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57th out of 856 books
—
1,224 voters
Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood
DEVIL IN THE DETAILS announces Jennifer Traig as one of the most hilarious writers to emerge in recent years and one of the strangest! Recalling the agony of growing up obsessive compulsive and a religious fanatic, Traig fearlessly confesses the most peculiar behavior like tirelessly scrubbing her hands for a full half hour before dinner, feeding her stuffed animals before...more
Paperback, 242 pages
Published
February 9th 2006
by Back Bay Books
(first published January 1st 2004)
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I’m not sure how I feel about this book, even still. I was intrigued when I first heard of it a few years ago, very interested to read a true life story about the struggles with OCD. And the fact that the author wrote with a clear view of her past and much humor made it all the more fascinating. If only the book had held up to that reputation.
The writing is good, the story intriguing. But the author’s particular type of OCD is a religious compulsion and her heritage is Jewish, so the stories (an...more
The writing is good, the story intriguing. But the author’s particular type of OCD is a religious compulsion and her heritage is Jewish, so the stories (an...more
This book was awesome. It's a memoir by Traig on her childhood with obsessive compulsive disorder. This childhood took place in 1980s California, before obsessive compulsive disorder was known and recognized as a disorder. Although some of Traig's experiences are humorous to those of us reading the story, I can't imagine how difficult this disorder was for her. She is born to a Catholic mother and Jewish father, and converts to Judaism. The strict rules for living as set out in the Torah send he...more
Aug 25, 2007
Rachael
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
my family but they wouldn't read it
Shelves:
comedy
It was slightly jarring to see so much of myself in the main character. I mean I don't have OCD or anything but I have a sympathy with her need to do those things. I don't have the compulsion but I do think about every shadow that passes my path as I'm driving and I do obsess about Salmonilla (which I still contend is totally reasonable to obsess over) and I do try to avoid stepping on tiles that are next to eachother in favor of those that are diagonal. I did make Delta stop a plane and turn it...more
It's...okay. Once you get past how weird little Jenny was, praying six hours a day with a kleenex on her head and making imaginary cosmetics from her own spit, you kind of get over it.
Basically, this is Jenny's "comic" memoir of how it was going through high school with Scrupulosity, a form of OCD that centers around religious obsession. This fun mental illness cocktail included everything from sterilizing things that were "impure" to overzealously separating everything (not just dairy and meat...more
Basically, this is Jenny's "comic" memoir of how it was going through high school with Scrupulosity, a form of OCD that centers around religious obsession. This fun mental illness cocktail included everything from sterilizing things that were "impure" to overzealously separating everything (not just dairy and meat...more
Jennifer Traig's childhood obsessive-compulsive religiosity makes for an entertaining read, but it's clear from the start that she doesn't think about (or present) it in a linear way.
About 2/3 of the way in, I started wondering, "Didn't she already mention this?" Closer to the end, I found myself wishing that she had employed a more ruthless editor, too -- because many of the details she chose to include about her high school years seemed not only redundant, but rather dull.
Still, I have a hank...more
About 2/3 of the way in, I started wondering, "Didn't she already mention this?" Closer to the end, I found myself wishing that she had employed a more ruthless editor, too -- because many of the details she chose to include about her high school years seemed not only redundant, but rather dull.
