I was particularly interested in the distinction between healthy and unhealthy obsessions and their differing effects on the author’s life and health.

Marianne Eloise has a lighthearted, easily readable tone that is present all throughout the book and works really well when talking about mental health and neurodivergence. I recognised a lot of myself in these essays - a deep commitment to vegetarianism, a grocery list of sensory issues, a brain that tells you you are responsible for everything around you and should you stop doing or not doing things Bad Things Will Happen. As a Los Angeles native, it was enlightening to see how Marianne wrote about my home with fresh eyes and made me appreciate it and question it in new ways.You can’t help but feel this style is influenced by the “wellness” idiom that has percolated through lifestyle journalism in the past decade or so. This memoir was ultimately less a memoir of her life and more a memoir of her brain and thought patterns. I would definitely recommend this as an insight into a neurodivergent mind and as a series of interesting essays in their own right. I've been a fan (if that's the right word) of Marianne Eloise for a while - I feel like she was one of the first women my.

Whilst reading the first chapter I struggled to keep the tears from falling because I just felt so intensely seen and validated, and I must have highlighted the vast majority of every single page because the author kept hitting the nail right on its head perfectly over and over again.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Marianne Eloise, a freelance journalist, is a practitioner of this form by trade, and she has stuck to its features in her move from journalism to essayism. most of it just didn’t really feel relevant to me, and i didn’t really take anything away from it - maybe it’s my fault for expecting something else from this, but I was left a bit disappointed.