Passing for normal: Tourette's, OCD and growing up crazy

A gripping memoir of a young girl’s struggle with Tourette’s syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It began the summer Amy was eight years old. A pretty, high-achieving young girl, she watched in horror as her body began to twitch and jerk. Soon these explosive tics were joined by baffling rituals that dominated her life. Amy’s fears and compulsions ranged from terror of odd numbers, to love of multiples of six; from denying herself water, to stockpiling rotting food, from obsessively needing to touch wood, to balancing on the edge of subway platforms. Constantly trying to “pass for normal”, her increasingly bizarre behaviour isolated her from friends and drove her family to distraction. Everyday events become torture. Unable to function normally in the outside world, Amy become a virtual recluse. By turns tragic and comic, Passing for Normal is compelling memoir of a young woman’s struggle to come terms with a life plagued with irrational behaviour, and how she survived a childhood devastated by one of the most misunderstood medical conditions. “Affecting, gripping-no matter what form the reader’s own struggles for acceptance may have taken, there’s a heartbreaking poignancy in Wilensky’s story” ELLE