Turtles All the Way Down
SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD AZA NEVER INTENDED to pursue the mystery of fugitive billionaire Russell Pickett, but there's a hundred-thousand-dollar reward at sake and her Best and Most Fearless Friend, Daisy, is eager to investigate. So together, they navigate the short distance and broad divides that separate them from Russell Pickett's son, Davis. Aza is trying. She is trying to be a good daughter, a good friend, a good student, and maybe even a good detective, while also living within the ever-tightening spiral of her own thoughts. In his long-awaited return, John Green, the acclaimed, award-winning author of Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars, shares Aza's story with shattering, unflinching clarity in this brilliant novel of love, resilience, and the power of lifelong friendship. This description comes from the publisher.
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What Hacker News says
- John Green, author of "The Fault in Our Stars", "Turtles All the Way Down", "The Anthropocene Reviewed", and other fine books is releasing a book called "Everything is Tuberculosis." If you are interested in the topic or just like to read well-written prose, I recommend joining me in pre-ordering it.
- 2022 was a year full of change for me and I am not looking for change but more of a complement to my life as it is currently.
In the process of reading:
Parable of a Sower’s Daughter by Octavia Butler
Read this year:
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St. John Mandel
Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
Turtles All the Way Down by John Green
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
- It's interesting how contamination OCD seems to be one of the most relatable forms of OCD to those who aren't sufferers. I'm glad articles like this are being written (there are a few other good ones out there), but it's unfortunate that this subset of the disorder is the only one that gets attention.
There are hundreds of variations of OCD -- basically, a variation for each thing you might have a fear over -- as fear and anxiety are at the root of the behavior associated with OCD. If you can fear it, you can probably create an obsession over it.
Much like the author, I also suffered a "nervous breakdown" in my 20s (and I'm still in my 20s, so this wasn't that long ago...) and tried to get myself hospitalized for the sake of my immediate family, as taking care of somebody in that state is emotionally exhausting. Fortunately, I had terrible insurance at the time that didn't allow for "non-critical" inpatient hospitalization, so I ended up going back home. This ended up being the right decision, because as mentioned in the article, exposure therapy is the best way to treat OCD. Avoidance behaviors actually _reinforce_ the damn thing, only making you worse.
I've thought about writing in more depth about my particular form of OCD, which is a difficult one to treat as my compulsions are entirely mental (compulsions are just reassurance seeking behavior, and you'd be surprised at the mental gymnastics one can try to jump through to reassure themselves about a situation). I consider myself very fortunate for having lived in a city with one of the best OCD clinics in the country, as I went through a few months of clinicians and psychiatrists not really understanding what was happening to me, before ending up at the right place.
Writing about OCD is incredibly exhausting, because as many other people have related in this thread, even reading about OCD tends to be triggering to sufferers. Writing about it is basically saying, "hey, I don't mind exposing myself to old and new anxieties over and over and over, with the potential to make my next few weeks miserable", so the people that do it are admirable. Probably healthier for it, too, given it's basically therapy.
I can't imagine what it's like to write a novel, like John Green did with Turtles All The Way Down, while also being a sufferer. I'm sure medication must help. ;)
