Amy Wilensky: Passing For Normal: A Memoir Of Compulsion

Scribner

$22.95

Review: Jan Wilson*

Amy Wilensky wrote this memoir when she was 30 years old, and had graduated from Vassar College and from a creative writing course at Columbia University. She is a journalist, is married to Ben and has a loving family and many close friends.

She emerges from this book as a witty, intelligent, insightful woman, with a great appetite for life. She also happens to have Tourette's syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder.

This book presents a series of vivid and moving verbal snapshots of episodes in Wilensky's life, showing how she learns to live a fulfilling life despite her tics and obsessions.

She writes of her most persistent tic, a head-jerking and shoulder-rolling, as an uninvited guest who shows up mid-thought or conversation. She bravely writes of the need to fight your own body for control every waking minute of every day. Her battle for control is assisted by her quest for knowledge about the conditions she lives with, and she shares much of this knowledge with her readers. This story is mostly about Wilensky, but also about Tourette's and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Wilensky describes responses which she has found respectful and helpful. For example, when she is in bed with Sean, her foot starts to move rhythmically, waking him. She explains how "instead of rolling away toward the wall, or sniping about it, he'd prop himself up on an elbow. 'Can you stop that?' he'd ask, not meanly, but directly and distinctly, and I'd give the matter legitimate thought. 'No. Well, maybe yes. Let me try.' He'd lie back down, placing his own warm foot over mine, pinning it gently to the mattress, and I'd concentrate hard on my foot, making it into a game, keeping it still for as long as I could, at least until Sean was soundly asleep."

Wilensky's mind can lurch out of her control as readily as her body, and compulsions can dominate. At one point she confessed with shame to her doctor that she had been taking her garbage down to the street every time it contained a single item. She carries out her own research with her partner and friends, checking how often the normal person empties the garbage. Not surprisingly, she finds a wide spectrum of behaviour that can be classed as normal. She decides that once every two days would be okay for her, and sets out to win this battle with obsessive compulsive disorder.

She does not avoid describing the pain and tragedy which are parts of her life. She has developed ways to control some of her obsessions and tics, but often at great personal cost in terms of stress. One strategy is to delay a tic during a social occasion, until she can rush to the privacy of a toilet, and there allow herself to tic in solitude and retain a public semblance of control and normality.

I eagerly read this book in one sitting. With the present efforts in our community to reduce the stigma that often accompanies difference, this book is a timely reminder that unusual behaviours and thoughts can be a part of any normal human being. In this case a human being who is an unusually creative and skilful author.

* Jan Wilson is a counsellor at Auckland University of Technology.