42
Popular Culture Review
dysfunction exists, with authors publicly exposing disorders that they had kept
hidden for so long. For the purposes of this article, two memoirs of dysfunction
will be examined, emphasizing the authors’ textual confrontation with the darker
side of their psyches: Passing for Normal: A Memoir of Compulsion by Amy S.
Wilensky and Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya
Hornbacher. These works have been chosen because of the common prevalence
of OCD and eating disorders in American culture, and the new light Wilensky
sheds on a minimally understood disorder: Tourette’s.
In Passing for Normal (1999), Wilensky, a graduate of Vassar College
and Columbia University’s M.F.A. writing program, recounts her long, torturous
battle with Tourette’s syndrome and OCD. Tourette’s is defined as a chronic,
usually lifelong, neurobiologically-based medical condition characterized by
involuntary movements or motor tics, and involuntary sounds, or vocal tics. The
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) estimates that at least 200,000
Americans have full-blown Tourette’s. The NIMH also estimates that at least 50
percent of those with Tourette’s have OCD, which is characterized by an
irrepressible need for symmetry and order, hoarding and saving, repetitive
rituals, nonsensical doubts, and superstitious fears (7-8). Wilensky developed
her first tic at age 8—a head jerk she at first labeled a “fascinating quirk”—but
soon that tic became a constant source of headaches and a perpetual stiff neck
(40-43). Slowly, a long litany of tics developed following the initial onset,
including: thrusting her chin forward, shifting her lower jaw to either side or
back and forth, rolling her eyes to the outer corners, clicking her molars and
front teeth in patterns, rotating her shoulder blades, grinding her teeth, tapping
her thumbs against each forefinger, clearing her throat, snapping her jaw until it
cracked, inhaling air through her nose in furtive sniffs, making clucking sounds
in the back of her throat, humming; making high-pitched squeaks, repeating
words and phrases said to her, asking rhetorical questions, picking at her face,
and biting her cuticles fiercely until her fingers bled (69).
Throughout her years of schooling, Wilensky became adept at
disguising her tics, so much so that her fellow students simply considered her
eccentric rather than “crazy.” She noted, “Sometimes 1 felt as if I were creating a
false bold self around my tics, like armor, a shell so watertight and impenetrable
that my real self, trapped inside, rattled against the walls in faintest protest like
seeds in a long-dried gourd” (67). In high school, Wilensky wasn’t able to swill
vodka and make out like the other students because her tics and rituals
consumed all of her mental and physical energy. And when in her junior year
she was bedridden with mononucleosis, she became a full-fledged
hypochondriac (85-86).
Although she was able to fool many of her school friends, Wilensky
was unable to hide the tics from her Massachusetts family. Her mother “tiptoed”
around the problem, avoiding talking directly about the matter. Her father felt
shame over her condition and simply was unable to accept the reality of the
disorder. Wilensky writes: