Becoming Anna: The Autobiography of a Sixteen-Year-Old Book

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

I felt very conflicted about this book and this review will definitely reflect that.

For the first 70 pages or so I was overwhelmed with empathy for Anna (or Tiffany - as she was called at that time). Anna grows up in a very emotionally and psychologically abusive family. Her father is an alcoholic who, when he is not ignoring Anna, beats her sporadically for various arbitrary transgressions. Her mother is a diabetic who also neglects Anna (when she is not screaming at her and trying to hit her) and leaves her in the care of her overbearing, tyrannical grandmother much of the time. The grandmother is - ironically - a child psychologist who sadistically enjoys "disciplining" Anna in the forms of verbal abuse and hitting Anna with metal knitting needles. The grandmother is a strict adherent to behavioral psychology and acts accordingly. While Anna is unjustly punished almost every day, her younger brother is treated good and allowed to do what he wants. Anna wants to be accepted, hugged, and loved by her family and she acts out by having fake fainting spells and having other behavioral problems. This, of course, results in the forced visit to a psychologist who suggests that Anna be forced to stay in a private clinic. This begins the pattern of Anna spending most of her time in mental institutions (private and public) and being labeled as a troubled child. No one believes what she has to say because her parents and grandmother lie about her and the psychologists and counselors that talk to her have the same opinion.

My heart broke for Anna while reading this part of the book. The way she describes her abuse and her feelings of being trapped in her family resonated with me on a personal level and affected me very much on an emotional level. The following quotes from the book really resonated with me:
Constantly watched, judged, picked at, accused, and punished, I cannot remember a time in my life when I felt good about myself. The one lesson drilled mercilessly into my head from every angle for the first fifteen years of my life was that I was not "good enough" and never would be.
It was a living hell, worse than the way prisoners are treated, and instead of wardens, it was my own flesh and blood treating me this way.
So, while reading the first part of this book, I was definitely thinking, "This will be at least a four star book."

Then as my reading progressed, I started feeling less empathy for Anna and more concern that the way she was viewing the world wasn't exactly accurate. Anna exhibited a lot of black and white thinking with no room for gray areas at all (for example, she fervently believes that all adults are bad and condescending, while all kids good, honest, and only act out because adults treat them horribly). Now while I do believe that Anna went trough a lot of abuse in her family home (which contributed to her emotional instability - no doubt about that) her impulsive/destructive behavior IS cause for concern, and it is not surprising to me that she is taken to a psychologist eventually.

The author doesn't concretely share her diagnosis (and mocks the psychological tests that she was made to take) but if I had to guess, I would say that it is very probable that she was diagnosed with having Borderline Personality Disorder. She exhibits many of the signs:
* she is impulsive (bashing her head against a wall, hitting herself on the jaw until a bruise is formed)
* suicidal behavior (swallowing pills, slashing her arms and bleeding)
* feeling misunderstood, hated, hopeless, alone (she is constantly feeling like a victim and that everyone is against her even when she has people trying to help her. She lies and says she is seeing things she is really not and she fakes seizures. She refuses to eat for days and feels paranoid constantly, especially of the staff and doctors of the mental health facilities she resides in).

I could go on and on because there are countless examples of Anna behaving destructively and while people ARE trying to help her, she doesn't believe them and acts antagonistically towards them. I believe that much of her behavior is justified and is exacerbated by the fact that she comes from such an abusive background but at some point I start to wonder whether her stay in mental institutions would have been shorter and less traumatic is she would've attempted to follow some of the rules of those places (who have them for a reason - not because they are mean but because they are trying to protect the patients from hurting themselves and others). I think that although Anna IS victim of child abuse, it is also possible that she also has a personality disorder, which would explain her constant erratic and impulsive behavior.

While reading the second part of this memoir, I wanted to give this book 2 stars since the narrator is, in my opinion, unreliable. Also, this book was written when she was 16 years old and it reads like an angsty self-centered teenage melodrama. Then, I read the epilogue (which was written several years later when Anna is a bit older) and I found myself agreeing with several things:
It is a sad fact of life that not everyone physically capable of bearing a child is capable of caring for it, or even wants to. What recourse do these unlucky children have? They are pretty much screwed for the next eighteen years, and by then they have been damaged in ways that screw up the rest of their lives, too. Humans learn by example. How can a person be expected to function normally and healthily if they have never seen how it is done?
As long as children have no rights or power of their own, then intentionally or not, there will always be those who will exploit them.

Because I had such a love/hate relationship with this book, I will rate it as 2.5 stars out of 5, which I consider to be a neutral, average rating. I liked it for the most part and most readers will like this memoir as well, but it does have a lot of flaws and does have an unreliable narrator and was written when the author was only 16, thus having that point of view that centers primarily on itself without regard for a wider perspective.