Turtles All the Way Down by John Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I have a beef with people who throw around “I’m so OCD” because they dislike the stapler being on the wrong side of the pencil cup. That is not what OCD is. OCD is an often crippling anxiety disorder that can make your life a living hell by way of intrusive, obsessive, terrifying thoughts that take over every single thing you try to do, every day of your life.
Example 1: As the result of a brutal attack, a woman now views the numbers 2 and 6, when adjacent, as a sign that something terrible is going to happen. If her total at the cash register comes to $8.26, she has to put something back or buy something else to get rid of the 26, while others in line shuffle their feet and mutter impatiently and she knows she’s inconveniencing them but she can’t help it, she has to get rid of that 26 or she’ll die. She always finagles a way not to leave the house, or even her bed on the 26th of the month and refuses to own a digital clock because somehow it’s always 26 minutes past the hour when she looks at it. She was fired from her job cleaning motel rooms because she could not even walk past, let alone clean, room 26 without hyperventilating and throwing up and management would not take her seriously enough to simply assign her a different block of rooms. She began crying uncontrollably in DMV when her new car was issued plates with a “626” and the clerk refused to simply skip that plate and issue her the next one, while letting her know she was being unreasonable and hysterical instead of being nice and humoring her, and had police remove her from the premises and cite her for disturbing the peace, but of course she can’t pay the citation because she just got fired from her fucking job and soon there will be a warrant for her arrest. Probably with a 26 in it somewhere, which will certainly kill her, because even though none of the other 26’s have killed her doesn’t mean this one won’t, and it will. She knows this.
Example 2: After losing her father, a high school student cannot walk down the “wrong” side of the street or sit in the “wrong” seat or her mother will die. She has to select the “right” item from the store display of identical items, always wear the “right” underwear with the “right” shirt, and needs her mother to check in throughout her daily movements to reassure her daughter that she wasn’t in an accident. If any of these rituals cannot be conducted, the girl is in agony, suffering crippling headaches and stomachaches, convinced with every moment that no matter how careful she has been, she has still inadvertently just managed to cause her mother’s death and equally convinced that even if she didn’t do it this time, she’ll surely do it next time, because you can’t watch everything, you can’t think of everything, and how long can anyone keep this up? What about all the things she could have done wrong that she didn’t even think of, because she was too busy choosing exactly the right Ibuprofen out of the bottle while trying not to throw up, and now she’s going to be late for first period again, that will be probably be detention, oh fuck it, just stay home sick again. But wait, they’ll haul my mom into court for me being a truant, and what if the stress makes her have a heart attack and kills her? Aaaand now I’m puking.
Now, picture those two scenarios, and knowing, with every fiber of your being, that the number 26 will kill you, or that not picking the right package of underwear off the rack will kill your mother, all while the rest of the world is telling you that you’re a nutcase, to just knock it off already, look, people are staring, no wonder nobody likes you. Imagine making your way through every single waking moment with the knowledge that disaster will fall at any moment, the constant pressure to make no mistakes because the resulting tragedy will be your fault, all while holding down a job and going to classes and doing homework and washing laundry and cooking dinner and taking medication and paying bills and trying to be social because the one thing you’re supposed to do beyond anything else in this life is just be goddamned normal, and maybe, just maybe, you could meet someone who gets you and wants to be a part of your life, all the while judging and weighing every single action because the tiniest mistake will summon doom, and ultimately knowing that you have no social life, no money, no success, because you’re batshit crazy and you can’t stop it.
That’s just one day. Now do that every day. Lather, rinse, repeat.
That is OCD. Not annoyance at an off-center picture on the wall. Please stop saying that.
These are real people, by the way. I personally know both of them.
I usually don’t care for Nicholas Cage, but he portrays OCD brilliantly in the movie “Matchstick Men,” which is worth the watch. It’s amazing that I would say that about a Nicholas Cage movie, but it was an amazing performance.
OK, so. Yes. This is supposed to be a book review. Turtles all the Way Down. Also a brilliant rendering of OCD. As he usually manages, John Green tackles a hard subject, kids dealing with the hard parts of life, and maybe they don’t do it entirely well but they do it entirely humanly, with grace and wisdom we don’t remember having at that age, but maybe we did. One of his characters, as you might suppose, has a pretty bad case of OCD, the real thing, and it is written realistically, with angst and compassion and a little bit of humor, too.
Turtles All the Way Down is every bit as good as you’d expect a John Green book to be, which is pretty damn good.
“Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.”
And once again, just so we’re clear: This is NOT OCD:
THIS is OCD:
Thank you.
Bookshelves: hot-off-the-press, coming-of-age, ya, mental-health-issues, popular-fiction, thank-you-for-getting-it-right, this-is-the-stuff-right-here
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