Are you sure you have your cell phone? Your wallet? Your keys? Did you lock the door when you left home this morning? Turn off the stove? Turn off the flat iron?
If, on the other hand, you’re mopping your kitchen floor ten times a day or heading to the sink for your 80th hand-washing, hoarding every plastic bag you ever got at Jewel, and lying awake at night counting the lights in neighboring buildings, someone close to you is probably suggesting that you see a doctor, get a diagnosis, and take a pill to fix your obvious case of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
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If you should pick up the book expecting an obsessively thorough discourse, you won’t be disappointed. But Davis is a fine writer, and he grabs the reader at the outset by confessing his own childhood rituals, constructed, as perhaps all obsessive behavior is, as a mental guardrail against the abyss of mortality. Routinely sleepless in his family’s one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx, he counted and compulsively recounted every light in the windows of the building next door. He also chanted at every traffic light, impaled each piece of macaroni before eating it, and put nickels, dimes, and pennies through the acid wash of his digestive system. “While I was doing that,” he writes, “my father and brother were compulsively washing their hands and surviving through their own developed rituals. Every night my father checked and rechecked the locks on the doors, the faucets, and gas jets while closing and rechecking all the kitchen cabinets…. My brother lathered himself up so much that he eventually developed a skin rash…. We didn’t know we were engaged in obsessional and compulsive activities. We were just doing what came naturally to us in our time and place.”
This was not an ordinary childhood. In 1999, Davis edited the love letters of their parents, Shall I Say a Kiss? The Courtship Letters of a Deaf Couple, 1936-1938, and in 2000 Davis published My Sense of Silence, a memoir of his life as the hearing child of a pair of working-class, Jewish, stone-deaf English immigrants. Graceful and unsparing, it begins with the isolation, frustration, fear, and vigilance that were his earliest memories—the futility of crying in his crib, for example, when no one would hear or respond. He writes of finding a haven at school, where he quickly excelled, and of the punishment he took from his brother, a decade older and more inclined to sibling torture than to providing any aid. He also describes the determination that made his father—trapped for a lifetime as a sewing machine operator in a garment factory—a national-champion race walker, and of his regrets at his own responses to his parents’ disability. With this legacy, explored with excruciating candor, it wouldn’t have been surprising if Davis grew into a seriously obsessed adult. But he calls himself only “intermittently obsessed” and says what he got is the upside of the quirk: the focused energy that fuels marathons and books, which he produces “in the zone,” without memory of the laborious process of writing them.
Davis and others maintain that the recent explosive growth in clinical depression has been driven by the publicity campaigns of the pharmaceutical companies—complete with magazine checklists to help depressives identify themselves. Davis says a similar drug-company-sponsored rise in cultural consciousness is fueling the growth in OCD. Many people exhibit obsessive-compulsive behavior without feeling bad about it and without requiring treatment, he says: “For example, take the guy who built the Watts Towers. What he was doing wasn’t causing him pain and suffering. But, in a slightly different scenario, with his mother going, ‘What are you doing, taking all that junk, wasting time?’ he could easily start feeling terrible about it.”
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