Still, I have a hank...more
Devil in the Details is subtitled “Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood,” and rightly so. Traig suffered from scrupulosity, one of the Obsessive Compulsive Spectrum Disorders defined by a religious compulsion to do various things. She also has full-blown OCD, although in this book, it mainly manifests itself through her scrupulous behavior. Traig’s story is very interesting especially for those of us - like myself - who have OCD tendencies and/or spectrum disorders. I am always fascinated by tales...more
For those who don’t know me well enough, I suffer from mild obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) (though I suppose mild is a relative term), which is why I picked up this book. This memoir describes Traig’s life growing up with a severe form of OCD called Scrupulosity where fanatic religious observance intersects with typical OCD fanatic observance of routine, resulting in (for Traig) situations like one instance where Traig put literally everything she owned in the washer on the remotest chance...more
Jun 27, 2008
Greta
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
everyone, because we are all ocd if we're being totally honest
Recommended to Greta by:
some dude with a card/review on the "staff recommends" bookshelf
Shelves:
memoir
i read this book essentially in one sitting: parked on the beach in a perfectly charming end-of-vacation/i'm-unemployed-and-have-no-idea-what-i'm-doing-with-my-life funk. at first, i had no patience for what seemed the usual sob-story of the trials of the adolescent middle-class white American female-- perfectionism and eating disorders and temper-tamtrums rolled into a neat clinical acronym, a protagnist whom we're supposed to pity and shake our heads over, grateful we are not she. but then i d...more
I really enjoyed this. It was similar to "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" in some ways, but much better -- tighter and crisper, funnier. I loved how she took what could have been a depressing, morbid topic and made it enjoyable to read about (at least for me, Marg). Despite, or perhaps because of, the humorous tone throughout, I found a rare serious moment where she described some of the painful social aspects of the disorder extremely poignant and moving. I also think that you don't...more
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Oct 26, 2007
Oi Yin
rated it
3 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Sufferers of OCD, Survivors of OCD, Those who have to live with people with OCD
Shelves:
memoirs
The book took off at a sprint but lost steam about three quarters of the way through. Perhaps a testiment that those who suffer more than the "normal, average" person builds up rather snarky, sarcastic approaches to life and people in it, whereas when one becomes another clone of the population, these quirks melt away into dullness. Not to say that author did not have a wonder way of making light of her condition, which is no laughing matter at all. It's also reassuring to see that with enough t...more
The illness is serious but oh, this book is funny! In short vignettes, the author recounts her girlhood in a family of mixed and open religious heritage and practice against a backdrop of her own emergent anorexia and obsessive-compulsive disorder that results in Jewish Scrupulosity. What could be a book full of woe and self-pity is instead a hilarious, clever, self-aware, lively tale of a girl struggling to control something about her free-form life. With such clever, humorous writing, it was e...more
Humor, I've been told, is something of a cure-all for emotional and mental traumas. Like a homemade tonic sold at a sideshow, people claim it can "cure whatever ails you," whether what ails you is male pattern baldness, an especially persistent boil, or something far more serious. It is true that making light of the depressing, the embarrassing, and the far too real to deal with can liberate a person from their problems. Cracking wise about your OCD, for example, can deflate it, and take its pow...more
This book was really funny!! It was almost like listening to a stand-up comic talk about their life. Sometimes i wasn't sure how much was real and how much was exaggerated just a touch.
I found out that i wasn't the only one with ocd (mine unrecognized at the time) that didn't want to get their driver's liscense for the same reasons she outlines. And then after i did get it (at 18) to worry about how many people i hit on my way home...even tho there were never any bodies flung over my engine.
Some...more
I found out that i wasn't the only one with ocd (mine unrecognized at the time) that didn't want to get their driver's liscense for the same reasons she outlines. And then after i did get it (at 18) to worry about how many people i hit on my way home...even tho there were never any bodies flung over my engine.
Some...more
Jun 21, 2009
Susie
rated it
3 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
people who are really into Judaism and/or into reading memoirs by people with screwed up lives
Shelves:
i-commented
This is one of those books like "Running with Scissors" which a lot of people label as humor because it's written in an offbeat/sarcastic/clever way, but is actually tragic and maybe even frustrating to read about. The author does a very thorough job of describing how her particular brand of OCD (scruples!) mixed with an obsession with Judaism, anorexia and cleanliness created a broken-record-like pattern of thought that ostracized her from any hope for a normal childhood and also ostracized her...more
We all have a little OCD in us, right? or is that just me? Scrupulosity, though? Wow.
