Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood Book

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), and various old testament dietary restrictions that eventually led Jenny to occasional bouts with anorexia, which she called "flare-ups". To make things more complicated, Jenny has a cooler, better-dressed and less socially-retarded sister just one year younger than herself, straight from the pages of a Brett Easton Ellis novel (or more likely a movie made from a Brett Easton Ellis novel). Add to the mix a Jewish surgeon for a father and a Catholic mom in charge of making sure Jenny gets a proper Jewish education, all whose secular sensibilities make it difficult to understand Jenny's strange form of spirituality.

Having read three well-known and decidedly not comical accounts of anorexia (Wasted by Marya Hornbacher) and mental illness (Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel and Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kayson), Devil in the Details was obviously a more "fun" read, but not necessarily a lot more fun. Honestly, it's not that I didn't get Jennifer Traig's sense of humor, it just wasn't appealing to me. Oh, sure, I occasionally chuckled, but not enough chuckles to sustain me through 242 pages of repetition. Yes, who would have guessed an OCD writer would repeat things, or say, obsess about certain things? Just kidding. But honestly, this short memoir could have been a bit shorter, in my opinion. I probably didn't need to hear about the summer crafting frenzy she went through every summer more than once. And she probably didn't need to mention that her Mom was Catholic over and over and over again. In Traig's defense though, who can't appreciate a good Pentecostal joke from time to time?