I would definitely recommend this as an insight into a neurodivergent mind and as a series of interesting essays in their own right. I also felt that at times the essays felt somewhat disjointed when viewed as a whole - for instance, cultural references that showed up time and time again were sometimes reintroduced from scratch. Would I like to feel more restful, or be able to try new foods or deviate from my strict routine without a meltdown? The rest of the book mostly annoyed me, because there’s this frustrating dichotomy between the person the author describes herself to be at first, and the person who constantly does stuff that the first version of herself would, surely, find extremely difficult if not impossible.

Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking is a culmination of a life spend obsessing, offering a glimpse into Marianne's brain, but also an insight into the lives of others like her.

Depression gets William Styron’s Darkness Visible, psychosis Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking is a non-fiction book about being neurodivergent and having OCD. I felt very seen by it, but a lot of the essays fell very flat for me and I wanted much more from them. In her candid, witty memoir, Marianne Eloise offers a powerful account of what it is like to feel trapped by mental health problems and obsessions .

As a neurodivergent person myself, I found myself relating to the author a lot of the time - and when I didn't, her sense of humour and snide observations about the world around her made up for it.It sounds more like she’s talking with oh-so-cool friends over drinks on one of the sun-soaked beaches she talks about. But the implicit cultural understanding of OCD as “quirk” has made it unworthy of literary treatment: insufficiently disturbing for trauma plots, and too specific to be a metaphor that parses out the modern condition. This memoir was ultimately less a memoir of her life and more a memoir of her brain and thought patterns.

It's within this ambivalent territory that Marianne Eloise’s debut essay collection-cum-memoir takes the stage. I didn’t highlight it so I’m paraphrasing, but it PISSED me off when the author said something somewhere along the lines of “I have no respect for women who wear 1950s fashion, yearning for a period steeped in racism” on one page, and then a little later goes on to brush off Disney’s very well documented nazism and racism as a “rumour”?I liked how relatable the narrator was and the way OCD and Autism are discussed in a much broader sense than what we usually see in media. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The author has an incredibly engaging writing style, which I enjoyed, but I found myself feeling like the story was cyclical. Part self-help book, part diary entry, the wellness genre demands neat resolutions and the elimination of excess – even for the most profoundly devastating and chaotic of health experiences.

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.While I couldn't relate to every one of her experiences, it was moving to read a deeply honest account of how it feels when your brain and body feels like it's working against you. I FELT RECOGNISED ON EVERY PAGE, LEARNT SO MANY NEW THINGS, AND LAUGHED SO HARD I CHOKED ON MY WATER.