Passing for Normal: A Memoir of Compulsion

A powerful and wise account of a woman’s lifelong struggle with Tourette’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder
 
“Affecting, gripping—no matter what form the reader’s own struggles for acceptance may have taken.”—Elle

I am crazy. But maybe I am not.
 
For most of her life, these thoughts plagued Amy Wilensky as her mind lurched and veered in ways she didn’t understand and her body did things she couldn’t control. While she 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. 
 
A powerful witness to her own dysfunction, Wilensky describes the strain it bore on her relationships with the people she thought she knew best: her family, her friends, and herself. Confronting the labels we apply to ourselves and others—compulsive, crazy, out of control—Amy describes her symptoms, diagnosis, and her 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.”

Amy S. Wilensky is a graduate of Vassar College and Columbia University's M.F.A. writing program. A native of suburban Boston, she lives in New York City.