Purge: Rehab Diaries Book

This is a fantastic, realistic, no-sugar-coating exploration of a young woman diagnosed with EDNOS who spends three months in a residential inpatient program in Wisconsin. I've read a few memoirs like this one and have never felt connected to a writer the way I have to Nicole, probably because we're close to the same age and are both perfectionistic nutbags who used school and academic life as a way to check out of real life, WHAT UP. But I've also never read anything this detailed about what it's like to deal with EDNOS before, something I've struggled with for going on 20 years and it was heartwarming??? to see someone with not only a similar experience, but almost an entirely identical experience in treatment. I enjoyed that she tried to keep it in the voice of who she was while she was suffering, though slipping through tenses made things awkward at times, and at other times it felt almost self-indulgent, like she was more interested in bragging about certain aspects of who she is than about actually telling her story. I mean, the book starts out with an intro that talks about how no other eating disorder memoir is as good as hers because, she claims, (a) the writing in every single other book that exists is TERRIBLE but hers is the best written EVER (lol what?), and (b) the other books all have beginnings, middles, and ends, which is dumb! HERS is REAL because she didn't fully recover and so there is no hopeful ending!!! Which like...cool, that's your story, but other people DO recover fully and write books. Just because you personally didn't have closure when you wrote your book doesn't mean your story is more valid than the people who waited a bit to tell their own. Lastly, there were issues and inconsistencies in terms of the timing...nothing MAJOR but one laughable error was saying a fellow resident during her treatment in 2004 was texting in a vote for Kelly Clarkson on "American Idol" when we ALL KNOW that Kelly Clarkson won in 2002. So yeah, lots of things like that as well as about 70 billion typos (seriously, multiple words in a single sentence missing letters, extra spaces and periods scattered throughout, etc) just show that this seemed rushed (blame the editor for that, I guess, but for someone who goes on and on about what a perfectionist she is, you'd think this book would be a little less riddled with mistakes). Anyway, the negative aspects really aren't so distracting that they take away from the ultimate goal of the book, which is to show someone in the throes of recovery who doesn't magically get better thanks to Jesus or a savior doctor or a revelation. She did do a great job there, and so I ignored most of what I didn't love because ultimately, it's a fascinating look at the tricky bastard that is EDNOS.