THE WAY SHE FEELS

Borderline personality disorder explained in 20 candid and endearing illustrated essays.

"It makes me sort of sick how easy it is for me to love people." "I call the boy who has broken my heart continually over the past two years. My hands are shaking because I’m scared he won’t answer and even more scared that he will." In her debut memoir, 24-year-old Cook delivers dozens of lines that will touch the heart of any tender soul who has dealt with a rough passage through adolescence and young adulthood: the passions, ironies, terrifying self-esteem crises, social drama, and urges toward self-harm. In Cook's case, these psychic states were turned up to the point that she was speculated to have borderline personality disorder at age 13 and was formally diagnosed with BPD at 23. In a typically charming essay called "Ten Months in Europe," a 21st-century update of Susanna Kaysen's classic Girl, Interrupted, Cook describes spending the better part of her 14th year in an art therapy–based treatment center called La Europa, based in a suburb of Salt Lake City. “We were almost normal teenagers,” she writes. “Like normality was within reach.” Her bright, cleverly annotated, wide-line illustrations are especially apt when depicting digital screens and their content. In the title essay and in one called "Oops, I’m Bleeding Again," Cook details her experiences with scab-picking in nauseating but necessary detail, and she explains how important friends and lovers can be in beginning to defang and move beyond these secretive behaviors. “The relief is instant, palpable,” she writes. “I sigh, partly because I’m frustrated I’ve restarted the healing process yet again, partly because this is my high. I’ve experimented with coke, Molly, shrooms, acid, drunk an entire fifth of vodka in a night; nothing touches this feeling.” In addition to a moving personal story, Cook provides a funny, heartfelt guide to borderline personality disorder and a distillation of adolescent tortures many readers will recognize.

A poignant debut from a promising writer and illustrator.