Written in the 1970s, Jennifer Traig reveals in her humorous memoir how she changed and overcame the mental and social challenges that life threw at her from childhood into adulthood. Life certainly threw her tough challenges in the forms of OCD (obsessive compulsion disorder), scrupulosity, and anorexia. . To say the least, she looked for the devil in every detail believing if she didn’t do something perfect someone would get hurt. Traig begins her book by recounting a memory where scrupulosity took over. Being a form of OCD, scrupulosity makes its “victims” have an obsession with religion, in Jenny’s case her obsession was Judaism. Although her mother is Christian and her father Jewish she found herself drawn to the rules of the Torah and its …show more content…
Anorexia applied to every little aspect in her life, which is where it differs from anorexics who are only worried about food. She found herself counting every calorie that came near her body and digging through encyclopedias for every element in her food. Her new coming skinniness didn’t come from her sister’s nickname of “Sister Infinity Fats” that even her parents joined in on, it merely formed on something Jenny considered a hobby. But her “hobby” became more than that after a while, thinking she would be “condemned to hell” for taking up so much room and felt guilty for eating. As Jenny neared college she desperately filled her schedule with every activity she could fit into her schedule from French club to drama club. With her schedule filled with activities and keeping up with her grades she had no time to live the “real high school experience” or as she tells it, that was her excuse. Her life had always been consumed by mental illnesses and obsessions that she had never made close friends or developed socially beside her classmates. Always feeling drawn towards France and its culture, Jenny and