It was well-written, it could have been more structured at times (it is biographical and I found some elements confusing at times, getting mixed up between boyfriends for example). She then goes on to describe him as “a nice man” and wants you to believe he was some gentle, tortured soul trying to make a lovely sweet theme park full of rainbows and happiness because he was scared to die…yeah right, whatever. In the condition’s derangement of cause and effect, OCD creates an alternative reality, too: one that seems utopian in its promise to clarify the universe, but is policed by fear, hostility, and a deep monomania. Amongst them is the way the matrix of obsession, compulsion and intrusion represents an exaggeration of conventional anxieties.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking is the culmination of a life spend obsessing, offering a glimpse into Marianne’s brain, but also an insight into the lives of others like her. I would definitely recommend this as an insight into a neurodivergent mind and as a series of interesting essays in their own right. Although, there were quite a few phrases that I felt were very 'internet' terms that I wasn't a huge fan of. The author paints a picture of herself as a complicated and extremely anxious person who obsessively loves and worries about her dog, takes weeks to pack for trips because of the crippling fear that she’ll forget something, is extremely socially anxious and nervous, is constantly in debilitating pain (none of which I’m disputing btw, not that I could or would want to anyway), and yet she somehow manages to travel the world almost incessantly (without her dog), hobnob with celebrities and bucketloads of friends, run marathons, and drown out the intrusive thoughts.It's truly a joy to be able to read something like this and know other people also have weird brains and what that looks like for them. What that means changes day to day, depending on what her brain latches onto: fixations with certain topics, intrusive violent thoughts, looping phrases. The stuff on OCD in this book, particularly throughout the first chapter, is probably the most brutally relatable and accurate account of it that I’ve ever read. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. In the introduction, she uses the term neurodivergent, a label that replaces the taxonomies of the doctor’s office with a more personal, holistic definition of being cognitively different.

References to social media trends, language and, I apologise in advance, *discourse* gives me the same feeling as a film which references wokeness or, worse, covid.Fascinating, especially in a world which wants us neurodivergent women to have only one of two types of experiences.