Devil in the Details

After finishing “Please Don’t Kill The Freshman” I began a new book: “Devil in The Details” by Jenny Traig. This new book is also an autobiography; Traig, as a child, had scrupulosity. Scrupulosity is a relatively unspecified form of OCD, it is basically a “religious” form of the disorder, feeling you have to pray/perform countless rituals/ purify/ worship multiple times per day. It was particularly hard for Traig because of her interfaith family; Catholic mother, Jewish father and atheist sister.
Traig describes hundreds of tasks her brain forced her to complete; obsessively kosher meals, washing her hands, nothing on the Shabbat, studying the bible and frequent prayers. The disorder began to affect her life in the late seventies, and her parents did not understand that Traig was not making up her strange habits for fun.
Only halfway through the book, I recently came across Traig’s middle school years; when she faced extreme “kosher anorexia”. Traig was not an obese child, merely a bit plump, but “Jewish lessons” with the rabbi introduced Traig to a new form of her religion to preoccupy herself with: keeping kosher. Traig quickly “purified” her home of all un-kosher or other risky items. She soon lost an unsafe amount of weight, and her parents quit the Jewish lessons, forcing Traig to eat regularly.
“I was fixing myself a snack of cream cheese with ranch dressing when my mother asked if I’d prefer tortellini or rotelle for dinner. ‘Oh neither,’ I answered casually. ‘I’ve gone low carb.’ My mother went quiet for a minute […] Had her thoughts been captioned, I imagine they would have read like this ‘I survived your anorexia. I acquiesced when you decided to keep kosher. […] But this is a bridge too far. Pasta is all I have left. You will eat it, and you will like it” (pg 96) I enjoy this quote because it displays both motherly “love” and ignorance of the mental condition; and it essentially catches the whole book’s feeling.