Content Warning: OCD
This book is one of my favourite books, and Holly Bourne one of my favourite authors. I will be doing my best to give an unbiased review of it! I feel like the characters she writes that have mental illnesses are some of the best representations that I have seen in Young Adult fiction. She also approaches the subject with care, making sure that she is properly educated on the topics that come up in her novels. At the back of my copy, there’s a Q & A with Bourne, and one of the questions asks about her research. She says that she spent “a lot of time grilling Cognitive Behaviour Therapists and psychotherapists, and young people with OCD.” This is incredibly important when choosing to write about mental health, and the fact that she spoke to both those who live with it every day and those who have researched it shows in the novel itself.
Before I get into the many reasons why I love this book and it’s characters, I will give my one piece of criticism. The one thing that this book is missing is trigger warnings and signposts for where to go to get help. When writing about a serious topic like mental health it’s important to tell the readers where they can go to get support if they also struggle with the things that they read. However, there is a note on the back that says it’s not for younger readers, and Bourne has clearly learnt about the importance of this since Am I Normal Yet? came out in 2015, as her later novels do contain trigger warnings and signposts for help.
So, why do I love this book so much? I loved the way the characters were written. When I first read it when it first came out, I’d picked it up as it seemed like another one of those quirky YA novels about a group of friends and I wasn’t disappointed. All the characters are well rounded and have plenty of interests aside from any mental illness that they might be struggling with. The protagonist, Evie, has OCD and is gradually reducing her medication and therapy visits now that she seems to have healthy coping mechanisms. The chapters are broken up into sections, separated by Evie’s “Recovery Diary” that she writes to show how much medication she’s currently on and how she’s feeling. In the chapters themselves, the narrative is sometimes interrupted by handwritten good, bad, or worse thoughts from Evie. During the novel, the bad and worse thoughts get more frequent, showing her relapse. But aside from these interruptions, Evie is just another 16 year old. We see her going to school, hanging out with her friends, going to a concert and starting a “Spinster Club”, a club to talk about feminism, with her best friends. These moments are often interrupted by Evie’s own thoughts, but it shows that someone living with mental illness can’t escape from their mental illness, but it isn’t their only character trait. Even before my OCD started, I felt like I could relate to Evie and enjoyed reading her story. And then when I was finally diagnosed and in therapy, I reread the book so many times because the way that Evie was represented was so comforting to me while I was dealing with similar things.
The way that the other characters react to Evie is also good. She’s not bullied or shamed for her compulsions or anxiety. A lot of the shame actually comes from Evie herself. She moves to a new college for her A-Levels so that she is less likely to see people who knew her when her OCD was at its worst. She doesn’t tell any of her new friends about what she is going through, not even Oli, who she recognises as someone else who struggles with anxiety. It’s not until the end of the book, when she is sectioned, that she tells her friends about her OCD, but they react in a positive way.
Evie’s relationship with her therapist is also well represented. The therapy sessions seen in the novel are extremely close to how they happen in real life, probably due to the amount of research that Bourne did. Although there are many moments with Evie’s therapist, I want to talk about the session that happens in chapter twenty-one. Evie is asked by her therapist, Sarah, to do some exposure therapy where she has to eat a sandwich that is two days out of date. This chapter is a truthful representation of how CBT works, and especially how it can feel as the patient in this situation. Bourne manages to show Evie’s distress without villainising Sarah. Although Evie seems angry and upset towards Sarah in this moment, there are plenty of other moments where she has good interactions with her in therapy, which balance out the few negative ones. Bourne manages to show the truth of what therapy is like for someone with OCD while still representing it as something that is good and helpful, and actually encouraged me to go and seek help for myself when my symptoms got worse. There is a risk that we could assume that therapy doesn’t work, as Evie’s symptoms get worse while she is in therapy, but we know that she has been seeing Sarah for two years now, and at the start of the novel she is in a good place. Evie’s mum says later on “Life is better and then it is worse, over and over, for everyone.” (Page 407) which is a really nice way of summing up how it feels to be living with a mental illness. It doesn’t just get automatically better, you are always going to have to deal with the ups and downs of life.
One of my favourite parts of this book is Evie’s rant on pages 90 to 93 about how society treats mental health and how “people use the phrase OCD to describe minor personality quirks.” (Page 91) Not only does this book give an accurate and positive representation of what it’s like to live with OCD and go through therapy for it, it also helps to educate those who may not know that much about mental illness and teaches them how they can do better to support those who do struggle.
For me, this book deserves 5/5, and is something that I will continue to reread and recommend to anyone and everyone.