Devil in the Details: Scenes From an Obsessive Girlhood
Little Jenny Traig, the heroine and author of Devil in the Details, has a tough life. She’s the oldest of two daughters, the first product of an interfaith marriage between her Jewish father and her Catholic mother, and she lives in a small northern California town where Jews are few and far between. Jenny feels like an outsider, not only in her hometown, but even in her own home; her father’s secular Judaism and her mother’s devout Catholicism leaves little room for her own Jewish religiosity, and she finds herself increasingly at odds with her own family. There is also one other teeny, tiny little problem: Jenny has a bit of a mental illness. Well, actually, she has a heaping helping of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and her frank but unabashedly humorous memoir of her struggle with the disorder is at turns hilarious and touching.
Traig writes about her disorder from its first, innocent-seeming signs through its remissions and recurrences over the course of her childhood until, in her teenage years, the symptoms become so severe - eating disorders, self-destructive compulsions, frightening obsessions - that she and her family finally seek professional help. It’s not giving too much away to say that the book has a happy ending, as Traig learns to control her symptoms and turn her compulsions in a positive direction.
It all sounds a little bleak (except for the part about the happy ending), but Traig’s book is anything but depressing. She notes that one endearing trait shared by many OCD sufferers is that they know that the things they do seem crazy. They are, however, powerless to stop doing them. Traig is able to step outside herself and see the humor in her behavior, and she is able write with sharp wit about her obsessive hand-washing, hypochondria and culinary peculiarities.
Traig’s OCD takes a particular form, something she calls “scrupulosity” (it sounds real, but she might be making it up), in which she decides to cling to the complex laws that dictate behavior in observant Judaism. It’s a convenient solution; it allows her to obsess over her stressful family life while providing her with an abundance of ammunition for her compulsive urges. She dives into kashrut, the Jewish food laws which prohibits such practices as eating pork and mixing milk and meat, to the extent that she worries about the pork fumes that she imagines have saturated the house. She prays compulsively, but, not having had much of a Jewish education, she doesn’t know any of the real prayers - so she just makes up her own.
The whole thing reaches a riotous climax when Traig nears the age of 13 and begins to prepare for her bat mitzvah. “In a rational society, thirteen-year-olds would be sequestered until they were properly socialized and good-looking enough to circulate among the general public,” she writes. “But in Judaism, we declare you an adult, buy you a suit, then hire a photographer and a DJ to mark the occasion.” All that’s bad enough, but Traig is horrified to discover that since her mother is not Jewish, neither, technically, is she. In order to have a bat mitzvah, she must first go through a conversion process. This is both good and bad: good because it allows her to learn even more about religious laws, and bad because it will require immersion in a ritual bath, an ordeal during which she will be “evaluated while bobbing around naked, like a clumsy Olympic synchronized swimmer who’s lost both her suit and the rest of her team.”
Although Traig’s book is just about as much fun as a book about childhood mental illness could be, there are a couple of things about it that are less than perfect. The first is not really a shortcoming of the book, but rather one of its strengths that, unfortunately, could constrict its potential audience. Traig riffs so well and so meticulously on the multitudinous laws and restrictions of Judaism that few ritualistic stones are left unturned, but I have to wonder how funny it will be for those readers for whom the intricacies of Jewishness are not common knowledge. Traig does an admirable job of putting everything into context, but I’m afraid that those who don’t know a mikvah from a mitzvah or kashrut from a rutabaga might find the book only about 80 percent as funny as those who are in on every joke.
My second little quibble with Devil in the Details is the slight whiff of unoriginality about it. That’s not to say that Traig has plagiarized anything; it’s just that she’s not the first young humorist to write about a childhood plagued by OCD. David Sedaris has written about his own obsessive-compulsive boyhood in many of his essays, and he’s done it in much the same way that Traig has done here. Sedaris, too, was an outsider who used his obsessions for both good and evil, much to the consternation of his whacky family. Traig’s family looks a lot like Sedaris’, with sarcastic parents and a slightly deranged sibling caricatured for laughs, although Traig’s family seems a lot nicer and much less dysfunctional than Sedaris’s.
What prevents Traig’s book from being a tired retread of Sedaris’s work is simply that it is too good to be that; Traig is every bit Sedaris’s equal when it comes to shoot-from-the-hip humor, and she often outdoes him when she’s at her best. Yes, this book has been done before, but it hasn’t been done better.
Copyright 2005 Ad Media Inc.