"Having an obsessive-compulsive impulse is like standing on red-hot colas. Every cell in your body is screaming for you to jump off. To keep standing there is so hard. It's just so hard. Leaning over the sink that night, I suddenly understood that that's what I had to do. I had to stand on the coals and take a tiny step forward. I had to feel the impulse and move past it. I got it, all of a sudden, just like th...more
"Having an obsessive-compulsive impulse is like standing on red-hot colas. Every cell in your body is screaming for you to jump off. To keep standing there is so hard. It's just so hard. Leaning over the sink that night, I suddenly understood that that's what I had to do. I had to stand on the coals and take a tiny step forward. I had to feel the impulse and move past it. I got it, all of a sudden, just like th...more
I did not enjoy this book AT ALL; I felt compelled to finish it just so I could say I did.
When I started "Devil in the Details," it was with the expectation that it would be about Jennifer Traig's struggle with OCD, maybe with a funny lean to it since she is known in the McSweeney's circuit. I was NOT expecting to learn alllll about Jewish law. Traig's OCD tendencies lean toward scrupulosity (which, for her, involves keeping Jewish laws, including some very obscure ones), which was new to me, so...more
When I started "Devil in the Details," it was with the expectation that it would be about Jennifer Traig's struggle with OCD, maybe with a funny lean to it since she is known in the McSweeney's circuit. I was NOT expecting to learn alllll about Jewish law. Traig's OCD tendencies lean toward scrupulosity (which, for her, involves keeping Jewish laws, including some very obscure ones), which was new to me, so...more
I forgot I even had purchased this book, and when I pulled it off my shelf and reread the back, I got immediately interested again. Devil in the Details is a memoir that tells the story of Traig, who not only has OCD/bouts of anorexia but also has scrupulosity (a form of OCD where the compulsions are all religion based). I had much higher hopes for this book, which is maybe why I didn't like it as much as I thought I was going to. Like a lot of people, she deals with all her problems with humor,...more
I can practically gaurantee you've never read anything like this before. It was a little unnerving to hear the author talk about all these super crazy things her OCD made her do, while sounding perfectly well-adjusted describing it. I kept mentally double-checking that the Jennifer Traig writing the book was no longer the out-of-control crazy the book is about. Even after finishing the book, I'm only mostly sure that she's not still out there somewhere, praying in the middle of a business meetin...more
I enjoyed this book on the whole. Traig does a great job of presenting her eccentric adolescence in a humorous way. The book was enjoyable, and I even related to some of Traig's OCD behaviors (to a lesser extent, of course).
The only problem I have with this memoir is the way the author consistently evades any real explanation of her recovery. In a novel, one expects a conclusion. In a memoir, of course, a conclusion is rarely as satisfying, but, in my opinion, Traig erred on the side of humor ra...more
The only problem I have with this memoir is the way the author consistently evades any real explanation of her recovery. In a novel, one expects a conclusion. In a memoir, of course, a conclusion is rarely as satisfying, but, in my opinion, Traig erred on the side of humor ra...more
I heard an interview with the author on NPR years ago when I was interested in the intersection between eating disorders and religion. I only read about 20 pages of this because I just wasn't interested or captivated by the author's voice.
I wanted to like this. I read a lot of memoirs, and haven't read many on living with OCD. When I began reading, I was blindsided by the religious content. OK, fine; interesting point of view: being religious as a compulsion. Unfortunately, Traig doesn't really delve into this besides a brief aside about driving her rabbi crazy with questions about the bits and pieces of religious law. The mix of religion in her family ("interfaith", as she calls it) are chronicled ad nauseum, and the really inte...more
I was enjoying this book, the author is wickedly intelligent and funny. I stopped enjoying it so much when she recalls her junior year in high school and tells us how she still won't sleep in a bed that, 20 years ago, had a school binder on it that she considered contaminated by brief contact with a human skull in anatomy class. I finally understood what she had been trying to say all along, that despite her intelligence and stunning sense of humor, she is suffering from a mental illness and con...more
Funny and heartbreaking. Captivating tale of the internal torture of the OCD teen and the lengths the disease will take them to. In going through her family dynamics, Jennifer Traig offers us a glimpse of the helplessness of parenting when there is no solution evident. All parents face this sooner or later, normally with a "stage". When it's with a true disorder, the internal torment and family dynamic impact can be devastating.
