The Woman Who Thought Too Much: A Memoir: Amazon.co.uk: Joanne Limburg: Books

Review

'Joanne Limburg's The Woman Who Thought Too Much is about that most intimate and destructive of civil wars - the fight against one's own thoughts and obsessions. Brave, witty, intelligent, wise, and honest, it is the story of a lifelong battle with neurosis, but it transcends pathology, uncovering the extraordinary underside of all our "ordinary" consciousness. Her unremitting candour liberates us all.'
--Raymond Tallis

`It is usual to praise the authors of memoir for their honesty, though it seems the least they can offer the reader. Can a writer be too honest? At times you want to close this book to protect its subject from your scrutiny...Empathy is her problem, as it is also her strength, and she writes well enough for us to empathise with her in turn. There is no limit to the ingenuity of the catastrophising imagination... She sounds like a woman in a hurry to explain, and sometimes like a navigator just glimpsing a chart which shows calmer waters. She brings insight and a rueful wit to her story, interesting not only for her fellow walking-wounded, but for writers and would-be writers... This talented and thoughtful young woman must be braver than she imagines, to step into the fiery circus where the modern writer performs her tricks.' --Hilary Mantel, Guardian

`A clear, unsentimental poet's eye... a sharpness of detail... conveys with great skill.. the identity issue of separating the disorder from the person... Moving and compelling, full of dark humour and insight.' --Sunday Business Post

'Limburg has penned a painstaking account of life dominated by debilitated anxiety... It makes absorbing reading. Whether her exceptional insights into her own life stem from poring over the minutiae of her existence, or from a rare poetic insight, her candid narrative evokes both pity and admiration.' --Metro

`Reading this will compel some readers - I'm one of them - to ponder their own hang-ups. There are no easy answers, but this book offers some hope... Limburg is a talented writer, and poet... and her story is revealing, honest and thought-provoking - as you'd expect.' --Time Out

`Weighty in places, both intellectually and emotionally, but Limberg renders her autobiographical tale with charming gusto and boundless energy while referencing everything from medical journals, Freud and Dante, to Hollywood films and Prefab Sprout. As a result it's a lovely read, expertly crafted and imbued with wry humour. These very personal and extraordinary accounts of a difficult life feel markedly different from the norm.'
--The List

Product Description

For readers of "A Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion and Bad Blood by Lorna Sage, here comes an intensely honest, riveting and surprisingly witty literary memoir of one woman's life as a sufferer of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Joanne Limburg suffers from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: she thinks things she doesn't want to think, and she does things she doesn't want to do. As a small child, she would chew her hair all day and lie awake at night wondering if heaven had a ceiling; a few years later, when she should have been doing her homework, she was pacing her bedroom, agonising about the unfairness of life as a woman, and the shortness of her legs. By the time she was an adult, obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours had come to dominate her life. She knew that something was wrong with her, but it would take many years before she understood what that something was. "The Woman Who Thought Too Much" follows Limburg's quest to understand her predicament and to manage her symptoms, taking the reader with her on a long, twisted journey through consulting rooms, libraries and internet sites, as she seeks to discover all she can about rumination, scrupulosity, avoidance, thought-action fusion, fixed-action patterns, anal fixations, schemas, basal ganglia, tics and synapses. On the way, she encounters competing interpretations of her condition, as offered by psychoanalysts, neuropsychiatrists and cognitive psychologists, and does her best to come to terms with an illness which turns out to be both common, and even - sometimes - treatable. This candid, moving and beautifully written memoir is a sometimes shocking, often sad, and yet also humorous revelation of what it is like to live with so debilitating a condition. It is also an exploration of the inner world of a poet and an intense evocation of the persistence and courage of the human spirit in the face of mental illness.

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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

review 25 April 2010

By Mel

Format:Hardcover

i had to read this book when i heard about it through a newspaper review. the author sounded just like myself. it's difficult to find literature on how it feels to be an obsessive compulsive let alone to find one whose ocd is mostly in her head and the ocd presents in her thoughts. i couldn't put the book down once i started reading it. the author writes with such honesty about her condition. the fact that these are her memoirs as opposed to a novel, i think, allows her to pour her soul into it. i think her book is an incredible achievement. for myself, who has gone through the whole gambit of therapy and medication, yet finds no end to her problems, it was some help and support to me to find limburg's book.

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

A Brave Book 31 Oct 2010

By Story Seeker

I found this a fantastic and utterly compelling read, but rather than explore what the book is about etc in this review, I just wnat to pay Joanne Limburg massive respect for achieving it. For someone with Joanne Limburg's illness, writing this book must have been fraught with difficulty. For someone for whom obsessive rumination is a debilitating disorder, writing any piece of work is a battleground, fraught with tension and anxiety. I have a fair idea of the kind of demons she would have had to overcome to put pen to paper to write something so clear, honest and passionate and I think she has been extremely brave and triumphant. Rumination and the inevitably accompanying (or co-morbid) depression and anxiety, are more common in writers than perhaps anyone knows - because basically, you have to live in your head a lot to be a writer. There are many medics who would suggest stopping writing and doing something else would be helpful and many writers who have had to do just that in order to lead a happier and peaceful life. But Joanne Limburg has battled on. In theway book itself, you can see evidence of the illness - the need to reassure herself, justify herself etc by insistent references to, for example, texts and papers that support her case that she is not in fact mad (OCD sufferers are not mad, they are ill. They are fully aware their thoughts are not rational) and to justify taking v small amounts of medication (the maintenance dose for Prozac on this kind of illness is 20g). But the book is a very clear, very thorough, passionate, honest and fascinating read. I was shocked how long it took her to realise she had OCD and that OCD was separate from her and something she had not something she is. It is a very common illness and there are good treatments for it, including, as she says, CBT. (Freudian and analytical type therapies often make it worse as they encourage more living in the head, more questions with out answers, more loops of thought going nowhere, create the idea there is a reason for for having OCD, which there may or not be, but knowing the reason is nowhere near bringing about an end to it - these kind of therapies are naval gazing and not solution based ). It's good to see a book about OCD that shows that it's not all about hand washing and checking you turned off the gas. It's very common and there must be a lot of undiagnosed cases, so I hope this helps people - esp people with generalised patterns of worrying and the ruminators and reassurance seekers. Well done to her.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

`I obsessed about all kinds of things' 3 Oct 2010

By J. Cameron-Smith TOP 500 REVIEWER

Joanne Limburg was a fearless child, a champion tree climber at the age of seven, who became an adolescent fearful of walking down stairs. Somehow, by the time she went to Cambridge to study, Ms Limburg was governed by obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). What happened to Ms Limburg? And, importantly, how did she learn to live with OCD in order to have become an accomplished (and published) poet, wife and mother?

`I don't want to die, but I feared for my life.'

This memoir is Ms Limburg's quest to understand her OCD and to manage her symptoms. There was no clear switch from relative fearlessness to extreme fearfulness, but looking back Ms Limburg recalls some memories which she now regards as warning signs. These signs include the punishing robot that first appeared in a dream and then obsessed her during her waking hours, and her compulsive singing in order to keep bad things at bay. Her journey continues: disorders such as OCD are managed rather than cured.

I found this book a difficult read at times, because of the intensely personal nature of OCD. Ms Limburg has bravely told her story, and many of us will relate to at least parts of her journey. Dealing with distressing symptoms and searching for effective treatment and answers is part of the challenge for many with mental health problems. Some of the visible manifestations of OCD can seem quite bizarre to those unafflicted by it. But ultimately Ms Limburg's memoir is a personal journey with a message of hope: that while all journeys will be different, sufferers of OCD need not suffer alone.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith