John Green’s, Turtles All the Way Down is a young adult novel that encapsulates the experience of a seventeen year old girl who struggles with severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). The story begins by the main character, Aza, sitting at her luch table thinking about how she has no real control over her own life. The first episode which explores Aza’s OCD occurs when her best friend Daisy is talking to her at the luch table, but Aza can not hear a word Daisy is saying. Daisy is a loud and outspoken character whose main love in life is to write fictional stories about Star Wars characters. She has an ethusiaticfollowing and plenty of people read her stories online. Aza is so focused on a very rare disease called Clostridium Difficile (diff C) that she is …show more content…
One of the main symptoms of a person with OCD is that they have persistant idea, thoughts, impulses, or imagies that are experienced as intrusive and inappropriate. Aza has persistant intrusive thoughts that dictate the way she lives. This is seen throughout the book when Aza drinks sanitizer because her thoughts convince her that she has a very rare digestive disease. These thoughts have to be time consuming and take up at least one hour of her day. Aza’s experiences her intrusive thoughts multiple times throughout the whole day so I would say that they are time consuming. More evidence for Aza having OCD is that she replaces the baind-aid on her hand multiple times a day even if she knows she just changed it. IF she even thinks for a second about how old the band-aid is her intrusive thoughts will kick in and she can not do anything excet listen to them and change the band-aid. Aza knows that many of her actions are ridiculous, but she simply can not do anything except listen to her thoughts. All of these symptoms and situations that Aza experiences throughout the book show a clear cut picture of a person with