Learn the Craft and Business of Memoir

Traci Foust wasn’t a “normal” seven-year-old girl. When all the neighborhood kids were playing outdoors, Traci was inside making sure the miniature Catholic saint statues in her windowsill always pointed due north, scratching out bald patches on her scalp, and snapping her fingers after every utterance of the word God. As Traci got older, her OCD blossomed to include panic attacks and other bizarre behaviors, including a fear of the sun, an obsession with contracting eradicated diseases, and the idea that she could catch herself on fire just by thinking about it.While stints of therapy—and lots of Nyquil—sometimes helped, nothing alleviated the fact that her single mother and mid-life crisis father had no idea about how to deal with her.

So, it wasn’t a total shock when she became a teenage runaway on the poetry slam beat in the hippie beach towns of Northern California and had to be dragged home by her family. It also wasn’t too surprising when her mother could no longer stand the stress of having Traci under her roof, so Traci had a stint of living at a family-owned nursing home, in a room with a seventy-five-year old WWII Vet who kept mistaking her for a prostitute.

In this heartfelt, funny, and candid account of her struggles with a variety of psychological disorders, Traci shows that there is nothing special about being “normal.”