Nowhere Near Normal

In the bestselling tradition of Augusten Burroughs a compassionate witty and completely candid memoir that chronicles growing up with obsessive-compulsive disorder.When all the neighborhood kids were playing outdoors seven-year-old Traci Foust was inside making sure the miniature Catholic saint statues on her windowsill always pointed north scratching out bald patches on her scalp and snapping her fingers after every utterance of the word God. As Traci grew older her OCD blossomed to include panic attacks and bizarre behaviors including a fear of the sun an obsession with contracting eradicated diseases and the idea that she could catch herself on fire just by thinking about it. While stints of therapy -- and lots of Nyquil -- sometimes helped nothing alleviated the fact that her single mother and mid-life crisis father had no idea how to deal with her. Traci Foust shares her wacky and compelling journey with brutal honesty from becoming a teenage runaway on the poetry slam beat in the hippie beach towns of Northern California to living at a family-owned nursing home in a room with a seventy-five- year-old WWII Vet who kept mistaking her for a prostitute. In this funny frenetic and wonderfully dark-humored account of her struggles with a variety of psychological disorders Traci ultimately concludes that there is nothing special about being “normal.”