Few of us have not felt "obsessed" about some small ritual in life -...more
Few of us have not felt "obsessed" about some small ritual in life -...more
I enjoyed this. Feeling better about my own OCD issues knowing they've never gotten this bad. Found much humour in reading this especially "musical chairs" and "SAT prep questions for OCD ". So in the ind I found comfort in listening to someone struggle and overcome and relief that I've never had a handwashing issue or many of the numerous tics that come with this. I give it three stars only because I found a few parts a bit tedious and also often got confused by her narration. At times it sound...more
What can I say? I enjoy reading about people more dysfunctional than me.
HYSTERICAL. Traig tells her story with wit and snark.
Jennifer Traig is a recovering OCDer who happens to be half-jewish as well. She used her jewish roots to feed her OCD when she was a teenager and the stories she tells will have you crying from laughing so hard. Her family chose to acknowledge her OCD behavior with humor and not a lot of coddling. I'm sure in reality, separate from the stories she shares in this memoir, her family was confused and irritated. Traig relays her sickness and stru...more
Jennifer Traig is a recovering OCDer who happens to be half-jewish as well. She used her jewish roots to feed her OCD when she was a teenager and the stories she tells will have you crying from laughing so hard. Her family chose to acknowledge her OCD behavior with humor and not a lot of coddling. I'm sure in reality, separate from the stories she shares in this memoir, her family was confused and irritated. Traig relays her sickness and stru...more
Devil in the Details by Jennifer Traig
This was a memoir about a girl who grew up with OCD before they really knew what it was. Or should I say, before they knew how to medicate those afflicted. This was not my favorite book, but not because it was not well written... this girl had some major issues that I really do not relate to. I believe we all have OCD moments – but she was way out there. As a child her parents were not very well informed, much like many parents back then. The major wave of p...more
This was a memoir about a girl who grew up with OCD before they really knew what it was. Or should I say, before they knew how to medicate those afflicted. This was not my favorite book, but not because it was not well written... this girl had some major issues that I really do not relate to. I believe we all have OCD moments – but she was way out there. As a child her parents were not very well informed, much like many parents back then. The major wave of p...more
Well I was really disappointed in this book. It started out great. It was funny and very descriptive about her OCD.
But by the 4th chapter, it started lacking.
I felt it was more of a lesson Jewish law than OCD. Nothing against Judaism, but as a non-jew I didn't understand 1/2 the terminology used in this book. I kinda got the feeling that when she wrote it she expected all the people reading would be Jewish.
Also - It skipped around a lot. One minute she was a child then a teen , then back to bein...more
But by the 4th chapter, it started lacking.
I felt it was more of a lesson Jewish law than OCD. Nothing against Judaism, but as a non-jew I didn't understand 1/2 the terminology used in this book. I kinda got the feeling that when she wrote it she expected all the people reading would be Jewish.
Also - It skipped around a lot. One minute she was a child then a teen , then back to bein...more
"Scenes" from an Obsessive Girlhood is right - I feel like I have whiplash from all the chronological jumping around Traig did in this book. Big parts of this book felt like word problems to me; in one chapter she's plagued by recurring scrupulosity and anorexia, but in the very next chapter she's broken a pair of glasses that she's had since 2 years after her mental health issues first cropped up, which, incidentally, was 3 months before she was first dragged to a nutritionist for turning orang...more
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“Every time a girl refuses to eat, she one-ups Eve.”
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14 people liked it
“There's a fine line between piety and wack-ass obsession, and people have been landing on the wrong side for thousands of years.”
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3 people liked it
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Les
Dec 09, 2007 09:37am
May 02, 2008 10:35pm