What do You think about Devil In The Details: Scenes From An Obsessive Girlhood (2006)?
Devil in the Details is subtitled “Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood,” and rightly so. Traig suffered from scrupulosity, one of the Obsessive Compulsive Spectrum Disorders defined by a religious compulsion to do various things. She also has full-blown OCD, although in this book, it mainly manifests itself through her scrupulous behavior. Traig’s story is very interesting especially for those of us - like myself - who have OCD tendencies and/or spectrum disorders. I am always fascinated by tales of others’ mental interiors, and this is no exception.Traig treats her childhood with sensitivity, never falling into self-pity or hatred, and yet is brutally honest about the strange behaviors in which she participated. This book is humorous and well-written, and heartily recommended.
—Bethany
I’m not sure how I feel about this book, even still. I was intrigued when I first heard of it a few years ago, very interested to read a true life story about the struggles with OCD. And the fact that the author wrote with a clear view of her past and much humor made it all the more fascinating. If only the book had held up to that reputation.The writing is good, the story intriguing. But the author’s particular type of OCD is a religious compulsion and her heritage is Jewish, so the stories (and compulsions) are endless. Not to mention tedious. Had Traig chosen to tell her story without such depth of explication regarding Jewish ritual I would have enjoyed it much better. It’s one thing to inform a non-Jewish reader, but quite another to drone on ad nauseum. And entire chapters felt ad nauseum. The story would have been better served with less religious ritual detail and more social commentary, less education and more autobiography. What perplexes me still is that fact that I wasn’t truly enjoying the book but I couldn’t seem to set it aside. Somehow she made me care to know how things played out, even when I cared nothing about what she was telling me.Jennifer Traig is a good writer, and I would certainly read more of her work in the future. I did enjoy Devil in the Details. I was simply prepared to enjoy it more, and that never came. I can’t say I’ll recommend this book to anyone, but I’m happy to have one more title to pass along to an interested party.
—Jules Q
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?
—Mrs. McGregor
