Twitch and Shout: A Touretter's Tale - Softcover

Handler, Lowell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452277027 ISBN 13: 9780452277021

Publisher: Plume, 1999

Synopsis

In the first book of its type, praised by reviewers for its humor and humanity, the author recounts how Tourette's Syndrome has shaped his life and explores the nature of the disease and the lives of others who have it. Reprint.

About this title

Review

Tourette's syndrome is a neurological disorder characterized by tics, physical jerks, and random shouts and noises that can include profanity and racial epithets. It's become relatively well known through the writings of neurologist Oliver Sacks (whose bestselling book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat includes several case studies of Touretters--as he dubbed them), and through the 1995 documentary Twitch and Shout, a film coauthored by Lowell Handler and Laurel Chiten, both of whom have the disorder.

Now Handler has written a book with the same name, an attempt to chronicle the disease from the inside, to explore the strange life and symptoms of a person who has discovered, as he puts it, that "the mind has a mind of its own." His personal odyssey includes many digressions into how the disorder has shaped the course of his relationships with his family, his career as a photojournalist, and his sense of purpose and belonging in society. He meets with other Touretters, including a professional basketball player, a medical doctor, and, in one of the book's most surreal episodes, an ex-military man who had served in a nuclear missile silo in charge of the launch keys. But while there is much honesty about the emotional impact of the disorder on an individual's life, Handler (who admits that he suffers from lifelong dyslexia) provides a severely fragmented narrative, jumping from episode to episode with little sense of closure or lessons learned. What's more, he's unable to give much insight into how it feels to have the disorder, or how the mind of someone with Tourette's differs from a nonsufferer. Still, some of his thoughts are intriguing (he posits, for example, that the great 18th-century author Samuel Johnson may have been a Touretter) and individual episodes ring with the resonance of hard-won truth. --John Longenbaugh

From Kirkus Reviews

Episodic, revealing memoirs of a young man with Tourettes Syndrome, a neurological disorder whose symptoms include uncontrollable tics and touching and odd vocalizations. Handler, a photojournalist and faculty member of the New School for Social Research, was born with the disorder but not diagnosed until he was a senior at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Relieved to know that his condition had a name and that he wasnt alone, Handler eventually became active in the Tourettes Syndrome Association, and it was through this organization that he found the subjects for a series of portraits of Touretters that Life magazine assigned him to produce. Although that series didnt run in Life, the experience led him to contact neurologist Oliver Sacks to suggest a collaboration, and their joint photo essay on a Tourettes family was published worldwide. In 1989, he began a five-year collaboration with film producer Laurel Chiten on a documentary about Tourettes Syndrome, also titled Twitch & Shout. Thus the disorder has not only shaped Handler's life, but has been the focus of most of his life's work. His account of his travels around the country with Sacks as they sought out Touretters is a warts-and-all picture of the noted author, whose peculiar sleeping habits and other idiosyncracies Handler is not averse to recording. He is even more forthright about his own problems, however, describing his search for relief through various drugs (Haldol, pimozide, and for a long time a combination of Prozac and marijuana), his difficult relationship with his brother, the end of his unhappy marriage, in which his pot-smoking lifestyle played no small part, and his brief affair with an especially troubled young woman. With its disjointed structure and photographs that seem to have been flipped carelessly, even haphazardly, onto the page, this memoir has all the energy and twitchiness of Tourettes Syndrome, which is probably exactly what Handler intended. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0452277027
• ISBN 13: 9780452277021
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256