Just Checking - Hardcover

Colas, Emily

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067102437X ISBN 13: 9780671024376

Publisher: Atria, 1998

Synopsis

In a series of brief vignettes, the author describes her daily life with obsessive-compulsive disorder with honesty and humor, reflecting on her colorful family and friends and her deep relationship with her husband

About this title

About the Author

Emily Colas is thirty-two years old and lives in Michigan with her two children. Just Checking is her first book.

Reviews

What could have been a fascinating exploration of a complex psyche never gets much beyond the level of stand-up comedy in this disappointing memoir of a young woman's life with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Substituting sarcasm for insight, Colas presents brief, easily digestible tidbits describing her overwhelming fear that she might catch diseases from strangers. She recounts her bizarre rituals of handwashing, garbage disposal, 800-number calling (is this product really safe?) that eventually hurt others and destroyed her marriage. Colas can be funny ?(an episode of the stranger's underpants in the laundromat dryer is especially amusing ("I called my OB to ask her if she'd be willing to test me for gonorrhea")?but her flat prose and superficial approach mask an intelligence that's never sufficiently engaged with this material?a typical analysis is, "It sucks big time." Though Colas provides occasional glimpses of a disturbed childhood, she quickly covers them up with her flippant comic routine. She's disappointed that her illness is less interesting than heroin addiction?it's just "insanity lite," she writes, and "Rock stars don't get magazine covers because they kept their audience waiting while they washed their hands twenty times." By keeping her book at the level of a Seinfeld routine, Colas ensures that readers will gain little insight into a condition that deserves better treatment than it gets in this memoir lite.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A frank and funny first-person account of living with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Colas, a young woman obsessed with the notion of being poisoned by drugs slipped into her food or contaminated by germs from ground-up hypodermic needles or diseased blood, tells of her life as a neurotic. At first she shares her fears with her husband, requiring him to taste the food on her plate before she will eat it, to question waiters about possible nicks and cuts on their hands, and to remove his shoes before entering the house. He complies with her demands, even performing extraordinarily complicated rituals when disposing of the kitchen garbage. After the birth of her second child , with her husband's patience wearing thin, she begins trying to conceal her fears from him while still compulsively checking everything from the soles of shoes to breakfast cereal. The power of her obsessions can be seen in her totally irrational belief that simply viewing a bleeding man on television could cause her to become infected with his germs. Not surprisingly, the marriage eventually fails, and Colas goes to a therapist who prescribes Prozac, which frees her from the grip of her obsessive thoughts and compulsive rituals. In outline, the story sounds bleak if not dull, but Colas has a sure comic touch and a mocking self-awareness that makes her memoir a delight. She tells her story in brief scenes, not necessarily in chronological order, from her childhood at summer camp, where a compulsive neatness was already evident, to her post-divorce job as a bar waitress, where she can ``smoke, drink, and be sarcastic, all while earning an honest living.'' With its unique patient's-eye viewpoint and perceptive honesty, a valuable contribution to the literature on obsessive-compulsive disorder. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Colas worries a lot. She fears that the baby-sitter is using the family's toothbrushes. She suspects someone has tampered with her Cap'n Crunch. An obsessive-compulsive mother of two, Colas makes worry an art. This anecdotal, first-person account of Colas' illness is highly readable and funny. It also benefits from one of the symptoms of the illness (which affects 2.5 percent of Americans over the life course): a vague awareness that something is awry. At its best, Just Checking is a lighthearted glimpse of a treatable illness. But it's not the whole story. After she runs over a chipmunk, Colas repeatedly returns to the scene to verify that she has not killed a child. Behind the comic behaviors that Colas emphasizes is a gnawing disorder that is often painful and frightening. One hopes that Colas will take up her pen again, explore this part of her experience, and risk the darkness. Lee Reilly

Edition details

• Publisher: Atria
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067102437X
• ISBN 13: 9780671024376
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176