I don’t profess to be the picture of mental health, but overall I’d say I don’t have a lot of experience with depression, anxiety, or any other mental disorders. Maybe it’s my WASPy suppressive tendencies? In our YA book club, the woman who suggested John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down described it as “the best depiction of anxiety” she’d ever seen, so I was intrigued. Turtles tells the story of Aza, a young woman dealing (poorly, but trying) with serious anxiety and OCD. Aza’s […]
“We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here…”
“The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely…” It’s hard to believe that The Fault in Our Stars came out five years ago! I didn’t even realize how much I missed John Green until I started Turtles All the Way Down. Maybe I never mentioned this before, but I love John Green. All of his books are fantastic, as you can see from my reviews of: The Fault in Our Stars, An Abundance […]
8: Turtles All the Way Down
It’s well-documented that I am neither a Rainbow Roweller nor a John Greener. I typically don’t find the earnest-hipster-loner-pop culture throwback to be all that appealing of a trope, which explains where some of my dislike originates. I had no intention of checking out Turtles All the Way Down, until I heard a Fresh Air interview that Terry Gross conducted with Green. And it was compelling. I had no idea he had OCD, and hearing him discuss the writing process and applying it to Aza […]
A Book about Teenagers (who Happen to Have Cancer)
The Fault in our Stars is not a book I ever expected to read. I knew so much about it peripherally. I knew the author John Green through his Mental Floss videos (not discovering the equally educational and more interesting Crash Course videos until later). I had known Shailene Woodley would play Hazel and was utterly confused as I saw her act next to her film brother and future film lover Ansel Elgort in Divergent. Out of sheer curiosity, I read the Wiki page for the movie […]