Reviews for Purge: Rehab Diaries

The average rating for Purge: Rehab Diaries based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-10-25 00:00:00 Jhone Linas Wow, it makes me feel kind of weird that there are so many mediocre reviews of this book, when I got so completely sucked into it and read it in one morning. I mean, last night I played a show with my band at a converted biscuit factory, out in East Oakland, with two other bands and a fashion show. It was kind of emotionally draining because there was drama and THEN there was tons of traffic on route 80 so I didn't get home til like three AM, but the dog didn't care, she started flipping out somewhere between seven and eight just like she always does. So I was exhausted and resigned to not getting enough sleep, so maybe I was in a fragile place and an eating disorder memoir was exactly what I needed. And look: I have talked shit about MFA program writers before. (Probably unnecessarily.) And Nicole Johns is an MFA writer, so I feel like I should be talking shit! But instead of using her MFA skills to write in [fake(?)-:] bland, measured sentences, and to reveal the things that are going on emotionally under the surface via careful revelation of detail, she just uses her skills to do stuff very well. She opens with a preface that's basically like 'here are all the pandering, or pat, or self-serving, or otherwise fucked up things you can do to make an eating disorder memoir horrible, and this is how I'm going to do my best to avoid them.' And then, just like, in the structuring and the way she orders her scenes, and her characters (who aren't particulaly fleshed out, which is great because they don't need to be), everything is just spot on. The scene she chooses to end on, and the way she ends it, is just like, oh my god. Whoa. She also just does a good job of talking about how hard it is to get well (or well enough), instead of focusing on all the glamorous throwing up, and desperation, and obsessive behaviors. Like, those things are there, they're just not the focus. The focus is on the attempt to rehabilitate, and how hard that is. Oh and also it is very funny sometimes! Y'know, bleak gallows humor or whatever. I don't know. I just liked this book a lot.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-12-22 00:00:00 Kenneth Willman 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.