A L S O +T O D A Y

A New Kind of Party Animal
Reviewed by Dante Ramos
An anecdote-rich examination of the mismatch between the existing political landscape and the aspirations of today's politically minded young adults

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Rethinking Jonestown
By Scott McLemee
(06/17/98)

Beach reading 1998
By Dwight Garner
(06/15/98)

Punch drunk
By Vivian Gornick
(05/27/98)

Cormac McCarthy: Shakespeare of the American West
By Vince Passaro
(05/20/98)

Communism on your coffee table!
By Barbara Ehrenreich
(04/30/98)

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________my syndrome, myself

A recent crop of memoirs chronicles our obsession with illness, from Tourette's syndrome to anorexia to obsessive-compulsive disorder.

BY LAURA MILLER | "I should like to die of consumption," Lord Byron once, insensitively, told a tubercular friend. "Because the ladies would all say, 'Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying.'" Among all diseases, TB was the Romantics' darling; Keats died of it, and its preferred victim was imagined to be (in the words of Susan Sontag) "a hectic, restless creature of passionate extremes, someone too sensitive to bear the horrors of the vulgar, everyday world" -- a poet, an artist, that is. Someone "interesting."

Antibiotics made short work of this particular manifestation of artistic temperament, but illness -- the right one, at least -- is a more popular way than ever of making oneself interesting. The contemporary equivalent of the feverish, ethereal, consumptive Romantic poet, swooning on his deathbed, quill in hand, puffy shirt falling from one shoulder, is Elizabeth Wurtzel's glum-but-glamorous, waiflike visage on the cover of 1994's "Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America." Extravagant, soulful (and pretty) suffering has proven a reliable way to sell lots of books since back in Byron's day, but in the 19th century, the truly fashionable diseases were few. Today, it helps if you're photogenic, like Wurtzel, but almost any old affliction can provide the occasion for a searching work of autobiography and/or cultural history, from asthma (Louise Desalvo's "Breathless") to stuttering (Marty Jezer's "Stuttering, a Life Bound Up in Words"). It used to be that the story of your life was a matter of what you did, where you went, who you knew. Now, it's what your diagnosis is.

In her decidedly nonautobiographical essay "Illness as Metaphor" (1978), Susan Sontag claimed that "insanity is the current vehicle of our secular myth of self-transcendence." That was more true in the '70s, during the heyday of the idea that schizophrenia, like LSD, offered a mind-expanding journey into the unconscious. (And it was easier to believe that when the streets weren't full of deinstitutionalized travelers who never returned from their Magical Mystery Tours.) Today, it's near-madness that fascinates us, probably because most of us have visited that territory once or twice, however briefly; we can identify. To be stricken with depression, or manic-depression, or anorexia, or the urge to self-mutilate, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, or any of a host of other odd psychophysiological calamities, is to be handed the ideal subject matter for a modern memoir: an extreme version of a common complaint.

Nevertheless, subject matter is only half the battle -- there's still the problem of execution. This hurdle turns out to be too high for Lowell Handler, author of "Twitch and Shout: A Touretter's Tale." After being written about by Oliver Sacks (the Chaucer of neurological dysfunction) and serving as the narrator for a 1995 documentary about Tourette's syndrome, Handler, a photojournalist, decided to commit his life story to paper. (Perhaps he was also encouraged by his brother Evan's successful autobiographical one-man show about battling leukemia, "Time on Fire.")

Although Tourette's -- which is characterized by exaggerated tics, involuntary jerking movements, grunting sounds and sometimes by profane verbal outbursts -- is a strange, dramatic condition, Handler's account of having it is inert. "Twitch and Shout" meanders woodenly through the predictable stages of the syndrome memoir -- the first surfacings of Handler's illness during his childhood, the confused teenage years spent trying in vain to fit in, going to the wrong doctors, finally finding the right doctor, researching the condition, evaluating the treatments, joining a support group, bridling at the stigma attached to the illness and, ultimately, arriving at Lessons Learned as a result of it all. While a book about a little-understood condition like Tourette's syndrome serves the laudable purpose of increasing understanding and tolerance, in this case that's all it does. No amount of virtuous intent can make it a pleasure to read a sentence as wooden as the following: "Oliver is a scientist and a writer, and I am a photographer, but I also had an agenda of exploration and discovery and sought answers to my basic human questions about this disorder such as why must I engage in actions I do not want to do."

When your affliction is less exotic, you've really got to come up with a more appealing approach. Emily Colas, author of "Just Checking: Scenes from the Life of an Obsessive-Compulsive," opts for a style somewhere between stand-up comedy and performance art monologue, her story broken into evocative, sketchlike vignettes with titles like "If You Know Your Party's Extension, Press 1 ..." and "The Living Hell of Neatness." Colas' cool, droll tone makes a perfect counterpart to the escalating absurdity of her disorder, the "insanity lite" of a woman who freely partook of recreational drugs yet insisted that her husband sample every restaurant meal she was served so that he could screen it for poison and broken hypodermic needles. Her dread of contamination (particularly from blood) becomes so severe she can't walk down a sidewalk without triple-checking the soles of her shoes, refuses to let anyone into her house (they might be concealing a cut finger) and eventually decides she's contracted a disease just from watching a man bleed on television.

One reason Colas' disorder makes for more intriguing material than Handler's is that its causes seem more mysterious. Once TB's onset could be traced to a mere microbe, the 19th century's fascination with the disease quickly faded. Tourette's has fairly straightforward neurological roots, and many would say the same of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which often can be controlled with medication. Nevertheless, Colas spends a lot of time in therapy and musing over childhood factors (a mother who needed to flick the light switch in multiples of four, a German nanny who "made the trains run on time") that might have contributed to her perpetual anxiety and need for ritualized structure.

N E X T+P A G E+| We all have our little anxieties

ILLUSTRATION BY HUNGRY DOG STUDIO