I would maybe know all too well? Impossible to tell. He looked normal, what I could make of him under that coat, but then again, so did we.
I could see my breath—it was that cold—and Bryant, for some incomprehensible reason, was lacking in hat and in scarf. He wouldn't last much longer. It was time for the big pitch. "What do you say we just go out to dinner? My treat."
For the first time all evening, Bryant looked mildly int
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